Best 108 quotes in «romanticism quotes» category

Energy was the ruling theme of Victorian science, as machines increasingly harnessed the forces of nature to do man's work. The concept is also present in the art and literature of the age, notably in the poems of William Blake. The Romantic movement was much interested in energy and its various transformations.

Even if all things turn to ash, you will still have hope. Oh, darling, there is an unfathomable power in the love of hope. The thought that there is something, is indubitable. Love is hope and hope is a never giving up thought...!

Fall in love with the energy of the mornings trace your fingers along the lull of the afternoons take the spirit of the evenings in your arms kiss it deeply and then make love to the tranquility of the nights.

For the first time she knew and loved the Spirit of good and beauty, an affinity to which affords the greatest bliss that our nature can receive.

For there was soft remembrance, and sweet trust In one fond breast, to which his own would melt, And in its tenderer hour on that his bosom dwelt.

From all that urges and admonishes, the romantic turns away. He wants to dream, enjoy, immerse himself, instead of clearing his way by striving and wrestling. That which has been and rises out of what is past occupies him far more than what is to become and also more than what wants to become; for the word of the future would always be command. Experiences with their many echoes and their billows stand higher in his estimation than life with its tasks; for tasks always establish a bond with harsh reality. And from this he is in flight. He does not want to struggles against fate, but rather to receive it with an ardent and devout soul; he does not want to wrestle for the blessing, but to experience it, abandoning himself, devoid of will, to what spells salvation and bliss.

[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.

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.

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?

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 …

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Our objective as a realist is to maximize our worth, and our objective as a romanticist is to be foolishly youthful.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Feet on the ground, eyes to the stars, heart in union with the Superior.

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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