Hippolyte Taine Quotes

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.

Whatever poetry that was in me was coming out in the form of constructing art books!

As naturally as the oak bears an acorn and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done.

Private imaginings may have no outcomes in the world at all. Creativity does. Being creative involves doing something.

There are two parts to the creative endeavor: making something, then disseminating it.

Art is the result of a creative impulse derived out of a consciousness of life.

By artist I mean of course everyone who has tried to create something which was not here before him, with no other tools and material than the uncommer-ciable ones of the human spirit.

To me the most interesting thing about man is that he is an animal who practices art and science and in every known society practices both together.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

The word 'art' interests me very much. If it comes from Sanskrit, as I've heard, it signifies 'making.

Man is a poetical animal, and delights in fiction.

I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties.

Creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. (Describing his poetic ideal, 1817)

...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.

Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world.

The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition.

The poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. The logger and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him.

My theory is that poems are written because of a state of emotional irritation. It may be present for some time before the poet is conscious of what is tormenting him. The emotional irritation springs, probably, from subconscious combinations of partly forgotten thoughts and feelings. Coming together, like electrical currents in a thunder storm, they produce a poem. ... the poem is written to free the poet from an emotional burden.

The animal has no intellectual capacity to justify or to find reasons to exist. An animal just exists because it's the natural thing to do.

In dance, in composition, in sculpture, the experience is the same: we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express.

I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.

No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.

I don't look back or analyze my films. I just make them. It's for someone else to look at.

When things get tough... Make good art.