Alfred de Vigny

Art ought never to be considered except in its relations with its ideal beauty.

The acts of the human race on the world's stage have doubtless a coherent unity, but the meaning of the vast tragedy enacted will be visible only to the eye of God, until the end, which will reveal it perhaps to the last man.

No writer, no matter how gifted, immortalizes himself unless he has crystallized into expressive and original phrase the eternal sentiments and yearnings of the human heart.

France, for example, loves at the same time history and the drama, because the one explores the vast destinies of humanity, and the other the individual lot of man.

I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in.

The study of social progress is today not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.