George Santayana Quotes

Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.

The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence.

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

The real magic is in making the intangible idea, the creative impulse, manifest and live in our reality.

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.

Since I started as an actress in the film industry, I realised the power of visuals and how that can fuel the imagination of our mind. It is very powerful. Therefore, I always cater to my own sensibility first and then to the world.

An artist sees that which does not yet exist. He or she imagines a future others cannot perceive. The artist - and the writer - reshapes reality so that it becomes even more vivid and lasting.

Work up imagination to the state of vision.

I'm filled with admiration, delight, and gratitude at discovering James Lasdun's poems in A Jump Start. He has wit, speed, intelligence, a keen eye, precision, and imagination of a high order.

I wanted it to provide an escape route, I wanted to make pictures that were fantastic and took you into another world, one that was brighter. I started off with this idea.

A great work of Art demands a great thought or a thought of beauty adequately expressed. - Neither in Art nor Literature more than in Life can an ordinary thought be made interesting because well-dressed.

The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.

The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world ofits own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited.

The world of the cinema and of painting are very different; precisely, the possibilities of photography and the cinema reside in that unlimited fantasy which is born of things themselves... a piece of sugar can become on the screen larger than an infinite perspective of gigantic buildings.

All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal.

The poets are wrong of course […] But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.

Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.

You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures.

The greatness of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.

As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality.

IMAGINATION, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.

I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us. We don't have to rely totally on experience if we can do things in our imagination.... It's the only way in which you can live more lives than your own. You can escape your own time, your own sensibility, your own narrowness of vision.