Ivan Turgenev Quotes

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.

I try to find the picture, not create it.

I think art is more glorious than life but not more real.

The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Words are men's daughters, but God's sons are things.

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful.

It is fun to try figure out the things that really are real and the things that aren't.

Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.

Everything that you can imagine is going on is going on.

You don't know reality until someone makes a fiction of it. Reality needs the completion of fiction.

Art is truth.

There's so many different types of illusions; our lives are an illusion in a sense.

Some people want to live in a world much prettier than the one I depict. But it exists, and I talk about it because it exists.