Hugo Von Hofmannsthal, as quoted in: Egon Schwarz, “Hugo Von Hofmannsthal as a Critic,” Arthur R. Evans (ed.), On Four Modern Humanists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 3:
Every . . . perfect thing we find lying in our path is a fragment that has strayed from a strange harmonious world, like meteorites which have somehow fallen down upon the paths of our earth. The task is now to call forth from the lost fragment, through a great exertion of the imagination, a momentary vision of that strange world. Whoever can accomplish this and is capable of such an exertion and concentration of the reproductive imagination will be a great critic. He will also be very just and very conciliatory because he will measure every work of art by an ideal, but a subjective ideal gained from the artist’s personality, and he will sense the beauty of all that has been conceived and born in truth.
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