Art strives to imitate nature, and because it cannot equal it, we say that art is what artists produce without imitating nature.
Anyone who ignores logic cannot be a true poet.
Artists really expand the boundaries of the empire of the mind and make new discoveries within the limits of this empire. They are the ones who open new channels and new arms for the flow of knowledge; thus showing us for the first time the nature of our experience.
This is the mission of all genuine art. This mission does not consist in reproducing what is already given (that would be superfluous) or in creating something through the mere play of the subjective imagination: this mission consists in penetrating ever deeper into the core of the outer world and into the soul, in see and communicate these realities existing within them and which accepted laws and conventions have hitherto concealed.
The work is located above the form, it represents essence, general character, it is a look and expression of the spirit of nature that animates it.
Art predilectionally and directly selects what is higher and more evolved, therefore it dwells on the human being.
A bee can teach you diligence, a worm can become the master of your craft, science you can share with higher spirits, but ART, man, is yours!
Works of art are like metals. Noble ones gain luster with time, ordinary ones rust.
All art is devoted to joy, and there is no more important and serious problem than how to make people happy.
You will find the fullness of culture in our supreme poetry, but I seek the depth of humanity in philosophers...
To seek and discover poetry, philosophy is the tool.
Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry. The destiny of poetry is not only to unite poetic genres, or to put poetry in contact with philosophy and rhetoric; he will have to sometimes combine poetry with prose, genius with criticism, the poetry of art with the poetry of nature, at other times merge them. To give life to poetry and to socialize it, at the same time making life and society poetic, to poetize the spirit, to saturate the forms of art with the authentic formative substance of each genre and to enliven them with the pulsation of humor.
The mother of the useful arts is necessity, that of the fine arts is abundance. The father of the former is the intellect, of the latter, the genius, which, itself, is a kind of abundance; it represents, namely, the excess of the power of knowledge, beyond the limits imposed by the service of the will.
"What is life?" - To this question, every authentic and successful work of art gives us a perfectly valid answer, in a specific way.
There is a special knowledge that applies to what exists independently and outside of any relationship, to what constitutes the very essence of the world and the true substratum of phenomena... This way of knowing is art, it is the work of genius...
Art reproduces the eternal ideas which it has conceived by means of pure contemplation, that is, the essential and permanent of all the phenomena of the world.
Humanism, peace, friendship are the supreme commandments of our age. All true writers must enclose in their work these higher values of human consciousness.
Art and science are forms of life; both have a common origin; the spontaneous tendencies of the spirit, the laws of being and its actions. Artistic genius is no longer a miracle; he is the spirit itself.
An art is never great unless its windows are directly open to life.
Only what is honest lasts in art. Only what is really a way of feeling lasts.
When I say ART, I don't understand the "art for art's sake" theory. This useless doctrine has come to denote the work of a powerless man who produces empty elegance in a sterilized room. I understand only the spiritual category made up of good works of art, past or present, those that serve as a model, those that will be exemplary... If we look at the consequences triggered by these works we will see that they are not at all alien to the struggles and passions of the time. "The great artist", it has been said, "does not belong to his time, he is his time" basically, the life of the poet, the complex of impressions, sensations, reactions that constitute the material of the work, are a part of the humanity that surrounds him; along with her anxieties, her pains, her greatness and her failures.
The writer, the poet are engaged in what can be called humanity. The role and validity of a writer and the man who is this writer approach, merge.
The ancestors are our guides, not our masters.
The rhythm of art is but a metaphor of the Great Universal Rhythm.
A work of art, and especially a poem, is an essential product of life, a kind of quintessence extract in which certain fundamental characters of life are necessarily included.
He who has no music in himself, he who is not moved by the sweet harmony of sounds, is ripe for treason, theft, and perfidy: his intelligence is gloomy as night, his thoughts dark as Erebus. Do not trust such a man.
Poetry immortalizes all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the perishing hallucinations that haunt the interlunar periods of life, and, enveloping them either in language or in form, sends them forth into the world….
Poetry turns everything into beauty; it increases the beauty of that which is very beautiful, and gives beauty to that which is very ugly; twin joy and terror, pain and pleasure, eternity and change; ... It changes everything it touches ... It tears the veil of ordinary appearance from the face of the world and reveals the bare beauty ... It creates the universe anew after it has been destroyed in our minds by the recurrence of impressions dulled by repetition .
In the infancy of society, every author is necessarily a poet, because language is poetry; and to be a poet means to perceive the truth and the beautiful, in a word, the good that resides in the relationship established first of all between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression.
According to the time and the nation in which they arose, poets were called in the early ages of the world, legislators were called prophets; the poet, in essence, merges and brings together both of these functions.