Best 108 quotes in «romanticism quotes» category

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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.

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

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

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 reaction against utilitarianism was a second romanticism, in which the fight against social injustice and the opposition to the actual theories of the "dismal science" played a much smaller part than the urge to escape from the present, whose problems the anti-utilitarians had no ability and no desire to solve, into the irrarionalism of Burke, Coleridge, and German romanticism.

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

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 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 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.

There are hundreds of miracles within a single machine. Americans calmly explain these with mathematical formulas. Our difficulty is to learn, theirs to appreciate. We Latins, even the most intelligent of us, still count on our fingers and toes. But once we do learn, we shall surpass the Americano, because we understand the spiritual significance of a machine. We see the beauty of combining gas, grease and steel into a powerful, exact movement. We appreciate the material destiny of the universe.

There is no single thing... that is so cut and dried that one cannot attend to its secret whisper which says 'I am more than just my appearance'. If each object quivers with readiness to imply something other than itself, if each perception is a word in a poem dense with connotations, then the poet's selection of any given subject of speculation will become... a means of attuning himself to the rhythms and harmonies of reality at large. ... The notion of a network of correspondence is not an outmoded Romantic illusion: it represents a crucial intuition...

…the rising movement of romanticism, with its characteristic idealism, one that tended toward a black-and-white view of the world based on those ideas, preferred for different reasons that women remain untinged by “masculine” traits of learning. Famous romantic writers such as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Hazlitt criticized the bluestockings. …and Hazlitt declared his 'utter aversion to Bluestockingism … I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.' Because of the tremendous influence that romanticism gained over the cultural mind-set, the term bluestocking came to be a derogatory term applied to learned, pedantic women, particularly conservative ones. ... Furthermore, learned women did not fit in with the romantic notion of a damsel in distress waiting to be rescued by a knight in shining armor any more than they fit in with the antirevolutionary fear of progress.

The ‘Sturm und Drang’ was even more complicated in its sociological structure than the West European forms of preromanticism, and not merely because the German middle class and the German intelligentsia had never identified themselves closely enough with the enlightenment to keep their eyes sharply fixed on the aims of the movement and not to deviate from it, but also because their struggle against the rationalism of the absolutist regime was at the same time a struggle against the progressive tendencies of the age. They never became aware of the fact that the rationalism of the princes represented a less serious danger for the future than the anti-rationalism of their own compeers. From being the enemies of despotism they, therefore, became the instruments of reaction and merely promoted the interests of the privileged classes with their attacks on bureaucratic centralization. To be sure, their struggle was not directed against the social levelling tendencies of the system, with which aristocratic and upper middle-class interests were in conflict, but against its generalizing influence and violation of all intellectual distinction and variety. They championed the rights of life, of individual being, natural growth and organic development, against the rigid formalism of the rationalized administration, and meant not only the denial of the bureaucratic state with its mechanical generalization and regimentation, but also the repudiation of the planning and regulating reformism of the enlightenment. And although the idea of the spontaneous, irrational life was still of an indefinite and fluctuating nature and certainly hostile to the enlightenment, but not yet markedly conservative in its purpose, nevertheless, it already contained the essence of the whole philosophy of conservatism. It did not need much now to ascribe a mystical superrationality to this principle of ‘life’, in contrast to which the rationalism of enlightened thought seemed unnatural, inflexible and doctrinaire, and to represent the rise of political and social institutions from historical ‘life’ as a ‘natural’, that is to say, superhuman and superrational growth, in order to protect these institutions against all arbitrary attacks and to secure the continuance of the prevailing system.

they would be astonished to discover the seriously German problem that we are dealing with, a vortex and a turning-point at the very centre of German hopes. But perhaps those same people will find it distasteful to see an aesthetic problem taken so seriously, if they can see art as nothing more than an entertaining irrelevance, an easily dispensable tinkle of bells next to the 'seriousness of life': as if no one was aware what this contrast with the 'seriousness of life' amounted to. Let these serious people know that I am convinced that art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life in the sense of that man, my noble champion on that path, to whom I dedicate this book.

Think of my Pleasure in Solitude, in comparison of my commerce with the world - there I am a child - there they do not know me not even my most intimate acquaintance - I give into their feelings as though I were refraining from irritating a little child - Some think me middling, others silly, other foolish - every one thinks he sees my weak side against my will; when in thruth it is with my will - I am content to be thought all this because I have in my own breast so graet a resource. This is one great reason why they like me so; because they can all show to advantage in a room, and eclipese from a certain tact one who is reckoned to be a good Poet - I hope I am not here playing tricks 'to make the angels weep': I think not: for I have not the least contempt for my species; and though it may sound paradoxical: my greatest elevations of Soul leave me every time more humbled - Enough of this - though in your Love for me you will not think it enough.

This was the first time I thought of S— that day. Her music was beautiful, her voice was beautiful, her body was beautiful. Even the dirty little pads of her feet were beautiful. I cursed myself then. For once, heaven had sent me Beauty in its most perfected form and I abandoned it. She might not have been a girl after all but an angel: a force to guide me on this hazardous path of life I hurry down. How can life be hazardous if it can only end in death?

Those novels with old-fashioned heroes and heroines in them -- are ruinous!

Thus spoke the Beauty and her voice had a cheerful ring, and her face was aflame with a great rejoicing. She finished her story and began to laugh quietly, but not cheerfully. The Youth bowed down before her and silently kissed her hands, inhaling the languid fragrance of myrrh, aloe and musk which wafted from her body and her fine robes. The Beauty began to speak again. 'There came to me streams of oppressors, because my evil, poisonous beauty bewitches them. I smile at them, they who are doomed to death, and I feel pity for each of them, and some I almost loved, but I gave myself to no one. Each one I gave but one single kiss — and my kisses were innocent as the kisses of a tender sister. And whomsoever I kissed, died.' The soul of the troubled Youth was caught in agony, between two quite irresolvable passions, the terror of death and an inexpressible ecstasy. But love, conquering all, overcoming even the anguish of death's grief, was triumphant once again today. Solemnly stretching out his trembling hands to the tender and terrifying Beauty, the Youth exclaimed, 'If death is in your kiss, o beloved, let me revel in the infinity of death. Cling to me, kiss me, love me, envelop me with the sweet fragrance of your poisonous breath, death after death pour into my body and into my soul before you destroy everything that once was me!' 'You want to! You are not afraid!' exclaimed the Beauty. The face of the Beauty was pale in the rays of the lifeless moon, like a guttering candle, and the lightning in her sad and joyful eyes was trembling and blue. With a trusting movement, tender and passionate, she clung to the Youth and her naked, slender arms were entwined about his neck. 'We shall die together!' she whispered. 'We shall die together. All the poison of my heart is afire and flaming streams are rushing through my veins, and I am all enveloped in some great holocaust.' 'I am aflame!' whispered the Youth, 'I am being consumed in your embraces and you and I are two flaming fires, burning with the immense ecstasy of a poisonous love.' The sad and lifeless moon grew dim and fell in the sky — and the black night came and stood watch. It concealed the secret of love and kisses, fragrant and poisonous, with gloom and solitude. And it listened to the harmonious beating of two hearts growing quieter, and in the frail silence it watched over the final delicate sighs. And so, in the poisonous Garden, having breathed the fragrances which the Beauty breathed, and having drunk the sweetness of her love so tenderly and fatally compassionate, the beautiful Youth died. And on his breast the Beauty died, having delivered her poisonous but fragrant soul up to sweet ecstasies. ("The Poison Garden")

We thought it was drops of dew and kissed cold tears from the crossgrass.

When tenderness softened her heart, and the sublime feeling of universal love penetrated her, she found no voice that replied so well to hers as the gentle singing of the pines under the air of noon, and the soft murmurs of the breeze that scattered her hair and freshened her cheek, and the dashing of the waters that has no beginning or end.

Yes," she thought, "nature is the refuge and home for women: they have no public career—no aim nor end beyond their domestic circle; but they can extend that, and make all the creations of nature their own, to foster and do good to.

You know what?” he whispered, out of breath, “You’re about to be in a whole lot of trouble. We probably better go.

Your memory feels like home to me. So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds it’s way back to you.

Boredom is simply romanticism with a morning-after thirst.

The truth is, people are ravenous for sex, sociopaths for love. I sometimes like to daydream that if we were all somehow simultaneously outed as lechers and perverts and sentimental slobs, it might be, after the initial shock of disillusionment, liberating. It might be a relief to quit maintaining this rigid pose of normalcy and own up to the outlaws and monsters we are.

They wanted so desperately to love each other more, to remove their clothes and submit their naked bodies to each other, but it was almost as if they were cursed since the first day that they met, and it was pure torture knowing that they could only get so close, but was unable to go the height that the both of them wanted so intimately to climb.

Though it’s reasons to burn may vary... you are always the fuel of my fire.

Usually, the murmur that rises up from Paris by day is the city talking; in the night it is the city breathing; but here it is the city singing. Listen, then, to this chorus of bell-towers - diffuse over the whole the murmur of half a million people - the eternal lament of the river - the endless sighing of the wind - the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed upon the hills, in the distance, like immense organpipes - extinguish to a half light all in the central chime that would otherwise be too harsh or too shrill; and then say whetehr you know of anything in the world more rich, more joyous, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes - this furnace of music - these thousands of brazen voices, all singing together in flutes of stone three hundred feet high, than this city which is but one orchestra - this symphony which roars like a tempest.

(visions) of strange cities, of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies with strange bright constellations, of mountain-passes, of grassy nooks flecked with the afternoon sunshine through the boughs: I was in the midst of such scenes, and in all of them one presence seemed to weigh on me in all these mighty shapes - the presence of something unknown and pitiless. For continual suffering had annihilated religious faith within me: to the utterly miserable - the unloving and the unloved - there is no religion possible, no worship but a worship of devils. And beyond all these, and continually recurring, was the vision of my death - the pangs, the suffocation, the last struggle, when life would be grasped at in vain. ("The Lifted Veil")

We know from accounts of Rilke's life that his stay in Rodin's workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. The poet's view of the mutilated body thus has nothing to do with the previous century's Romanticism of fragments and ruins; it is part of the breakthrough in modern art to the concept of the object that states itself with authority and the body that publicizes itself with authorization.

What is the world, except that which we feel? Love, and hope, and delight, or sorrow and tears; these are our lives, our realities, to which we give the names of power, possession, misfortune, and death.

When you fall in love, you land on a cloud.

Yes Ernest, it is pretty to think so.

You have attempted to tinge detection with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid." - Holmes to Watson, The Sign of Four

You," Seven pronounced, "are a train wreck of sexual history." But this is inaccurate. A runaway train is an accident. Me, I'll jump in front of the tracks. I'll even tie myself down in front of the speeding engine. There's some illogical part of me that still believes if you want Superman to show up, first there's got to be someone worth saving.