“For his contemporaries, Racine was a romantic, but for every age he is classical, that is to say, he is faultless.”

13 January 1857 (p. 337)
1831 - 1863, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1847 – 1863)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 14, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "For his contemporaries, Racine was a romantic, but for every age he is classical, that is to say, he is faultless." by Eugène Delacroix?
Eugène Delacroix photo
Eugène Delacroix 50
French painter 1798–1863

Related quotes

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay photo
M. Balamuralikrishna photo

“An enduring legacy of Balamuralikrishna is the wider accessibility of classical kirtanas to the public. Many of his contemporaries tend to treat classical and popular music as watertight compartments.”

M. Balamuralikrishna (1930–2016) Carnatic vocalist, instrumentalist and playback singer

Garimella Subramaniam in: A musical colossus http://hindu.com/2004/07/06/stories/2004070603272000.htm, The Hindu, 6 July 2004.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe photo

“What is Classical is healthy; what is Romantic is sick.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Das Klassische nenne ich das Gesunde und das Romantische das Kranke.
Maxim 1031, trans. Stopp
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

Frank Lloyd Wright photo

“Every great architect is — necessarily — a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.”

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American architect (1867-1959)

The Future of Architecture (1953)

Robert M. Pirsig photo

“Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.”

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 6
Context: The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. "Art" when it is opposed to "Science" is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience. In the northern European cultures the romantic mode is usually associated with femininity, but this is certainly not a necessary association.
The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws—which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior. In the European cultures it is primarily a masculine mode and the fields of science, law and medicine are unattractive to women largely for this reason. Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.

Leon Fleisher photo
Paul A. Samuelson photo
John Gower photo
Sören Kierkegaard photo

“Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Swenson, 1959, p. 21
1840s, Either/Or (1843)

Related topics