Paul Claudel

About Paul Claudel

“Il n'y a pour les choses et pour les poèmes qu'une seule manière d'être nouveaux, c'est d'être vrais et qu'une seule manière d'être jeunes, c'est d'être éternels.”
— For things and for poems, there is but one way of being new, and that is to be true; there is only one way of being young, and that is to be eternal.
“Si l'ordre est le plaisir de la raison, le désordre est le délice de l'imagination.”
— Order is the pleasure of the reason; but disorder is the delight of the imagination.
“In the little moment that remains to us between the crisis and the catastrophe, we may as well drink a glass of champagne.”
— Quoted by Claud Cockburn, In Time of Trouble (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1956) p. 264.
“Art imitates nature not in its effects as such, but in its causes, in its ‘manner,’ in its process, which are nothing but a participation in and a derivation of actual objects, of the Art of God himself.”
— as quoted in "The man who got it right," The New York Review of Books, Volume 60, Number 13, August 15, 2013, p. 72

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.