L'art n'est pas une étude de la réalité positive; c'est une recherche de la vérité idéale.
La Mare au Diable, ch. 1 (1851); Frank Hunter Potter (trans.) The Haunted Pool (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1895) p. 15
L'art n'est pas une étude de la réalité positive; c'est une recherche de la vérité idéale.
“Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.”
La politique, quand elle est un art et un service, non point une exploitation, c'est une action pour un idéal à travers des réalités.
Press conference, June 30 1955
Fifth Republic and other post-WW2
Source: "Le Général de Gaulle et la construction de l'Europe" https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wg4ZAQAAIAAJ (1967), pg 33. note: 1950s
About Beauty
(1857/58)
Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 113
Context: Art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. Realism is striving for truth, and truth is always beautiful. Here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.
R.U.R. supplement in The Saturday Review (1923)
Context: Be these people either Conservatives or Socialists, Yellows or Reds, the most important thing is — and that is the point I want to stress — that all of them are right in the plain and moral sense of the word... I ask whether it is not possible to see in the present social conflict of the world an analogous struggle between two, three, five equally serious verities and equally generous idealisms? I think it is possible, and that is the most dramatic element in modern civilization, that a human truth is opposed to another human truth no less human, ideal against ideal, positive worth against worth no less positive, instead of the struggle being as we are so often told, one between noble truth and vile selfish error.
Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Art-Principle as Represented in Poetry, p.183
Discourse no. 12; vol. 2, p. 104.
Discourses on Art
L'art pour l'art est un vain mot. L'art pour le vrai, l'art pour le beau et le bon, voilà la religion que je cherche....
Letter to Alexandre Saint-Jean, (19 April 1872), published in Calmann Lévy (ed.) Correspondance (1812-1876). Eng. Transl by Raphaël Ledos de Beaufort in Letters of George Sand Vol. III, p. 242
