Since the poet belongs to all times, the jury that appreciates him must be composed of his equals; he must be recruited by time from among the choicest of the sages of many generations.
To seek to transpose the creations of a poet from one language to another would be as wise as throwing a violin into a crucible to discover the essential principles of its color and smell. The plant must spring up again from its seed; for otherwise it will not flourish - this is the burden of the curse of the tower of Babel.
Art is the perpetual struggle for freedom. Consciously or unconsciously this struggle is the only perceptible mission of the moral universe, which it stimulates and ennobles.
The poet is, in fact, only a man skilled in popularizing wisdom.
If it were not beautified by art, life itself would be dry, and would often show you a monkey's face.
Art has a purpose, the condensing of life and its clarification, and whoever would be content to reproduce it would be making a big, huge mistake.
They say that art has no nationality. Works of universal value are, however, a kind of synthesis of national cultural development.
In our cultural development we will reach stability and unity only if we take into account in all our works the taste of the people, their way of seeing and feeling, their nature.
When we will know how to better use the powers of nature, when the means of production will be perfected, when human labor will be well protected, when education will be well organized, when training for the most essential functions of human activity, and when, therefore, man will have more leisure, then the beautiful in art and in nature will rightfully take a large place in all spirits.
Our deeds are forgotten, no matter how famous, / and once with us all thoughts are extinguished, only the wise words, if they are spoken in verse, / are meant by the muses for life without death.
Every current and every poem, without expressly mentioning or revealing the collective forces which directed the feelings and inspiration of the author, nevertheless betrays its true social origin.
The epic is the ethical contemplated aesthetically.
An art that would not have a social substratum, would only be a precarious and purely subjective accident...
He who produces the work for a purpose other than its own value, may achieve his goal often, but the value of the work rarely.
Feeling, passion, enthusiasm cannot become art until the imagination converts a mass of intellectual data into a unitary whole of harmonic, symmetrical, eurythmic forms, suggesting relationships that go beyond raw experience...
In the works of artists, what holds us back and charms us is precisely the escape from the immediate given, it is the power to envelop it with our interpretation and momentum.
By a strange contrast, the arts, which teach us to savor life, make us careless of death...
All that man has made greater is due to the painful sense of his unfulfilled destiny...
In art, only one policy is possible: that of perfection.
A work of art will be all the more apt to bear the title of masterpiece the more complete its axiological meaning will be. Aesthetic exclusivity does not lead to a masterpiece. And, in any case, the work of great artistic resonance is not the one that is restricted to the artistic embryo... The intervention of the ethical value enhances an aesthetic content.
The difference between nature and art is exactly the difference between the fine hearing of a rabbit and the deaf ear of Beethoven.
The main problem of our literature is its anchoring in Romanian realities, from today the creation of more and more valuable works that will further help our progress, in the construction of socialism, communism.
The universal prestige of a literature cannot exist outside of its national consciousness and potential... to write about the life of your people means, in the plan of the universal circuit, to integrate yourself into universality.
Any work of art contains in it an ideological stance, more clearly or less clearly, for or against a society, some ideals or simply a way of life.
Our first writers were also our first political men. Their literature was closely related to the aspirations and struggles of the Romanian people for freedom, for national independence, for sovereignty, for a fairer, better social order. No uprising, no revolution, no fairer, more social movement took place in Romania without the direct or indirect participation of writers. They sang the revolutions, the uprisings, the social movements, always being on the side of the oppressed, always being against the oppressors.
The peoples who did not know how to support the arts and literature and did not help them flourish, perished almost without leaving a trace in the history of mankind.
A literature can only be explained and understood in the context of the history of the people who produced it, who expressed themselves through it, who hoped, struggled, were defeated and conquered, and all the hopes, questions, pains and joys, and he embodied them in words and made them known through his poems and books.
Poetry is not only art; it is life itself, the very soul of life. It expresses itself primarily through art, but not only through art. Understanding poetry only as art impoverishes the notion of poetry. It is not a way of existence, as is sometimes claimed, but a fundamental component of existence... Without poetry man would not be distinguished from nothingness.
The role of art is not primarily to express ideas, but to express the tension of ideas. But in order to express the tension of an idea, a general idea must always hover in the background of the artwork.
Aesthetics is the peak expression of consciousness.