Benedetto Croce Quotes & Sayings

Art is ruled uniquely by the imagination. — Benedetto Croce

We are products of the past and we live immersed in the past, which encompasses us. How can we move towards the new life, how create new activities without getting out of the past and without placing ourselves above it? And how can we place ourselves above the past if we are in it and it is in us? There is no other way out except through thought, which does not break off relations with the past but rises ideally above it and converts it into knowledge. — Benedetto Croce

The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past ... The writing of history liberates us from history. — Benedetto Croce

Morality, and the ideal of freedom which is the political expression of morality, are not the property of a given party or group, but a value that is fundamentally and universally human ... No people will be truly free till all are free. — Benedetto Croce

This is a mission and a vision to do good as well as doing well. — Benedetto Croce

The translation called good has original value as a work of art. — Benedetto Croce

Art is what everyone knows it is. — Benedetto Croce

All history is contemporary history. — Benedetto Croce

Art is a true aesthetic synthesis , "a priori" of feeling and image in the intuition, as to which it may be repeated that feeling without image is blind, and image without feeling is void. — Benedetto Croce

History is various and sinuous and no essential part of the human spirit is ever wholly absent from it. — Benedetto Croce

We shall not understand the history of men and other times unless we ourselves are alive to the requirements which that history satisfied. — Benedetto Croce

Historical judgement is not a variety of knowledge, it is knowledge itself; it is the form which completely fills and exhausts the field of knowing, leaving no room for anything else. — Benedetto Croce