Reflexive Irony

     When the soul drifts uncertain between life and dream, between the mind's disorder and the return to cool reflection, it is in religious thought that we should seek consolation; such I have never found in a philosophy which only gives us egotistical maxims or, at most, those twin tenets, empty experience and bitter doubt; it struggles against moral anguish by annihilating sensibility; like surgery, it can only cut out the suffering organ. But for us, born in the day of revolution and storms, when every belief was broken, brought up at best in a vague tradition satisfied by a few external observances, the indifferent adhesion to which is perhaps worse than impiety and heresy — for us it is very difficult, when we feel the need of it, to ressurect that mystic ediface already built in their ready hearts by the innocent and the simple. "The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life!" And yet, can we cast out of our spirits all the good or evil poured into them by so many learned generations? Ignorance cannot be learned.
     I hope better of the goodness of God. Perhaps we are approaching the predicted time when science, having completed its cycle of analysis and synthesis, of belief and negation, will be able to purify itself and raise up the marvellous city of the future out of the confused ruins ... we must not hold human reason so cheap as to believe it gains by complete self-humiliation, for that would be to impeach its divine origin ... God will no doubt appreciate purity of intention; and what father would like to see his son give up all reason and pride in front of him? The apostle who had to touch to believe was not cursed for his doubt!
— Gérard de Nerval, Aurélia - Life and the Dream, Part II, I, in Selected Writings - Gérard de Nerval, Geoffrey Wagner (tr.), pp. 147-148.

Those novelists deceive us who show the individual's development without taking into account the pressure of surroundings. The forest fashions the tree. To each one how small a place is given! How many buds are atrophied! One shoots one's branches where one can. The mystic bough is due more often than not to stifling. The only escape is upwards....
— André Gide, The Counterfeiters (1919-1925), "Edouard's Journal: Pauline," p. 275.

    The originality which we ask from the artist is originality of treatment, not of subject. It is only the unimaginative who ever invent. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything.
— Oscar Wilde, as a reviewer, in Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde, Alvin  Redman (ed.), p. 59.

     Philosophy may teach us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of our neighbours, and science resolve the moral sense into a secretion of sugar, but art is what makes the life of each citizen a sacrament.
— Oscar Wilde, A Lecture in America, in Ibid., p. 61.

     The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.
— Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, in Ibid., p. 62.