Quotes by Gustave Lanson

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Our degradation lacks curiosity, literature brings a remedy. It reminds us that we have not done all there is to do when we have fulfilled our daily duties, when we have earned the necessities, and that the best and most specifically human part of us has not lived.

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The intellectual beauty of the aesthetic conceptions of literature dulls and elevates again our atrophied intelligence reduced to the ways of everyday life. Literature captivates us by imitating our real actions, by realizing our dreams of action; its specific function, however, remains to pose those problems which life does not pose directly, such as the meaning of existence, the reason of the universe, the finality of human actions and universal evolution.

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A novel, a poem are images of life, not its laws. They depict the reality of things, without constraining it; they are pure creations of the spirit.

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The great literary personalities are, for the most part, images and symbols of collective life; foci that compete at certain moments with the rays emitted by the collective and send them back, then, variously combined and modified, to the collective.