literature Quotes

"Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss."

When writing the plot and choosing the right words, the poet should imagine the scene as clearly as possible. By seeing everything vividly, as if watching it happen, they will find what fits and are less likely to miss inconsistencies.

Accordingly, the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities. The tragic plot must not be composed of irrational parts.

Sophocles said he drew men as they ought to be, and Euripides as they were.

While fiction is often impossible, it should not be implausible.

A tragedy is that moment where the hero comes face to face with his true identity.

Homer is the main one who taught other poets how to tell lies skillfully.

If you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point and diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these... ...

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

For even they who compose treatises of medicine or natural philosophy in verse are denominated Poets: yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common except their metre; the former, therefore, justly merits the name of the Poet; while the other... ...

By myth I mean the arrangement of the incidents

Comedy has had no history, because it was not at first treated seriously.