Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?

Do you know that charming part of our country which has been called the garden of France - that spot where, amid verdant plains watered by wide streams, one inhales the purest air of heaven?

The study of social progress is today not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.

But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.

Of what use is the memory of facts, if not to serve as an example of good or of evil?

France, for example, loves at the same time history and the drama, because the one explores the vast destinies of humanity, and the other the individual lot of man.

We live in an age of universal investigation, and of exploration of the sources of all movements.

Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?

What is the use of theorizing as to wherein lies the charm that moves us?

No writer, no matter how gifted, immortalizes himself unless he has crystallized into expressive and original phrase the eternal sentiments and yearnings of the human heart.

Just as we descend into our consciences to judge of actions which our minds can not weigh, can we not also search in ourselves for the feeling which gives birth to forms of thought, always vague and cloudy?

Art ought never to be considered except in its relations with its ideal beauty.

From this, without doubt, sprang the fable. Man created it thus, because it was not given him to see more than himself and nature, which surrounds him; but he created it true with a truth all its own.

I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in.

Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?

One might almost reckon mathematically that, having undergone the double composition of public opinion and of the author, their history reaches us at third hand and is thus separated by two stages from the original fact.

What it values most of all is the sum total of events and the advance of civilization, which carries individuals along with it; but, indifferent to details, it cares less to have them real than noble or, rather, grand and complete.

On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.

The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.

The acts of the human race on the world's stage have doubtless a coherent unity, but the meaning of the vast tragedy enacted will be visible only to the eye of God, until the end, which will reveal it perhaps to the last man.

Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.

We shall find in our troubled hearts, where discord reigns, two needs which seem at variance, but which merge, as I think, in a common source - the love of the true, and the love of the fabulous.

An army is a nation within a nation, it is one of the vices of courage.

We live in an age of universal investigation and of exploration of the sources of all movements.

History is a novel for which the people is the author.

I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.

Imitation is the sincerest form of pain.

The Negroes have little invention, but strong powers of imitation, so that they readily acquire mechanic arts. They have a great talent for music, and all their external senses are remarkably acute.

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.

To be as good as our fathers we must be better, imitation is not discipleship.

The worst acting is about imitation.

Imitation is the highest form of flattery, but clones kind of get it wrong because we are promoting individuality and being proud of being yourself.

The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art.

I don't like traditions, I am very personal, very independent, I don't like intimate ladies, I mean in German lieder there's a lot of copy, a lot of imitation, a lot of tradition, and this I have put it aside.

Imitation is the sincerest flattery.

Listening, not imitation, may be the sincerest form of flattery.

Ignorance and a narrow education lay the foundation of vice, and imitation and custom rear it up.

Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?

The opponents of this process have always tried to vilify westernization as a poor imitation.

When I came up, it was all about originality and collective research. There is an awful lot of imitation going on now.

Unfortunately what came out of it was also kind of an imitation community with a lot of mindless conformity.

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

All bad Literature rests upon imperfect insight, or upon imitation, which may be defined as seeing at second-hand.

Anyone who draws attention to himself as an individual, is viewed with suspicion. We acquired this tendency, of course, from America, and we must resist it: levelling, and imitation of what others are already doing.

My works are an imitation of my own past and present.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.

The heroes of the present will retreat to the imitation they are anyhow.