Romanticism Quotes

“Behind my romanticism lies a primitive woman with primitive hungers.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume 4 1944-1947

“মানুষ একদিন আশ্চর্য সব রূপকথা তৈরি করেছে । সে কি শুধুই মিথ্যার মৌতাতে বুঁদ হয়ে, যা বাস্তব তাকে ভুলিয়ে দেবার ও ভুলে থাকবার জন্যে? সে রূপকথার মধ্যে সেই দুঃসাহসী আশার বর্তিকা কি নেই, বিকৃত বর্তমানকে অবজ্ঞা ভরে বিদ্রূপ ক'রে ভবিষ্যতের সঙ্কেত যা বহন করে! জীবনকে তার সমস্ত কদর্যতা, গ্লানি আর অসম্পূর্ণতা নিয়ে সত্য করে জানবার দুর্ভাগ্য যাদের হয়নি, বাস্তবের ফাঁকা বুলির হুজুগে তারই সব চেয়ে বেশি মেতে ওঠে । জীবনকে সত্য ক'রে যে জেনেছে, সে সত্যের চেয়ে আরও বেশি কিছু দিয়ে তা প্রকাশ করে; - সেই বেশি কিছুই স্বপ্ন ।”
― Premendra Mitra, প্রেমেন্দ্র মিত্রের শ্রেষ্ঠ গল্প

“There are many toxic myths about love, but perhaps the worst is that "love conquers all." This myth hurts us in all kinds of ways -- such as the untold zillions of hours and wasted tears spent by people trying to heal, reform or otherwise change a partner. Especially pernicious is the idea that we're supposed to "give until it hurts" -- in fact, for some of us, that the measure of our worth is our ability to give, right down to the last drop of ourselves. That is wrong. Love isn't supposed to hurt, and we should not and do not need to sacrifice our selves for good relationships.”
― Franklin Veaux, More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory

“And beautiful, and there the sea I found
Calm as a cradled child in dreamless slumber bound.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Revolt Of Islam

“Or is this all but obsolete romantic rot, Cincinnatus?”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

“The blasphemy is reverent, since every blasphemy is, ultimately, a participation in holiness.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel

“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.”
― Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

“In every drop of love I find you
My every drop of love is for you
With every drop of me I love you.”
― Krishna Chhetri, A Drop of You

“Yêu là một luật chung của vạn vật, là bản tính của Phật giáo. Ta yêu nhau, ta yêu nhau trong linh hồn, trong lý tưởng, Phật tổ cũng chẳng cấm đoán đôi ta yêu nhau như thế" - Ngọc”
― Khái Hưng, Hồn Bướm Mơ Tiên

“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.”
― August Wilhelm Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature

“I’m infected with the romantic fever. It began in my teens when I read Baudelaire in secret.”
― Renée Vivien

“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.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism

“The concentrated structure of musical form, based on dramatic climaxes, gradually breaks up in romanticism and gives way again to the cumulative composition of the older music. Sonata form falls to pieces and is replaced more and more often by other, less severe and less schematically moulded forms—by small-scale lyrical and descriptive genres, such as the Fantasy and the Rhapsody, the Arabesque and the Étude, the Intermezzo and the Impromptu, the Improvisation and the Variation. Even extensive works are often made up of such miniature forms, which no longer constitute, from the structural point of view, the acts of a drama, but the scenes of a revue. A classical sonata or symphony was the world in parvo: a microcosm. A succession of musical pictures, such as Schumann’s Carnaval or Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage, is like a painter’s sketch-book; it may contain magnificent lyrical-impressionistic details, but it abandons the attempt to create a total impression and an organic unity from the very beginning.
[...]
This change of form is accompanied by the literary inclinations of the composers and their bias towards programme music. The intermingling of forms also makes itself felt in music and is expressed most conspicuously in the fact that the romantic composers are often very gifted and important writers. In the painting and poetry of the period the disintegration of form does not proceed anything like so quickly, nor is it so far-reaching as in music. The explanation of the difference is partly that the cyclical ‘medieval’ structure had long since been overcome in the other arts, whereas it remained predominant in music until the middle of the eighteenth century, and only began to yield to formal unity after the death of Bach. In music it was therefore much easier to revert to it than, for example, in painting where it was completely out of date. The romantics’ historical interest in old music and the revival of Bach’s prestige had, however, only a subordinate part in the dissolution of strict sonata form, the real reason is to be sought in a change of taste which was in essentials sociologically conditioned.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism

“Love denied, and the somatic experience of that denial, is─as de Rougemont recognized─the hidden, and gnostic/heretical, thread of Western History.”
― Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West

“Choosing a person to marry is hence just a matter of deciding exactly what kind of suffering we want to endure rather than of assuming we have found a way to skirt the rules of emotional existence. We will all by definition end up with that stock character of our nightmares, 'the wrong person.'

This needn't be a disaster, however. Enlightened romantic pessimism simply assumes that one person can't be everything ot another. We should look for ways to accommodate ourselves as gently and as kindly as we can to the awkward realities of living alongside another fallen creature. There can only ever be a 'good enough' marriage.”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

“Đại gia đình của tôi nay là nhân loại, mà tiểu gia đình của tôi là...hai linh hồn đôi ta, ẩn núp dưới bóng từ bi Phật tổ" - Ngọc”
― Khái Hưng, Hồn Bướm Mơ Tiên

“But at the same time it inaugurates an æsthetic which is still valid in our world, an æsthetic of solitary creators, who are obstinate rivals of a God they condemn. From romanticism onward, the artist’s task will not only be to create a world, or to exalt beauty for its own sake, but also to define an attitude. Thus the artist becomes a model and offers himself as an example: art is his ethic. With him begins the age of the directors of conscience. When the dandies fail to commit suicide or do not go mad, they make a career and pursue prosperity.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel

“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.”
― Andrew Bowie, Introduction to German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas

“But the principal cause of the difference lies in the plastic spirit of the antique, and the picturesque spirit of the romantic poetry. Sculpture directs our attention exclusively to the group which it sets before us, it divests it as far as possible from all external accompaniments, and where they cannot be dispensed with, it indicates them as slightly as possible. Painting, on the other hand, delights in exhibiting, along with the principal figures, all the details of the surrounding locality and all secondary circumstances, and to open a prospect into a boundless distance in the background; and light and shade with perspective are its peculiar charms. Hence the Dramatic, and especially the Tragic Art, of the ancients, annihilates in some measure the external circumstances of space and time; while, by their changes, the romantic drama adorns its more varied pictures. Or, to express myself in other terms, the principle of the antique poetry is ideal; that of the romantic is mystical: the former subjects space and time to the internal free-agency of the mind; the latter honours these incomprehensible essences as supernatural powers, in which there is somewhat of indwelling divinity.”
― August Wilhelm Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature

“Feet on the ground, eyes to the stars, heart in union with the Superior.”
― Bongha Lee, On Resistism

“It would shed an extraordinarily revealing light on the gradual alienation of modern literature from the middle classes, to examine the metamorphoses this figure underwent from the ‘Sturm und Drang’ right up to Ibsen and Shaw. For he does not represent simply the stereotyped insurgent against the prevailing social order, who is one of the basic types of the drama of all times, nor is he merely a variant of rebellion against the particular ruler of the moment, which is one of the fundamental dramatic situations, but he represents a concrete and consistent attack on the bourgeoisie, on the basis of its spiritual existence and on its claim to stand for a universally valid moral norm. To sum up, what we are here confronted with is a literary form which from being one of the most effective weapons of the middle class developed into the most dangerous instrument of its self-estrangement and demoralization.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism

“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.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism

“Why should one exaggerate and distort things, if one does not feel disturbed and frightened by them? ‘Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be; why then should we wish to be deceived?’ says Bishop Butler, and thereby gives the best description of the serene and ‘healthy’ eighteenth-century sense of reality with its aversion to all illusion.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism

“I spite of his scientific attitude he is a romantic, and indeed much more whole-heartedly so than the other less radical naturalists of his day. His one-sided, undialectical rationalization and schematization of reality is already boldly and ruthlesslyromantic. And the symbols to which he reduces motley, many-sided, contradictory life— the city, the machine, alcohol, prostitution, the department store, the markethall, the stock exchange, the theatre, etc.—are all the more the visions of a romantic systematizer, who sees allegories instead of concrete individual phenomena everywhere.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“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.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“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...!”
― Krishna Chhetri, A Drop of You

“It was the stuff of Alexandre Dumas' novels as it would be of George Sand's; Romanticism had some roots in reality.”
― Joseph Amber Barry, Infamous Woman: the life of George Sand

“Deep down, for better and for worse, I consider myself to be a romantic. Whether that consideration is correct, I have no idea.”
― Jason Flores-Williams, The Last Stand of Mr. America

“...it was only natural that this mutual connection between sea and observer be forged: they were kindred spirits. The same, however, could not be done with the implacable moon: that imperious stalwart, which agitated the currents and spurned its beholder. This aloof satellite was formidable, yet neurotic, and so in spite of its ferocity, its movements were simple to predict, thereby granting this fearsome creature a veil of placidity. Its magnitude of torque was easily outmatched by that forceful heave of fear portending any misalignment with its anticipated schedule of phases. It cycled through these on time and without hesitation, experiencing, all the while, a wide array of emotions in response to the dissatisfied countenance of the Master it served. And yet, these changes in mood remained prosaic and careful, dutiful to its Patron; thusly, betraying nothing of its own resentments or intentionality either to its dismissed observer or to its demanding Patron, divulging nothing even of the influence which it potentially wielded over the Patron Planet, but which, in its lunar insecurity, never reached full expression save for the idle touslings of liquid fur. Perhaps it was diffident or bashful—otherwise, it was simple and had little prevailing ambition. Its motives were immaterial, in fact, for its aspirations were easily eclipsed and often countermanded and so one could not help but anticipate in its withered mien a certain resignation, a retreat to introspection away from the gazes of those who mistook its surrender to deterministic forces as a duty held most solemn. To be sure, it was a specter oft-romanticized by dullard poets and priests who admired it for its calming reserve, its gentle wisdom in juxtaposition with the histrionic impatience of the sea: like a tired guardian and a screaming toddler with primacy afforded counterintuitively to the guardian.

What mattered more, in fact, was the subject of its influence: the willful and disobedient medium which spurned that hands that molded it. The moldings were more like jostles really and for a time they felt just and reasonable, but soon they came to confine and until verily there was no movement available that was not otherwise preordained by the will of the master.
The accursed moon!”
― Ashim Shanker, Inward and Toward

“Plato’s heirs—armed with his methods, but unchained from his wistful predilections—abstracted away the faces of the pagan gods: the marbles that in Homer’s day were warm Olympian flesh were philosophized into dust and that dust into theology. Consequently, the labor of keeping beauty and goodness yoked became moot as their separation in the realm of experience, in art and religion—their correspondent spheres of human activity—became so obviously distinct. Christianity supplanted paganism and the art of yore, which had formerly been principally confined to civil and religious expression, was gradually supplanted by an art that was its own unique means by which humanity understood itself. In due course, following the birth of Romanticism, art stood on the field of history its own inexorable self.”
― Michael Shindler