Without the critical faculty there can be no artistic creation worthy of the name... There is no fine art without self-consciousness, and self-consciousness and the critical spirit are one and the same; every subtle work of the imagination is conscious and deliberate. ... A work of creation that was not at the same time critical has never existed.
Interesting as it may be, truth (in art - n.n.s.) pleases more and makes a stronger impression when it is clothed in fiction; allegory is to mature people what fable (in the strict sense of the word) is to children.
All arts pursue a double purpose; to please us and at the same time to instruct us.
All pleasures - except those which rob men of their most precious treasure, time acquire their immortality, and protect us from force and boredom in so far as they appeal to reason. Purely sensory emotions remain superficial, exerting an insignificant strain on reason.
When people understand that art is as necessary as bread and that they are the only beings who know how to create it, they will be happier and wiser.
All good poetry is a spontaneous outpouring of strong feelings; and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never written, on any kind of subject, except by one who, being endowed in a higher degree than usual with organic sensibility, he thought long and deeply.
The value of a work of art, what we call its beauty, consists—generally speaking—in its values of happiness. These happiness values stand, of course, in a causal relationship with the soul needs they satisfy.
The work of art stands as an independent organism of the same value, alongside nature and, in its deepest and most intimate essence, unrelated to it, so long as by nature is meant the visible surface of things...
The natural beauty should in no case be regarded as a condition of the artistic work, even if in the course of evolution it seems to have become a precious factor for art, and even from certain points of view exactly identical with it.
Each people creates in its art ideal possibilities for triggering its vital feeling.
In the forms of a work of art we enjoy ourselves. Aesthetic pleasure is objectified self-pleasure.
National literature is the exposition of the national ideas of the people or even universal ideas. Perhaps in an entire literature the word fatherland may not be uttered even once, and yet the literature may be eminently national...
Any narrated life becomes a parable; we write to attack or defend a system, to define a method that belongs to us.
Art has become reality and reality has transfigured itself into art.
Those who place the historical novel in a separate category forget that the novelist only interprets, with the help of the procedures of his time, a number of facts belonging to the past, memories conscious or not, personal or not, woven from the same matter as history. .
In our time, the historical novel, or what has been allowed to be called that for convenience, can only be immersion in a rediscovered time, taking possession of an inner world.
One of the best ways to recreate a man's thinking: to reconstruct his library.
There is tradition in art, as in any part of historical creation. To say of this artist that he owes nothing to anyone is a short, childish and completely wrong statement.
Any feeling and desire can be material for art... But he who does not distinguish his dreams or his sentimental interests from the necessary appearance of the world, but uses them to sneak past them as images of life, finds himself, with his enterprise artistic, exactly on the level of the one who grows pineapples at the polar circle.
What is a novel and what is the purpose of a writer? I think it is to give you the most intensive illusion about the reality of life.
The poet and the objective writer in general have no preferences: all the manifestations of life have for him, artistically speaking, the same value and the true gift of objectivity includes within itself that of universality.
Art... a moment of creation seen through a temperament...; what I'm looking for in a work is the man, the strong individuality who was able to create alongside God's world, his own personal world.
Art has no other limits than the impotence of the artists.
The poet:... cursed tree, / with blessed fruit.
The opinions we have about others are never so sound that we can afford to judge.
Look to listen to everything, but be mindful of what you say and what you do.
Above all, you must do what no one could do in your place.
Be patient and watch. / Live, die of need! Die and stay. / Be faithful and be free!
When you are asked to do something that you could not do, refuse curtly, without leaving any false hope. Give quickly what you want to give. In this way you will conquer the grace of refusal and the grace of beneficence, double probity which wonderfully enhances a character. I do not know whether we do not feel more pity for a disappointed hope than gratitude for a good one.
I know the priceless that the only life: the only health, the beyond-illuminating peace of the soul. The only novelty, a pre-existing and rediscovered thought, not as the term of a necessary walk, but as the longing of horrified memory.