Quotes by George Călinescu

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Art has a well-defined social function, it is a school of morality for citizens.

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An art based on pure pleasure, i.e. on hedonism, would be essentially obnoxious. Art is knowledge.

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When the reader shows hostility to a poem that is too convoluted, and bewilderment to a prose that gets lost in analyzes and unusual and foggy states saying nothing about humanity, he has, aesthetically, a just feeling. Great art is an expression of elemental life and basically speaks to the common soul.

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In order to reach the promontory from where life is glimpsed in its universality, one must climb the steps of events... The great artist necessarily dreams in the midst of the tumult of events.

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Creation is a clarification of an order seen in nature, it is nature rationalized, made intelligible and exemplary. What strikes you in a true work of art is its global clarity, but combined with the impression of spontaneity.

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The most patriotic act of a true artist is to compose masterpieces..., in order to prove the spiritual viability of a people.

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The true regime of art is joy, that serene tension of the soul, in which life, with its contradictions, appears full of meaning and worth living. Only a defeated pain, without being phenomenologically denied, a pain transformed into victory over our nervous nature, transported from the subjective domain of neuralgia to the universal idea, can be the germ of poetry...

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The true poet knows how to extract from what he lived, what belongs to everyone and, above all, to give his experiences the wide scope of the life of his peers, he knows how to live, on behalf of his contemporaries and, through them, of the universal man.

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Great poetry grew like a beautiful and bitter weed where life was more bubbling and troubled. Whenever a really deep and great poet appeared somewhere, he was also an unhappy or a troubled one, a man with his eyes open to the world, with a penetration of her creation...

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Every time we meet a great poet, we find such sincerity of the cry, such a need to tell in a sustainable rhythm his own collision with life, that there is no longer any doubt that poetry relies on truth.

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In the arts, in general, the affective and the intellectual understanding are one and the same, because the idea is expressed by a stirring of the whole soul in the highest level.

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The masterpiece does not exist objectively, as a thing on which universal judgments can be made, but a state of mind of some individuals, a particular feeling of value.

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Books are life captured at its most acute.

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In order to create, the spirit needs excitement.

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The prerequisites for a writer to be able to create are the intensity of perception and the power of analysis of perceptions.

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True creation begins only when art has been overcome.

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Art is not verism, i.e. a faithful copy of the mediocre, but realism, extracting the essence from the accidental.

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We need a great art, in which the heart of life beats noisily, an art that impetuously reveals the grandiose emotions, the serious ideas about life, that makes everyone understand and love the conception of the creative man.

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What we must ask of a work is not to be late to the respective historical moment.

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Art for the people is not, however, to be confused with the art of popularization. There is no need to "go down", but to strengthen ourselves on the foundations.

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The artist is not an end in itself, but a means to express common reactions. The soul of a people expresses itself substantially in its thought and art.

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Artists... are people who see the truth in all its clarity and have no peace until they communicate it through a work of art.

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An artist always speaks of himself under the guise of the universal.

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The artist is the individual who takes the absolute human significance out of the event.

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One cannot imagine an art outside of life. Art is the eternal, that is, the painting of the constants of the phenomenal universe.

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The life in true art must be of itself supremely beautiful, I mean deep, healthy, highly human.

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Literature is made through culture, and culture through reading.

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The work must contain the aspirations of humanity, only then it has the value of a universe open to the present man, who thus glimpses the future human condition.

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Art is a mirror; everything that is not mirroring cannot be called art... The universe existing as an objective reality, art can only be an extension of it, a concentration in a significant point.

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An apathetic and unvibrating artist in his time is a weak esthete. All the great poets, so abstract in their work, were, as men, vigorously polemical citizens with civic passion.

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A work has no value unless it is an open window into the absolute of man.

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He who has the strength to let himself be defeated in everyday life wins in the end.

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He who fights can be defeated, but only he who fights can be victorious.

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When a grain of sand in your shoes annoys you, do not imagine that all mankind has stopped from its glorious path.

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Everyone manifests their envy through an attitude of superiority.