QUOTES BY AMC | AM.CASSANDRE

FAVORITE QUOTES OF THE ARTIST A.M.CASSANDRE

Juvenal

Latin satirical poet (55–140 AD), before taking his own life.

"There is no worse crime than to prefer life to the reasons for living."

Jules Renard

"It’s a matter of property: One must change one’s mind like changing shirts."

Vauvenargues

"If someone thinks I contradict myself, I reply: because I was wrong once, or several times, I do not claim to always be right."

Jules Renard

"A great poet only needs to use established forms. Let the little poets worry about reckless generosity!"

Rivarol

"Indulgence for those we know is much rarer than pity for those we don’t know."

A.M.Cassandre

"Resignation is nine times out of ten a disguised cowardice: a reprieve we ask of death."

A.M.Cassandre

"When a man takes pride in the group to which he belongs—clan, party, province, or nation—it’s a bad sign. Generally, it means that he cannot rely on his personal virtues."

Derain

"An indispensable return to literal representation, the only one, contrary to what people believe, that can truly liberate the values of the artist and allow him, finally, to invent himself."

A.M.Cassandre

"All my life, I have been pulled by two innate dispositions: a need for formal perfection that demanded an artwork from an artisan conscious of his duties as well as his limits, and a burning thirst for lyricism eager to break free—contradictory impulses that are hard to reconcile in our times."

Vauvenargues

"Whoever condemns activity condemns fertility. To act is nothing other than to produce; each action is a new being that begins and did not exist before. The more we act, the more we produce, the more we live, because the fate of human things is to be maintained only by continuous generation. Picasso's only virtue: all his works are Actions."

Vauvenargues

"It is permissible to regret life when we regret it for itself, and not out of timidity before death."

Vauvenargues

"One no longer makes friends in old age; thus, all losses are irreparable."

A.M.Cassandre

Tribute to Blaise Cendrars, Florence 1961

"For those of us who were his friends, Cendrars was not just the great poet who inspired our youth by revealing the lyricism of a new world opening up to us after the bloody night of 1914-1918. He was much more: a man, one of the very few free and true men we were allowed to meet in the contemporary artistic circles. For him, the most successful work of art was first and foremost life in its entirety: his own. A life without shadows, without complacency, without deceit or cowardice, and dominated by an inexhaustible goodness—a 'dangerous life' in truth, which he lived so generously.
Thus, far from intrigues, cliques, and sects, disdainful of all honor and vanity, scornful of aesthetics as much as exhibitionism so dear to our time, he pursued his path, alone in his little Alfa Romeo, preferring its beauty to that of museums, just as he preferred the conversation of mechanics to that of literary circles. A prince, like any great poet, but a prince of adventure—whether imaginary or truly lived, it didn’t matter, always a man in the present, his work as a writer being for him but a gesture of his life, a gesture among so many others, and counting no more than the others.
Dear Blaise! I know you would not have liked these ceremonies, these official tributes that today seek to honor your memory; it even seems I can hear you bursting into laughter, with your loud, boyish, jokey laugh… May you, at least, in these gestures that slightly soften our sorrow, see nothing but a final farewell from your friends of yesterday, from those to whom you always offered "your friendly hand," and whom you have just left this time to join in one last adventure your other hand, raised to the sky, forty-four years ago."

Vauvenargues

"Nothing long is really pleasant, not even life; yet we love it..."