Best 108 quotes in «romanticism quotes» category

He firmly pulled her body against his and he brushed her lips with his. Staring into her eyes, he lightly slid his tongue across her bottom lip. She drew a deep, staggered breath in response to the wave of heat she felt flushing through her. Derrick smiled at her. Then, he softly kissed her. He lightly swept his tongue between her lips, pressing his warm, soft lips to hers. He slid his hands up her body and cradled her face with his hands. Then, he passionately kissed her, tickling her tongue with his. He sucked her lips, gently, as though he was sampling nectar on a delicate petal. Then, with an intense urgency, he dipped his tongue past her lips, caressing her tongue with his. She felt fluttering inside. Anne’s body craved him. A shallow hum escaped from within her in response to how he was making her feel. She could feel his body responding to her. He was breathing heavier which was waking Anne’s primal needs. The tidal wave of lust that had just churned within her was slowly calming as his kiss became more subtle and tender. He gently pressed his lips against hers. He pulled back a little and looked away, exhaling.

[H]e initially conceived of Olivier as a man of the greatest promise destroyed by a fatal flaw, the unreasoning passion for a woman dissolving into violence, desperately weakening everything he tried to do. For how could learning and poetry be defended when it produced such dreadful results and was advanced by such imperfect creatures? At least Julien did not see the desperate fate of the ruined lover as a nineteenth-century novelist or a poet might have done, recasting the tale to create some appealing romantic hero, dashed to pieces against the unyielding society that produced him. Rather, his initial opinion -- held almost to the last -- was of Olivier as a failure, ruined by a terible weakness.

I’d never dreamed anybody could love me the way he did. And even when he proved it to me time and again – I still could hardly believe it was true.

I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness for me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a parent's duties. But he was already past the middle of life, and I was not his only son. My mother had been his second wife, and he was five-and-forty when he married her. He was a firm, unbending, intensely orderly man, in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft of the active landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those people who are always like themselves from day to day, who are uninfluenced by the weather, and neither know melancholy nor high spirits. I held him in great awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive in his presence than at other times; a circumstance which, perhaps, helped to confirm him in the intention to educate me on a different plan from the prescriptive one with which he had complied in the case of my elder brother, already a tall youth at Eton. My brother was to be his representative and successor; he must go to Eton and Oxford, for the sake of making connexions, of course: my father was not a man to underrate the bearing of Latin satirists or Greek dramatists on the attainment of an aristocratic position. But intrinsically, he had slight esteem for "those dead but sceptred spirits"; having qualified himself for forming an independent opinion by reading Potter's Aeschylus, and dipping into Francis's Horace. To this negative view he added a positive one, derived from a recent connexion with mining speculations; namely, that scientific education was the really useful training for a younger son. Moreover, it was clear that a shy, sensitive boy like me was not fit to encounter the rough experience of a public school. Mr. Letherall had said so very decidedly. Mr. Letherall was a large man in spectacles, who one day took my small head between his large hands, and pressed it here and there in an exploratory, suspicious manner - then placed each of his great thumbs on my temples, and pushed me a little way from him, and stared at me with glittering spectacles. The contemplation appeared to displease him, for he frowned sternly, and said to my father, drawing his thumbs across my eyebrows - 'The deficiency is there, sir-there; and here,' he added, touching the upper sides of my head, 'here is the excess. That must be brought out, sir, and this must be laid to sleep.' I was in a state of tremor, partly at the vague idea that I was the object of reprobation, partly in the agitation of my first hatred - hatred of this big, spectacled man, who pulled my head about as if he wanted to buy and cheapen it. ("The Lifted Veil")

I feel liquefied, like a cucumber forgotten in the crisper drawer, and I want to hold myself at arm's length and carry me to the trash. Who is this sack of slush masquerading as me? It's intolerable.

In Hegel's case the irony ceases at the end of the system, because all the negatives lead eventually to the positive recognition that one has exhausted negativity: negativity is the path to the truth. Romantic irony, on the other hand, does not come to an end. The sense that we can never rest with a final certainty becomes the essential fact about our being. Romantic irony is, then, an attitude of mind which tries to come to terms with the finitude of every individual's existence, rather than trying to transcend that finitude by reaching a positive, philosophical conclusion. The scepticism involved in Romantic irony is not the kind of scepticism which worries about whether all our beliefs might be false, but rather a kind of 'fallibilism', which assumes we may always come up with new and better ways of dealing with things, because being transcends what we know of it.

insomnia has this romantic way of making the moon feel like perfect company.

In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of fidelity, kindness and fertility – but the other side of love, its cruelty, sterility and duplicity. In a way, the decadents did accept Nordau's idea of the artist as monster. But in nature, the glory and panacea of romanticism, they found nothing. Theirs is an aesthetic that disavows the natural and with it the body. The truly beautiful body is dead, because it is empty. Decadent work is always morbid, but its attraction to death is through art. What they refused was the condemnation of that monster. And yet despite the decadent celebration of artifice, these stories record art's failure in the struggle against natural horror. Nature fights back and wins, and decadent writing remains a remarkable account of that failure.

I set about seeking a thread, a theme, a style, in the realm of legend. Something that might allow me to give free rein to my juvenile sense of romanticism and the beautiful image.

It's not the end if you're too shy to say 'I love you.' It's only the beginning; because you're first meant to show it anyway.

On reflection, falling in love for him was not only extraordinary, but rather comical. By having closely observed Kiyoaki Matsugae, he knew full well what sort of man should fall in love. Falling in love was a special privilege given to someone whose external, sensuous charm and internal ignorance, disorganization, and lack of cognizance permitted him to form a kind of fantasy about others. It was a rude privilege. Honda was quite aware that since his childhood, he had been the opposite of such a man.

On the whole, although Zuleika is shallow and vain, we don’t blame her for her disastrous effect on Oxford because we perceive that the love she inspires is essentially narcissistic and has deep roots in the institution she has overwhelmed. It is a love of the unobtainable ideal—the paradox of self-fulfillment in self-destruction—which originates with Romanticism, with Byron and Shelley, and finds its apotheosis in the decadent pose of Wilde: his open self-love, yet self-destructive wantonness and preoccupation with death.

Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man's nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical. One may note here that the Church has always taken the classical view since the defeat of the Pelagian heresy and the adoption of the sane classical dogma of original sin. It would be a mistake to identify the classical view with that of materialism. On the contrary it is absolutely identical with the normal religious attitude. I should put it in this way: That part of the fixed nature of man is the belief in the Deity. This should be as fixed and true for every man as belief in the existence of matter and in the objective world. It is parallel to appetite, the instinct of sex, and all the other fixed qualities. Now at certain times, by the use of either force or rhetoric, these instincts have been suppressed - in Florence under Savonarola, in Geneva under Calvin, and here under the Roundheads. The inevitable result of such a process is that the repressed instinct bursts out in some abnormal direction. So with religion. By the perverted rhetoric of Rationalism, your natural instincts are suppressed and you are converted into an agnostic. Just as in the case of the other instincts, Nature has her revenge. The instincts that find their right and proper outlet in religion must come out in some other way. You don't believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don't believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words, you get romanticism. The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.

Romanticism is man's revolt against reason, as well as against the condition under which nature has compelled him to live.

Romanticism requires bravery and risk.

Romantic poetry, on the other hand, is the expression of the secret attraction to a choas which lies concealed in the very bosom of the ordered universe, and is perpetually striving for marvellous births; the life-giving spirit of primal love broods here anew on the face of the water. The former (the antique) is more simple, clear, and like to nature in the self-existent perfection of her separate works; the latter (the romantic) notwithstanding its fragmentary appearance, approaches more to the secret of the universe.

Romanticism embodied "a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals.

Romanticism in loneliness is a true romanticism; but romanticism when others are around is suspicious because you may be pretending!

Romantic enthusiasm lifts the good aloft and removes it into the dim distance of the incomparable and unattainable; at the same time it portrays the good in a human countenance out of which it looks at us and we can look back at it, face to face, in admiration and ecstasy, and stretch out our arms towards it. Thus the moral good is represented in human, and at the same time superhuman, form; it is of our own kind, and yet above our kind; it confronts us, but makes no demands. IT is not really a standard and lacks the power to issues commandments. Both are given at once: the ethical which one would like to love; and the passive, the romantic, in which one wants to live. As a substitute for constant activity demanded by the ethical commandment, we have adoration in which the romantic impression of the moment in vented, and yearning which need only admire and enjoy but not achieve anything.

Romanticism is the expression of man’s urge to rise above reason and common sense, just as rationalism is the expression of his urge to rise above theology and emotion.

Scholarship especially runs scared of fervent quests for glory. If we acknowledge the existence of such feelings, we tend to diminish them: the fearless knight becomes illiterate and ignorant, the passionate lady becomes a woman frustrated by male-dominated society. We cynically explain the motives of the man who goes on campaign, or fights to the death for his lord. Perhaps only the anonymous men at the bottom of the social spectrum-the landless laborers, who lifted their spades in the years following the Black Death and started to conform to the modern stereotype of the downtrodden peasant, resentful of his servitude-gain widespread and genuine modern sympathy.

She'll come, if not today, then tomorrow, but she'll find me. That's the cursed romanticism of all these pure hearts! Oh the vileness, oh the stupidity, oh the narrowness, of these rotten, sentimental souls

She seemed like the kind of woman who would fall in love with the sky.

He is in love with the land that is always over The next hill and the next, with the bird that is never, Caught, with the room beyond the looking glass. He likes the half-hid, the half-heard, the half-lit, The man in the fog, the road without an ending …

He looked at me like I was the stars when all I’d ever felt like was the dark nothingness between them.

I am more romantic than the Romantics!

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke - Aye! and what then?

I felt I could turn the earth upside down with my littlest finger. I wanted to dance, to fly in the air and kiss the sun and stars with my singing heart. I, alone with myself, was enjoying myself for the first time as with grandest company.

If vampires were so passionate and depicted as sexy beasts because they fed on life force, why were zombies not depicted as the scholars of the coterie world?

If we truly detach from our childhood and abandon our inherent romanticism, then we shred any bit of humanity left in us.

I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow men. But we have all a chance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiven - the living only from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind. While the heart beats, bruise it - it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brotherly recognition - make haste - oppress it with your ill-considered judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations. The heart will by and by be still - ubi saeoa indignatio ulterius cor lacerate nequit; the eye will cease to entreat; the ear will be deaf; the brain will have ceased from all wants as well as from all work. Then your charitable speeches may find vent; then you may remember and pity the toil and the struggle and the failure; then you may give due honour to the work achieved; then you may find extenuation for errors, and may consent to bury them ("The Lifted Veil")

I know he wasn’t perfect… But he did the best impression of it I’ve ever seen.

In every drop of love I find you My every drop of love is for you With every drop of me I love you.

In the mind of western man, there is nearly always a tendency to overrate suffering. This tendency is inherited from Christianity and Romanticism. One has, for centuries, considered suffering to be an atonement, a purification, and a cause of uplift. Suffering may comprise such virtues but not necessarily so.

It is the right of art to consider an impression valid simply as an impression and to accept it as something entire and complete without critical scrutiny. Art is, as Schopenhauer puts it, "everywhere at its goal." But for life, and hence surely also for religion, there is a danger, the romantic danger, in making the impression of an experience all-important. For then the sense for the content and commandment of life must all too soon evaporate together with any sense for reality with its definite tasks; and the place of all aspiration and expectation will be taken over by the sole dominion of the mood of faith which simply feels itself, and then finds it easy to deem itself, complete. This is faith for faith's sake.

Men, I still think, ought to be weighed, not counted. Their worth ought to be the final estimate of their value.

My delusions of grandeur are steadily becoming a reality of grandeur.

M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life.

Some people call me sick and twisted. I feel that I'm neither; I am instead a Romantic.

Study of the past often turns into love of the past and a desire to keep it.

Sickness occurs when we desire what we need and what’s desirable with equal intensity, suffering our lack of perfection as if we were suffering for lack of bread.

The gods grant nothing more than life, So let us reject whatever lifts us To unbreathable heights, Eternal but flowerless.

The beauties of the North seemed to be intensified by the loss we had experienced there, and they drew us back to them.

The blasphemy is reverent, since every blasphemy is, ultimately, a participation in holiness.

… the conjunction of Beethoven’s last symphonic masterpiece with crucial works or events in the lives of so many other outstanding artists made 1824 a particularly fertile year…. The fact that the Ninth Symphony, Byron’s death, Pushkin’s Boris Gudunov and “To the Sea,” Delacroix’s Massacres at Chios, Stendhal’s Racine and Shakespeare, and Heine’s Harz Journey and North Sea Pictures all futhered, in one way or another, Romanticism’s rear-guard action against repression underlines the significance of that speck of time. And perhaps these brief glances at those artists and their states of being at that moment will have helped to remind readers—as they reminded this author—that spiritual and intellectual liberation requires endless internal warfare against everything in ourselves that narrows us down instead of opening us up and that replaces questing with certitude. Nearly two centuries later, the world still overflows with people who believe that truth not only exists but that it is simple and straightforward, and that their truths—be they political, religious, philosophical, moral, or social—constitute The Truth. Federico Fellini’s characterization, a generation ago, of the fascist mentality as “a refusal to deepen one’s individual relationship to life, out of laziness, prejudice, unwillingness to inconvenience oneself, and presumptuousness” describes the obedient adherents of most prefabricated beliefs, everywhere and at all times. The others—the disobedient, the nonadherents, those who think that the world is not easily explained and that human experience does not fit into tidy little compartments—are still fighting the eternally unwinnable War of Liberation. Until our sorry species bombs or gluts itself into oblivion, the skirmishing will continue, and what Beethoven and company keep telling us, from the ever-receding yet ever-present past, is that the struggle must continue (pp. 110-11).

the dandy can only play a part by setting himself up in opposition. He can only be sure of his own existence by finding it in the expression of others’ faces. Other people are his mirror. A mirror that quickly becomes clouded, it is true, since human capacity for attention is limited. It must be ceaselessly stimulated, spurred on by provocation. The dandy, therefore, is always compelled to astonish. Singularity is his vocation, excess his way to perfection. Perpetually incomplete, always on the fringe of things, he compels others to create him, while denying their values. He plays at life because he is unable to live it. He plays at it until he dies, except for the moments when he is alone and without a mirror. For the dandy, to be alone is not to exist. The romantics talked so grandly about solitude only because it was their real horror, the one thing they could not bear.

The individualism of the Romantic theory of interpretation attempts to abstract the individual from his historical context by presenting him with the ideal of presuppositionless understanding; a truer theory of interpretation, which does not seek to elide the historical reality of the one seeking understanding, sets the interpreter himself within tradition. What we understand when we seek to understand the writings of the past is borne to us by tradition. Understanding is an engagement with tradition, not an attempt to escape from it.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century was the Age of Romanticism; for the first time in history, man stopped thinking of himself as an animal or a slave, and saw himself as a potential god. All of the cries of revolt against 'God' - De Sade, Byron's "Manfred", Schiller's "Robbers", Goethe's "Faust", Hoffmann's mad geniuses - are expressions of this new spirit. Is this why the 'spirits' decided to make a planned and consistent effort at 'communication'? It was the right moment. Man was beginning to understand himself.

The real stylistic creation of the Revolution is, however, not this classicism but romanticism, that is to say, not the art that it actually practised but the art for which it prepared the way. The Revolution itself was unable to realize the new style, because it possessed new political aims, new social institutions, new standards of law, but so far no new society speaking its own language. Only the bare presupposition for the rise of such a society existed at that time. Art lagged behind political developments and still moved partly, as Marx already noted, in the old anti-quated forms. Artists and writers are, in fact, by no means always prophets and art falls behind the times just as often as it hastens on in advance of them.