Reflecții și Maxime vol. I.

Aesthetics is not an independent field, but is an integral part of morality.

The poem is a semantic tension towards a word that does not exist, that he did not find. The poet creates the semantics of a word that does not exist.

Speech is the pinnacle of life experience. Learned or spontaneous, speech, like the genes in the cell, reproduces the history of the world.

The reader is an alter ego, he is the one for whom I write. I write the lyrics in solitude. He also reads them to me like this: in solitude.

Arise and enlighten in word / the feelings of your country so that your son can tell you / and you can call it / your home.

If the ultimate meaning is not also that of adding your life to your country, ennobling yourself by its light and adding greatness to it by your own existence, then you, who find occasion to be through writing, let yourself written.

There is no timeless seminal work. The human general does not gain relief except filtered through a historical epoch...

We can talk about the appearance of the human general in the work of art only when he is fixed in a precise historical time...

The historical consciousness of the man of art is expressed through the reevaluation of the human general in a given era...

There are few writers who manage to transcend their era. But I don't know any really talented writer or artist who doesn't have the era in which he lives as an active reference system in his work.

Art seems to us to be the fullest and most enduring part of humanity...

The truth of art is shown to be more concrete than the truth of nature.

The role of literature is as important as the role of science. Literature (and here we obviously mean only major, valuable literature) represents human specificity to the highest degree, it stimulates sensitivity and educates, through the force of the particular example, the general noble and sublime side of feelings as an act of consciousness.

The world of a poem is often truer than the very convention of the world seen through the senses.

Art, if only by involvement, bears witness to the world that depression and chaos have been overcome.

Poetry is, in a certain way, the first step of philosophy, which introduces us from childhood into life, and which teaches us in a pleasant way all that concerns the morals, feelings, and actions of man.

Art - science:... Art seduces and science convinces. The artist creates individually, his creation adding numerically to previous ones, while the scientist builds collectively, his work raising a common edifice. Artistic progress cannot therefore represent a growth that historical progress would ensure...

Artists can be modern without being superior to the classics or other great artists of the past. Historical superiority in art is an absurd idea. Quite the opposite is the position of the positive sciences in relation to history.

Whoever, in art, does not innovate, is an epigon. The artist's right and duty is to be himself, vis-a-vis the scientist who has the duty to be first what his predecessors were and the right only to extend the range of their science.

Having one's own conception of the world forces the construction of a correlative aesthetic conception, any philosophy responding explicitly or implicitly in a certain way of conceiving Poetry... Poetry and metaphysics could therefore seem to be two ways of asking ourselves on the same reality.

Only the poets, with their new eyes and their well-known clumsiness, marvel at everything they see, whenever they see it, being therefore, today, the only authors of unanswered questions. There are some that have a notable cadence over time. They impose themselves on the spirit of man, after a periodicity incalculable in the future, but certain in the past... No age has escaped undeceived from their demand, and they have never been less new than they were to the anxiety of the first man... There are the questions of man for man, of spirit for spirit, of life for life...

Good brothers of poets, philosophers were and are themselves, after all, also a kind of poet; they feed on the same substance...

Moreover, the philosophers themselves, under the power of that circularity of limit questions, which is not only a recurrence in history, but also a cycle of congeneric anxieties, all felt the need to know what poetic beauty is, even if they speculated especially on music, their interest metaphysicians and non-metaphysicians necessarily went to the theory of artistic creation...

Poetry and Philosophy could therefore appear to be two ways of man to inquire about reality...

Anyway, at the mute threshold of existence, where only poets and philosophers dwell, theoretical conjecture and poetic metaphor have always been felt as possibilities of knowledge that supplement each other...

The philosopher and the poet meet several times on their way, which ends where we can no longer distinguish it.

The poet is a man of all sciences: he knows how the grass sprouts and withers, how beings are born and how they die, how a star rises and sets, how the sea boils and freezes, being in his own way and in turn for this, a naturalist, a biologist, an astronomer, a hydrologist...

His word brings together all the sciences in a confluence of knowledge through images. Images and symbols are his means of participating and making ourselves participate, by return, in the forms and pulsations of cosmic matter... Only the feeling of this full knowledge makes poetry the science of sciences which, dilating the reader's personality by liberating it of current automatisms, increases its life content...

As it used to be said, in contrast to the dryness of the exact sciences, poetry is a "gaia scientia", that is, the science of living life.

Art alone, among human pursuits, is eternal...