Quotes About Romanticism

It is certainly true that writers take a stance at some variance from organized religion. This has not always been true. But since the romantic movement - and I'm referring now exclusively to poetry - the emphasis has been on the individual imagination defined against, rather than in terms of, any orthodoxy.

He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze; he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height

I detest common heroes and moderate feelings, the sort that exist in real life

How she listened, the first time, to the sonorous lamentations of romantic melancholia echoing out across heaven and earth! If her childhood had been spent in the dark back-room of a shop in some town, she would now perhaps have been kindled by the lyric surgings of nature which only normally reach us as through the interpretation of a writer.

As her figure coarsened, her soul became ever more romantic, and when her corpulence riveted her to her chair, her imagination continued to wander through tender adventures, of which she was the heroine.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.

Sailin' 'round the world in a dirty gondola Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!

Romanticism is a cultural tool of male power to keep women from knowing their condition.

In concreto, il mondo colorato, rumoroso e soprattutto fasullo che ci sta intorno, è l'erede del sogno romantico di una rinascita del mito, del fatto che la ragione deve essere sostituita dal sogno. Piuttosto che razionalista, come spesso la si dipinge, la modernità, almeno dal romanticismo in avanti, è stata in buona parte mitologica e anti-illuminista, e l'esito del postmoderno si pone, in piena coerenza, in questa linea di sviluppo.

Marcella cared nothing for men's admiration, and yet, instead of retiring to one of those nunneries which are founded for her kind, she chose to rove the mountains, causing despair to all the shepherds.

Whereas the Enlightenment had found its model in China, Romanticism turned to India, the source of all mysticism (Schwab 1984; Halbfass 1988).

The romantic movement, in art, in literature, and in politics, is bond up with this subjective way of judging men, not as members of a community, but as aesthetically delightful objects of contemplation. Tigers are more beautiful than sheep, but we prefer them behind bars. The typical romantic removes the bars and enjoys the magnificent leaps with which the tiger annihilates the sheep. He exhorts men to imagine themselves tigers, and when he succeeds the results are not wholly pleasant.

With his long hair as ragged as rain and as black as thunder, he would have looked quite at home upon a windswept moor, or lurking in some pitch-black alleyway, or perhaps in a novel by Mrs. Radcliffe.

Whether V. be the eternal feminine of Goethe or the great Goddess of Graves, symptom or cause of the chaos of the twentieth century, blighter or ghastly redeemer of the waste land, Western Civilization, as Pynchon sees it, is caught in a dying fall. Randomly dispersed natural energies, creeping inanimateness, rampant colonialism and racism, expiring romanticism, perverted sexuality, degenerate politics, and holocaustic wars have turned the Western world into a waste land.

Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty.

The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English - the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants.

But whether we fear death and refuse to face it, or whether we romanticize it, death is trivialized. Both despair and euphoria about death are an evasion. Death is neither depressing nor exciting; it is simply a fact of life.

It is true that whenever we have been told a great many interesting things about a person whom we have not yet met, our visual fantasy conjures up a picture of him beforehand, dipping liberally into the storehouse of our most precious and most romantic memories.

Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.

I am so romantic about Gypsies. They're not allowed to do anything until they get married. So they all get married really young, at sixteen.

Love is enough: though the world be a-waning, And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining.

... in the movies Paris is designed as a backdrop for only three things--love, fashion shows, and revolution.

There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.

And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him. The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all.