It would be absurd to separate the work of art from the zeitgeist...
The perfect work of art is eternal, meaning it lasts longer than its age, but perfection cannot be conceived outside of a coincidence towards the freedom of the artist and the spirit of the age, between creative imagination and taste.
Art is indestructibly linked to the conception of the world and its social function.
The meaning of artistic reflection lies in the relationship between the meaning of reality and the writer's vision.
Real depth is only judged by clarity. I personally suffer from a severe and incurable disease: respect for the reader. Since you publish, you do it to be read, so to make yourself understood; forcing yourself to be clear is the most basic courtesy. Why make something opaque with everything inside? Except in the force majeure case of genuine genius, when everything becomes a paradox, in all other circumstances it is an impertinence.
The work of art:... the mirror of the artist's soul... in it crystallizes the soul processes that developed in the artist during creation...
The synthesis of the infinite with the finite, the eternal with the transient, and the ultimate reality with its appearance.
A long attendance at art lends the soul new energies, deepening the experience and enriching the fantasy. Art is also sought after for the undeniable human superiority that attending it can lend to someone...
In front of the aesthetic object, man transcends his singularity and becomes available to the human universe.
Because there is art, there can be a better society, a nobler moral life, a more complete, deeper, truer science. The philosophical meaning of art completes it, for those who know how to understand that in its harmony is configured the very glorious destiny of the spirit.
What constitutes the sovereign value of art and the beautiful is their situation in a world that is not entirely artistic and beautiful, and in which they are called upon to rest and regenerate us from the strains of practical life and the toils and struggles of truth and good. Only their alternation and contrast with other goods gives them their supreme value.
Science investigates and art contemplates. Contemplation is not opposed to research, but on the contrary, when it helps it free itself from the dictates of morality or when it provides the framework in which its results can be registered. The artistic spirit can therefore unite with the scientific one. Indeed, only their union gives the latter its entire fruitfulness.
A work of art is a respite of beauty in an ugly or indifferent world. Through art, a value is introduced in a point of the world that the rest of it lacks. Whoever approaches an artistic work has the clear awareness that he is entering a world different from that of common perception and practical life... The function that art fulfills results, moreover, from this appropriation of it, through which the human soul completes itself, exercising itself in a kind of activity that the rest of the world does not have the opportunity to determine.
Humanity in man presupposes the totality of points of view and their appropriate distribution to the situations of life. For this reason, disregarding vast regions of the field of values, in favor of aesthetic value alone, is always accompanied by serious human flaws...
The egoism, lack of piety and sometimes intellectual limitation of the esthete cannot be compensated by his keen sensitivity to beauty. In this spiritual constellation, aesthetic values themselves seem debased...
Art... result appeared at the point of intersection of the plastic force of nature with the creative faculty of man.
A society devoid of artistic activity is something impossible to find, both in the historical and prehistoric past and in the ethnographic present. The history and scope of art therefore coincide with the entire past of mankind and its entire spatial variety.
The artist ... a voice through which the aspirations, pains and joys of all or a large part of humanity are expressed.
Creative fantasy is not an exclusive faculty of the artist and by which he would isolate himself from the rest of the people. The creative imagination in the artist, just like the other functions of his structure, is nothing but the intensification of an aptitude common to all men.
A developed reception of art presupposes an educated and formed consciousness. The satisfaction awakened by a work of art increases in proportion to the lucidity with which we intellectually master it, understanding it in its values and mechanism.
Only a man who was once at the cross of Hercules can draw real accents from the tragedy of life, worthy of great art.
People drowned in brutality, coarse souls can never adopt the aesthetic attitude, the beauty of nature and art remains mute to them...
Frequenting art produces that state of inner harmony favorable to morality, but it is no less true that inner harmony and a certain degree of moral refinement are indispensable conditions for establishing contact with beauty.
Art is eternal in its aesthetic form, and temporal in its content. Through the first, art lasts; by the second it wears out and grows old.
Art is creation in joy. When every mortal attains the consciousness of an artist, the face of the world will change.
By diligence, man can acquire in any activity the skill which nature has not given him, but this is not possible in poetry, where he who does not possess the necessary inclination from birth cannot acquire it by work - it being known that the poetic arts and the critical arts can give him spiritual culture, but they cannot make him great.
Poetry:... the mother tongue of the human race.
Let us dream that there were sometimes stronger and greater men, who were more decidedly good or bad; this encourages us...
What we want from works which set human ghosts in motion is... the philosophical spectacle of man deeply animated by the passions of his character and his time...
It is therefore about the TRUTH of this MAN and of this TIME, but both raised to a superior and ideal power that would concentrate all forces...