“It is not only pleasurable things that we imagine in our day-dreams; there are lights in which we are willing to contemplate even the idea of our own death; ways in which it seems as if it would amuse us to be cheated, wounded or calumniated.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, A Gossip on Romance (in Memories and Portraits) (1882)
“The threads of a story come from time to time together and make a picture in the web; the characters fall from time to time into some attitude to each other or to nature, which stamps the story home like an illustration.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, A Gossip on Romance (in Memories and Portraits) (1882)
“Let us look for the day, be it a puritan triumph or not, when the sons and the daughters of the slums shall prophesy, the young men shall see visions, the old men dream dreams.”
— Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1922)
“In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, A Gossip on Romance (in Memories and Portraits) (1882)
“The photoplay can speak the language of the man who has a mind World's Fair size.”
— Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1922)
“But if every mechanical inventor on earth voiced his dearest wish and lived to see it worked out, the real drama of prophecy and fulfilment, as written in the imagination of the human race, would remain uncompleted.”
— Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1922)
“The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, A Gossip on Romance (in Memories and Portraits) (1882)
“Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life; and when the game so chimes with his fancy that he can join in it with all his heart, when it pleases him with every turn, when he loves to recall it and dwells upon its recollection with entire delight, fiction is called romance.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, A Gossip on Romance (in Memories and Portraits) (1882)
“Fairy-tales are inherent in the genius of the motion picture and are a thousand times hinted at in the commercial films, though the commercial films are not willing to stop to tell them.”
— Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1922)
“But perhaps the most adequate way of showing the meaning of this outline is to say that the Action Film is sculpture-in-motion, the Intimate Photoplay is painting-in-motion, and the Fairy Pageant, along with the rest of the Splendor Pictures, may be described as architecture-in-motion.”
— Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1922)
“The theater has both depth and motion, without any subjective help; the screen has them and yet lacks them. We see things distant and moving, but we furnish to them more than we receive; we create the depth and the continuity through our mental mechanism.”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“Realistic and idealistic, practical and romantic, historical and modern topics are fit material for the art of the photoplay. Its world is as unlimited as that of literature, and the same is true of the style of treatment.”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
Every quote in this collection was verified
against its original public-domain source — the letter, journal, poem or treatise it
truly comes from. No internet folklore, no misattributions.
Start free to bring these voices into your daily practice.