Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon Quotes

The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

The adoration of human nature by the Greeks appeared in Greek plastic art and was the cause of its excellence.

Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.

Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.

What I see in science is a lot of imagination referring to things that are fundamental to what we are. Our cells, our history, our future, our place in the universe, our lack of place in the universe. That's poetry as far as I'm concerned.

History is the action and reaction of these two, nature and thought.

Nature in no case cometh short of art, for the arts are copiers of natural forms.

Anything an artist does is to show ourselves as we really are, which is a complex thing. I don't think that one work of Philosophy or Art, or Letters, or Acting, or Middle Playing, or Tightrope Walking, or Flea Circuses has made mankind better, if by better you mean kinder, wiser, more tolerant of each other. One thing self knowledge. Knoticayton: know thyself.

Art is vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it.

In our time, what is at issue is the very nature of man, the image we have of his limits and possibilities as a man. History is not yet done with its exploration of the limits and meanings of human nature.

In scorn of nature, art gave lifeless life.

At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that otherwise wouldn't be retained by the mind.

The great question, whether man is of nature or above her.

Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature, like himself, is but the effect.

History after all is the true poetry.

The entire routine of our memorized acquisitions, for example, is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds us of the others.

I went out under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal.

Intellect begins with the observation of nature, proceeds to memorize and classify the facts thus observed, and by logical deduction builds up that edifice of knowledge properly called science… But admittedly we also know by feeling, and we can combine the two faculties, and present knowledge in the guise of art.

Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard.

I paint the cot, As truth will paint it, and as bards will not.

Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves.

Sometimes I make films about scenes other filmmakers would leave out, so I just make the film out of all the things they wouldn't put in. Poetry allows you to do this more than prose, for example.

A work of art is like a person: it has more than one soul in its breast.

The mysteries of Nature and of humanity are not lessened, but increased, by the discoveries of philosophic skill.