Romanticism Quotes

Love is Not an illusion. It's a Rarer Find & Harder to Cultivate. ~ Matthew Edward Hall

And aye, beside her stalks her amarous knight!
Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn,
And thro' those brogues, still tatter'd and betorn,
His hindward charms glean an unearthly white,
Ah! thus thro' broken clouds at night's high Noon
Peeps in fair fragments forth the full-orb'd harvest-moon! ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There's a certain romanticism associated with exploration of space, which is one of the major factors why we'll continue. ~ John McCain

Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives ~ Alfred De Musset

Women collect grievances, hold grudges and change shape. They pass hard, legitimate judgments, unlike the purblind guesses of men, fogged with romanticism and ignorance and bias and wish. Women know too much, they can neither be deceived nor trusted. I can understand why men are afraid of them, as they are frequently accused of being. ~ Margaret Atwood

Foreign correspondence has a natural element of romanticism - and this could be seen as soon as that class of professional reporter emerged in the last half of the 19th century. ~ John Maxwell Hamilton

In fact he was as
lovesick as a high schooler of an especially sensitive sort who wonders if he dare share a poem with his
beloved or whether she will laugh at him. He does read her the poem and her feminine capacity for
romanticism for a moment approaches his own and they are suffused in a love trance, a state that so
ineluctably peels back the senses making them fresh again whatever ages the lovers might be. ~ Jim Harrison

Only the really young are fearless, have the optimism, the romanticism to take unimaginable risks. ~ Olivia Wilde

Romanticism is the expression of man's urge to rise above reason and common sense, just as rationalism is the expression of his urge to rise above theology and emotion. ~ Charles Yost

Imagination and romanticism deny love, for love is its own eternity. Man has sought through various gods, ideologies and hopes, something that is not bound by time. The birth of a new baby is not the indication of something eternal. Life comes and goes. There is death, there is suffering and all the mischief that man can make, and this movement of change, decay and birth is still within the cycle of time. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

What is noble, lyrical, tender in the upper level shown is also with the servants, scoundrels, and scamps, as in a distorting mirror. This contrast seems to me a most appealing musical theme
to show love in its noble and crude forms, romanticism and crass realism mixed as in everyday life. ~ Stefan Zweig

As a people, we have been tolled farther and farther away from the facts of what we have done by the romanticizers, whose bait is nothing more than the wishful insinuation that we have done no harm. Speaking a public language of propaganda, uninfluenced by the real content of our history which we know only in a deep and guarded privacy, we are still in the throes of the paradox of the "gentleman and soldier."
However conscious it may have been, there is no doubt in my mind that all this moral and verbal obfuscation is intentional. Nor do I doubt that its purpose is to shelter us from the moral anguish implicit in our racism - an anguish that began, deep and mute, in the minds of Christian democratic freedom-loving owners of slaves. ~ Wendell Berry

If we truly detach from our childhood and abandon our inherent romanticism, then we shred any bit of humanity left in us. ~ Evan Meekins

Romanticism is the mother of kitsch and that there are moments when the child becomes so like its mother that one cannot differentiate between them ~ Hermann Broch

Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it is hard to believe it existed as anything but a logical construction; and what imagist found it possible to go on writing imagist poetry? A number of poets have stopped writing entirely; others, like recurring decimals, repeat the novelties they commeced with, each time less valuably than before. And there are surrealist poetry, and political poetry, and all the othe refuges of the indigent. ~ Randall Jarrell

Romanticism requires bravery and risk. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

It was not so much rebellion that fueled the German youth movement (as it did in the American youth movement of the 1960s); rather, it was romanticism. ~ Andrew Root

Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman ~ Oscar Wilde

Incidentally, one has to be very careful with that 'Bridegroom' imagery. It is so very apt to land one in Male and Female Principles, Eleusis, and the womb of the Great Mother. And that sort of thing doesn't make much appeal to well-balanced women, who look on it as just another example of men's hopeless romanticism about sex, and who are apt either to burst out laughing or sniff a faint smell of drains. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I don't have any romanticism about any part of my past. I think of it only inasmuch as it gave me pleasure or helped me grow psychologically. That is the only thing that interests me about yesterday. I don't believe in yesterday, by the way. You know I don't believe in yesterday. I am only interested in what I am doing now. ~ John Lennon

Peellaert's comic strips were the literature of intelligence, imagination and romanticism. ~ Federico Fellini

Through style, the creative effort reconstructs the world, and always with the same slight
distortion that is the mark of both art and protest. Whether it is the enlargement of the microscope which
Proust brings to bear on human experience or, on the contrary, the absurd insignificance with which the
American novel endows its characters, reality is in some way artificial. The creative force, the fecundity
of rebellion, are contained in this distortion which the style and tone of a work represent. Art is an
impossible demand given expression and form. When the most agonizing protest finds its most resolute
form of expression, rebellion satisfies its real aspirations and derives creative energy from this fidelity to
itself. Despite the fact that this runs counter to the prejudices of the times, the greatest style in art is the
expression of the most passionate rebellion. Just as genuine classicism is only romanticism subdued,
genius is a rebellion that has created its own limits. That is why there is no genius, contrary to what we
are taught today, in negation and pure despair. ~ Albert Camus

Men, I still think, ought to be weighed, not counted. Their worth ought to be the final estimate of their value. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Thus spoke the Beauty and her voice had a cheerful ring, and her face was aflame with a great rejoicing. She finished her story and began to laugh quietly, but not cheerfully. The Youth bowed down before her and silently kissed her hands, inhaling the languid fragrance of myrrh, aloe and musk which wafted from her body and her fine robes. The Beauty began to speak again.

'There came to me streams of oppressors, because my evil, poisonous beauty bewitches them. I smile at them, they who are doomed to death, and I feel pity for each of them, and some I almost loved, but I gave myself to no one. Each one I gave but one single kiss - and my kisses were innocent as the kisses of a tender sister. And whomsoever I kissed, died.'

The soul of the troubled Youth was caught in agony, between two quite irresolvable passions, the terror of death and an inexpressible ecstasy. But love, conquering all, overcoming even the anguish of death's grief, was triumphant once again today. Solemnly stretching out his trembling hands to the tender and terrifying Beauty, the Youth exclaimed, 'If death is in your kiss, o beloved, let me revel in the infinity of death. Cling to me, kiss me, love me, envelop me with the sweet fragrance of your poisonous breath, death after death pour into my body and into my soul before you destroy everything that once was me!'

'You want to! You are not afraid!' exclaimed the Beauty.

The face of the Beauty was pale in the rays ~ Valery Bryusov

We stepped to the window. Off to one side there was thunder, and the splendid rain was trickling down upon the land; the most refreshing fragrance rose up to us from the rich abundance of the warm atmosphere. She stood leaning on her elbows, with her gaze searching the countryside; she looked up to heaven and at me; I saw her eyes fill with tears, and she laid her hand on mine, saying, "Klopstock!" I recalled at once the glorious ode she had in mind, and became immersed in the stream of emotions which she had poured over me by uttering this symbolic name. I could not bear it, I bent down over hand and kissed it amid tears of the utmost rapture. And looked into her eyes again - noble poet! Would that you had seen your apotheosis in that gaze, and would that your name, so often profaned, would never reach my ears from any other lips. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Ever since Romanticism, an oppositional mode, artists have the right, and indeed the duty, to attack social convention. But it is ridiculous and in fact self-infantilizing for them to expect to be financially supported by the general public whom they are insulting. ~ Camille Paglia

From all that urges and admonishes, the romantic turns away. He wants to dream, enjoy, immerse himself, instead of clearing his way by striving and wrestling. That which has been and rises out of what is past occupies him far more than what is to become and also more than what wants to become; for the word of the future would always be command. Experiences with their many echoes and their billows stand higher in his estimation than life with its tasks; for tasks always establish a bond with harsh reality. And from this he is in flight. He does not want to struggles against fate, but rather to receive it with an ardent and devout soul; he does not want to wrestle for the blessing, but to experience it, abandoning himself, devoid of will, to what spells salvation and bliss. ~ Leo Baeck

I damned myself for my earlier romanticism. That Croaker who had come north, so thoroughly bemused by the mysterious Lady, was another man. A stripling, filled with the foolish ignorances of youth. Yeah. Sometimes you lie to yourself just to keep going. ~ Glen Cook

Early laurels weigh like lead and of many of the boys whom I knew at Eton, I can say that their lives are over ... Once again romanticism with its death wish is to blame, for it lays an emphasis on childhood, on a fall from grace which is not compensated for by any doctrine of future redemption. ~ Cyril Connolly

The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b. who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list. ~ John Derbyshire

I felt as though the
past and the future, cause and effect, patterns and connections, were a huge complicated artifice, and it was only by my efforts that they kept going.
If I gave up it would all dissolve into the raw chaos of the senses. That's all we really have. The rest is romanticism and storytelling. But we need
those stories. I guess I do. ~ Ann Brashares

Romanticism implies nostalgia for damaged goods. ~ Brad Mehldau

Romanticism is a grace, celestial or infernal, that bestows us eternal stigmata. ~ Charles Baudelaire

At last, in the gray dawn of Civilization the fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, half-successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism in the womb of the mother in the grave. ~ Oswald Spengler

A better-constituted boy would certainly have profited under my intelligent tutors, with their scientific apparatus; and would, doubtless, have found the phenomena of electricity and magnetism as fascinating as I was, every Thursday, assured they were. As it was, I could have paired off, for ignorance of whatever was taught me, with the worst Latin scholar that was ever turned out of a classical academy. I read Plutarch, and Shakespeare, and Don Quixote by the sly, and supplied myself in that way with wandering thoughts, while my tutor was assuring me that "an improved man, as distinguished from an ignorant one, was a man who knew the reason why water ran downhill." I had no desire to be this improved man; I was glad of the running water; I could watch it and listen to it gurgling among the pebbles and bathing the bright green water-plants, by the hour together. I did not want to know why it ran; I had perfect confidence that there were good reasons for what was so very beautiful. ("The Lifted Veil") ~ George Eliot

Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss! ~ Oliver Goldsmith

Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. ~ Mark Twain

You see for me, America is an idea. It is a stage for transformation. I felt when I came to Iowa City from Calcutta that suddenly I could be a new person ... What America offers me is romanticism and hope ... Suddenly, I found myself in a country where ~ Bharati Mukherjee

Whereas discipline without discipleship leads to rigid formalism, discipleship without discipline ends in sentimental romanticism. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

What I'm sure of," he began, "is that you can't be happy without money. That's all. I don't like superficiality and I don't like romanticism. I like to be conscious. And what I've noticed is that there's a kind of spiritual snobbism in certain 'superior beings' who think that money isn't necessary for happiness. Which is stupid, which is false, and to a certain degree cowardly. You see, Mersault, for a man who is well born, being happy is never complicated. It's enough to take up the general fate, only not with the will for renunciation like so many fake great men, but with the will for happiness. Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience. And in almost every case, we use up our lives making money, when we should be using our money to gain time. That's the only problem that's ever interested me. Very specific. Very clear."
(...)
"Oh, I know perfectly well that most rich men have no sense of happiness. But that's not the question. To have money is to have time. That's my main point. Time can be bought. Everything can be bought. To be or to become rich is to have time to be happy, if you deserve it. ~ Albert Camus

I tried not to stare at his body because I already knew it was good. Instead I focused on his eyes. ~ Robert J. Crane

If you are my flower and I your water,
you'll be with me always watered ~ Miguel El Portugues

Modern poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become. It is the end product of romanticism, all past and no future; it is impossible to go further by any extrapolation of the process by which we have arrived, and certainly it is impossible to remain where we are who could endure a century of transition ? ~ Randall Jarrell

We know from accounts of Rilke's life that his stay in Rodin's workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. The poet's view of the mutilated body thus has nothing to do with the previous century's Romanticism of fragments and ruins; it is part of the breakthrough in modern art to the concept of the object that states itself with authority and the body that publicizes itself with authorization. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

We're brought up with a kind of romanticism that's so false it leads us astray. Falling in love and marriage is forever. The movies, then TV told us that, even - especially - the commercials. ~ Eric Van Lustbader

It is not self-forgetting and pain-loving antiquarianism nor self-forgetting and intoxicating romanticism which induces us to turn with passionate interest, with unqualified willingness to learn, toward the political thought of classical antiquity. We are impelled to do so by the crisis of our time, the crisis of the West. ~ Leo Strauss

The Open Road goes to the used-car lot. ~ Louis Simpson

Two people can remain "in love"
a phrase made practically useless by stinking romanticism
only if their common desire for each other unites in a greater desire for God. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities, and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order, then these possibilities will have a chance, and you will get Progress. ~ T. E. Hulme

Our epoch will be marked by the romanticism of the stateless. Already apparent is the image of a universe in which no one will have droit de cité.
Inside every citizen nowadays lies a future alien. ~ Emil M. Cioran

The nineteenth century was the Age of Romanticism; for the first time in history, man stopped thinking of himself as an animal or a slave, and saw himself as a potential god. All of the cries of revolt against 'God' - De Sade, Byron's "Manfred", Schiller's "Robbers", Goethe's "Faust", Hoffmann's mad geniuses - are expressions of this new spirit. Is this why the 'spirits' decided to make a planned and consistent effort at 'communication'? It was the right moment. Man was beginning to understand himself. ~ Colin Wilson

The temptation is to stay inside; to subside into the kind of recluse whom neighborhood children regard with derision and little awe; to let the hedges and weeds grow up, to allow the doors to rust shut, to lie on my bed in some gown-shaped garment and let my hair lengthens and spread out over the pillow and my fingernails to sprout into claws, while candle wax drips onto the carpet. But long ago I made a choice between classicism and romanticism. I prefer to be upright and contained - an urn in daylight. ~ Margaret Atwood

Educational romanticism asks too much from students at the bottom of the intellectual pile, asks the wrong things from those in the middle, and asks too little from those at the top. ~ Charles A. Murray

The sound of the wind stretches its limbs.
The jazz music witholds some of its ruckus.
Hands move something in the dark.
I say: just an old romanticism...
No matter, the place will fit everything.

Vision descends upon flaccid pathways
and rides them on cheap metal.
Dried out trees and others take their water
from the drowned sand by force.
I say: a passing depression.
No matter, the place will fit everything.
During the day the sun approaches the mountain,
places its hand upon it,
its cold hand of lovers,
strikes stone with stone.
Mountain scrub dances behind the stone.
The sun does not see it.
Only the moon shines upon it all the way beyond the bend
and the guardian stones watch from afar.
I say: a passing coincidence.
No matter, the place will fit everything. ~ Ashur Etwebi

For there was soft remembrance, and sweet trust
In one fond breast, to which his own would melt,
And in its tenderer hour on that his bosom dwelt. ~ Lord Byron

Think of my Pleasure in Solitude, in comparison of my commerce with the world - there I am a child - there they do not know me not even my most intimate acquaintance - I give into their feelings as though I were refraining from irritating a little child - Some think me middling, others silly, other foolish - every one thinks he sees my weak side against my will; when in thruth it is with my will - I am content to be thought all this because I have in my own breast so graet a resource. This is one great reason why they like me so; because they can all show to advantage in a room, and eclipese from a certain tact one who is reckoned to be a good Poet - I hope I am not here playing tricks 'to make the angels weep': I think not: for I have not the least contempt for my species; and though it may sound paradoxical: my greatest elevations of Soul leave me every time more humbled - Enough of this - though in your Love for me you will not think it enough. ~ John Keats

Dr Allendy said that it was necessary to become equal to life, that the romantic was defeated by life, really died of it, whether by tuberculosis in the old days, or by neurosis today. I had never thought before of the connection between neurosis and romanticism. Wanting the impossible? Dying when unable to reach it? Not wanting to compromise? ~ Anais Nin

Bartending took the romanticism out of drinking. ~ Ronda Rousey

Now the basic impulse behind existentialism is optimistic, very much like the impulse behind all science. Existentialism is romanticism, and romanticism is the feeling that man is not the mere he has always taken himself for. Romanticism began as a tremendous surge of optimism about the stature of man. its aim like that of science was to raise man above the muddled feelings and impulses of his everyday humanity, and to make him a god-like observer of human existence. ~ Colin Wilson

I have seen romanticism outlast the realistic. I have seen men forget the beautiful women they have possessed, forget the prostitutes, and remember the first woman they idolized, the woman they could never have. The woman who aroused them romantically holds them. ~ Anais Nin

The remoter poetry in particular was replete with effects, an effect being something hypnotic we cannot quite understand, whiteness of moon and wave related to the setting of Time in a manner "too subtle for the intellect." And all over Europe, by the late 19th century, poets had decided that effects were intrinsic to poetry, and were aiming at them by deliberate process. By the end of the century, in France, whole poems have been made "too subtle for the intellect," held together, as effects are, by the extra-semantic affinities of their words. Picking up a name that was once thrown around as their authors, we have learned to call them "Symbolist" poems. In the Symbolist poem the Romantic effect has become a structural principle, and we may say that Symbolism is scientific Romanticism, thus an effort to anticipate the work of time by aiming directly at the kind of existence a poem may have when a thousand years have deprived it of its dandelions and its mythologies, an existence purely linguistic, determined by the molecular bonds of half-understood words. ~ Hugh Kenner

She seemed like the kind of woman who would fall in love with the sky. ~ Nenia Campbell

I'm infected with the romantic fever. It began in my teens when I read Baudelaire in secret. ~ Renee Vivien

insomnia has this romantic way of making the moon feel like perfect company. ~ Sabrina Benaim

Liberals and leftists are not wrong in describing romanticism as reactionary, because it did indeed become that after 1810. The problem is that they make that description true of the movement as a whole, as if romanticism were essentially reactionary. ~ Frederick C. Beiser

For me, Romanticism is the most recent and the most current expression of beauty. ~ Charles Baudelaire

I felt I could turn the earth upside down with my littlest finger. I wanted to dance, to fly in the air and kiss the sun and stars with my singing heart. I, alone with myself, was enjoying myself for the first time as with grandest company. ~ Anzia Yezierska

I knew I might die, but I was prepared to risk that; it was almost romantic. Somehow it never occurred to me it might entail privation and suffering. ~ Iain M. Banks

She was a wonder junkie. In her mind, she was a hill tribesman standing slack-jawed before the real Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon; Dorothy catching her first glimpse of the vaulted spires of the Emerald City of Oz; a small boy from darkest Brooklyn plunked down in the Corridor of Nations of the 1939 World's Fair, the Trylon and Perisphere beckoning in the distance; she was Pocahontas sailing up the Thames estuary with London spread out before her from horizon to horizon. been voyaging between the stars when the ancestors of humans were still brachiating from branch to branch in the dappled sunlight of the forest canopy. Drumlin, like many others she had known over the years, had called her an incurable romantic; and she found herself wondering again why so many people thought it some embarrassing disability. Her romanticism had been a driving force in her life and a fount of delights. Advocate and practitioner of romance, she was off to see the Wizard. ~ Carl Sagan

I find the Romantic period extraordinarily interesting. My landscapes have connections with Romanticism: at times I feel a real desire for, an attraction to, this period, and some of my pictures are a homage to Caspar David Friedrich. ~ Gerhard Richter

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. ~ Oscar Wilde

Utilitarianism had found [in Samuel Smiles' Self-Help] its portrait gallery of heroes, inscribed with a vigorous exhortation to all men to strive in their image; this philistine romanticism established the bourgeois hero-prototype the penniless office-boy who works his way to economic fortune and this wins his way into the mercantile plutocracy. ~ John Carroll

I wandered lonely as a cloud ~ William Wordsworth

On the whole, although Zuleika is shallow and vain, we don't blame her for her disastrous effect on Oxford because we perceive that the love she inspires is essentially narcissistic and has deep roots in the institution she has overwhelmed. It is a love of the unobtainable ideal - the paradox of self-fulfillment in self-destruction - which originates with Romanticism, with Byron and Shelley, and finds its apotheosis in the decadent pose of Wilde: his open self-love, yet self-destructive wantonness and preoccupation with death. ~ Sara Lodge

The Beauty drew near and the Youth heard her softly ringing, clear voice, every sound of which rent his heart with a sweet pain, "Dear Youth, do you know the price of my love?"
"Let it be the price of life!" exclaimed the Youth, "Let it lead even to the dark gates of death."
("The Poison Garden") ~ Valery Bryusov

It is the right of art to consider an impression valid simply as an impression and to accept it as something entire and complete without critical scrutiny. Art is, as Schopenhauer puts it, "everywhere at its goal." But for life, and hence surely also for religion, there is a danger, the romantic danger, in making the impression of an experience all-important. For then the sense for the content and commandment of life must all too soon evaporate together with any sense for reality with its definite tasks; and the place of all aspiration and expectation will be taken over by the sole dominion of the mood of faith which simply feels itself, and then finds it easy to deem itself, complete. This is faith for faith's sake. ~ Leo Baeck

I feel liquefied, like a cucumber forgotten in the crisper drawer, and I want to hold myself at arm's length and carry me to the trash. Who is this sack of slush masquerading as me? It's intolerable. ~ Laini Taylor

There is a subtle danger that leads people away from religion, prevents them from submitting to God as their Lord, and ultimately, brings numerous other forms of trouble and distress upon them. This danger is ROMANTICISM, which leads people to live, not according to their reason, but according to their emotions; that is, according to their desires, hatreds, their susceptibility to temptations and their whims. ~ Harun Yahya

Fall in love
with the energy
of the mornings

trace your fingers
along the lull
of the afternoons

take the spirit
of the evenings
in your arms
kiss it deeply

and then
make love
to the tranquility
of the nights. ~ Sanober Khan

The true danger of romanticism is that the principles through which it rules itself are of such nature that everybody can invoke them to grant themselves the category of artist. Taking the anxiety of an unreachable happiness, the angst of unrealized dreams, the indifference towards action and life, as the defining criteria of genius or talent, immediately facilitates everyone who feels or has felt that same anxiety, suffers that same angst and is prey of that particular indifference, to feel themselves convinced that they themselves are an interesting individuality, and that Destiny, granting them that longing, suffering and dreams, implicitly bestowed on them intellectual greatness. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Romanticism demands mastery of the primary element of fiction: the art of storytelling - which requires three cardinal qualities: ingenuity, imagination, a sense of drama. ~ Ayn Rand

She was around two. She and Laura went down in a shipwreck. I heard Henry didn't eat or sleep for days. He searched for them for weeks, but there was never any sign of them. There were no survivors." "How sad," she whispered. He touched her chin and turned her liquid eyes toward him. "Don't cry. It happened a long time ago. I'm sure Henry is over it all by now." "Love like that never dies." He smiled. "Such romanticism. No wonder you read poetry." "Does he ever talk about them?" He released her chin and shook his head. "Clara would be in tears if he did. The servants tell how he raved like a madman when he heard the news. Molly said she'd never heard a grown man cry like that. ~ Colleen Coble

If modern design moved the stage picture away from the specific, tangible, illusionistic world of Romanticism and Realism into a generalized, theatrical, and poetic realm in which the pictorial image functioned as an extension of the playwright's themes and structures (a metanarrative), then postmodern design is a dissonant reminder that no single point of view can predominate, even within a single image. ~ Arnold Aronson

I do whatever comes my way. But I get burned out on stage. It's a lonely world. I think part of the romanticism about being on the road is you get to meet a lot of - my mom once told me, "You've probably got a woman at every port." Like I'm a pirate. Obviously she doesn't know her son that well. ~ Zach Galifianakis

His feeling for the South was not so much historic as it was
of the core and desire of dark romanticism--that unlimited and
inexplicable drunkenness, the magnetism of some men's blood that
takes them into the heart of the heat, and beyond that, into the
polar and emerald cold of the South as swiftly as it took the heart
of that incomparable romanticist who wrote The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, beyond which there is nothing. And this desire of his was
unquestionably enhanced by all he had read and visioned, by the
romantic halo that his school history cast over the section, by the
whole fantastic distortion of that period where people were said to
live in "mansions," and slavery was a benevolent institution,
conducted to a constant banjo-strumming, the strewn largesses of
the colonel and the shuffle-dance of his happy dependents, where
all women were pure, gentle, and beautiful, all men chivalrous and
brave, and the Rebel horde a company of swagger, death-mocking
cavaliers. Years later, when he could no longer think of the
barren spiritual wilderness, the hostile and murderous intrenchment
against all new life--when their cheap mythology, their legend of
the charm of their manner, the aristocratic culture of their lives,
the quaint sweetness of their drawl, made him writhe--when he could
think of no return to their life and its swarming superstition
without weariness and h ~ Thomas Wolfe

I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness for me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a parent's duties. But he was already past the middle of life, and I was not his only son. My mother had been his second wife, and he was five-and-forty when he married her. He was a firm, unbending, intensely orderly man, in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft of the active landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those people who are always like themselves from day to day, who are uninfluenced by the weather, and neither know melancholy nor high spirits. I held him in great awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive in his presence than at other times; a circumstance which, perhaps, helped to confirm him in the intention to educate me on a different plan from the prescriptive one with which he had complied in the case of my elder brother, already a tall youth at Eton. My brother was to be his representative and successor; he must go to Eton and Oxford, for the sake of making connexions, of course: my father was not a man to underrate the bearing of Latin satirists or Greek dramatists on the attainment of an aristocratic position. But intrinsically, he had slight esteem for "those dead but sceptred spirits"; having qualified himself for forming an independent opinion by reading Potter's Aeschylus, and dipping into Francis's Horace. To this negative view he added a positive one, derived from a recent connexion with mi ~ George Eliot

We see single symptoms, hear one heartbeat of the century, and want to conclude from this that it is diseased. ~ Karoline Von Günderrode

Could it be that sexual perversion and romanticism sprang from the same longing for distant horizons? ~ Colin Wilson

She who makes her husband and her children happy, who reclaims the one from vice, and trains up the other to virtue, is a much greater character than the ladies described in romance, whose whole occupation is to murder mankind with shafts from their quiver or their eyes. ~ Oliver Goldsmith

A little while ago I was able to wander in a beautiful sublime fantasy world, in Ossian's half-dark magical world. But the blessed dreams dissolve; they seem like love potions - they intoxicate, exalt and then disappear, that is the misery and wretchedness of all our feelings. With thoughts it is no better: one easily overthinks things to the point of staleness. ~ Karoline Von Günderrode

The 19thc hatred of Realism is Caliban's enraged reaction to seeing his own face in the mirror. The 19thc rejection of Romanticism is Caliban's fury at not seeing his face reflected in the mirror. ~ Oscar Wilde

Like the roots stay forever with trees, help them grow and make them strong, will you stay with me just a bit long(er)? ~ Sijdah Hussain

Writing this, I'm reminded that until I was quite old I too adhered to the romantic cult of madness. I got over it, thank God. Experience has taught me that this particular form of romanticism is pure stupidity, and that madness is the saddest, most dismal thing on earth. ~ Emmanuel Carrere

The very concept of trying to 'teach' a lover things feels patronising, incongruous and plain sinister. If we truly loved someone, there could be no talk of wanting him or her to change. Romanticism is clear on this score: true love should involve an acceptance of a partner's whole being. It is this fundamental commitment to benevolence that makes the early months of love so moving. Within the new relationship, our vulnerabilities are treated with generosity. Our shyness, awkwardness and confusion endear (as they did when we were children) rather than generate sarcasm or complain; the trickier sides of us are interpreted solely through the filter of compassion.
From these moments, a beautiful yet challenging, and even reckless, conviction develops: that to be properly loved must always mean being endorsed for all that one is. ~ Alain De Botton

What the world stigmatises as romantic, is often more nearly allied to the truth than is commonly supposed; for, if the generous ideas of youth are too often over-clouded by the sordid views of after-life, that scarcely proves them to be false. ~ Anne Bronte

The drawing Anna was thinking of wasn't particularly wicked, not so far as drawings in Anover House went. It was a colored sketch of a young man and woman embracing in a sun-dappled garden.

Her embarrassment was not in the nudity portrayed ... well, not all the embarrassment ... it was in the sentiment. The couple were entwined in each other's arms, lost in each other's gaze, seemingly oblivious to the world around them.

For Anna, the picture was a sweet bit of ink and imagination that epitomized every silly romantic notion she'd ever had about falling in love. And it was that silly romanticism that embarrassed her. It was always a little uncomfortable to admit wanting something you knew you couldn't have. ~ Alissa Johnson

The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods - romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

I'm sick of my own romanticism! ~ Anais Nin

Aestheticism and radicalism must lead us to jettison reason, and to replace it by a desperate hope for political miracles. This irrational attitude which springs from intoxication with dreams of a beautiful world is what I call Romanticism. It may seek its heavenly city in the past or in the future; it may preach 'back to nature' or 'forward to a world of love and beauty'; but its appeal is always to our emotions rather than to reason. Even with the best intentions of making heaven on earth it only succeeds in making it a hell – that hell which man alone prepares for his fellow-men. ~ Karl Popper

For the first time she knew and loved the Spirit of good and beauty, an affinity to which affords the greatest bliss that our nature can receive. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley