Category: Authors
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George Sand
To the younger Dumas Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age, and to imagine right up to the brink of death that life is only beginning. I think that is the only way to keep adding to one’s talent, to one’s affections, and one’s inner happiness. Keep your excessive […]
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Francois Marie Arouet De Voltaire
TO M. Helvetius Cirey, February as, 1739 My dear friend — the friend of Truth and the Muses your Epistle is full of bold reasoning in advance of your age, and still more in advance of those craven writers who rhyme for the booksellers and restrict them-selves within the compass of a royal censor, […]
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Oliver Wendell Holmes
Sometimes very young persons send communications which they want forwarded to editors; and these young persons do not always seem to have right conceptions of these same editors, and of the public, and of themselves. Here is a letter I wrote to one of these young folks, but, on the whole, thought it best not […]
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Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
To Carlyle It is obvious that the efforts of the best poets and aesthetic writers of all nations have now for some time been directed towards what is universal in humanity. In each special field, whether in history, mythology, or fiction, more or less arbitrarily conceived, one sees the traits which are universal always more […]
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Heinrich Heine
When one has too much to write to people, one ceases to write altogether; but necessity compels me to take up my pen today…. I must give your style the highest praise. I am a competent judge of style only, on your life, do not grow careless and do not cease to study the […]
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Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
`When a poetaster,’ says Horace, `can do nothing else, he falls to describing a grove, an altar, a brook winding through pleasant meadows, a rushing river, or a rainbow.’ Pope, when a man, looked back with contempt on the descriptive efforts of his poetic childhood. He expressly enjoined upon every one, who would not prove […]
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Gustave Flaubert
I even think that a novelist has not the right to express his own opinion on any subject whatever. He may communicate it, but I do not like him to say it. (That is part of my art of poetry.) I limit myself, then, to declaring things as they appear to me, to expressing what […]
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John Ruskin
It seems to me, and may seem to the reader, strange that we should need to ask the question, ‘What is poetry?’… I come, after some embarrassment, to the conclusion, that poetry is `the suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.’ I mean, by the noble emotions, those four principal secret […]
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Anatole France
I thank fate for having made me be born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life. … there is no objective criticism. The good critic is the one who relates the adventures of his soul in the midst of masterpieces. I have always been inclined to take life as […]
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Sir Walter Scott
If I have a knack for anything it is for selecting the striking and interesting points out of dull details, and hence I myself receive so much pleasure and instruction from volumes which are generally reputed dull and uninteresting. Give me facts, I will find fancy for myself. A work begun is with me a […]