It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky... a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe.
Victor HugoRead
The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.
Interpretation
The ideal and beautiful are intertwined concepts, where ideals embody ideas and beauty represents their tangible form.
Victor Hugo suggests that the concepts of the ideal and beauty are fundamentally connected; the ideal represents a conceptual notion whereas beauty represents the physical manifestation of that notion. In this view, what we perceive as beauty in art or nature is a direct reflection of the ideas we hold, indicating that true beauty arises from the integrity of its underlying idea.
In practice
In a discussion about the role of art in society, this quote could exemplify the relationship between an artist's concept and their work's aesthetic appeal.
It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky... a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe.
When two mouths, made sacred by love, draw near to each other to create, it is impossible, that above that ineffable kiss there should not be a thrill in the immense mystery of the stars.
At that moment of love, a moment when passion is absolutely silent under omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, pure seraphic Marius, would have been more capable of visiting a woman of the streets than of raising Cosetteβs dress above the ankle. Once on a moonlit night, Cosette stopped to pick up something from the ground, her dress loosened and revealed the swelling of her breasts. Marius averted his eyes.
Thought is the work of the intellect, reverie is its self-indulgence. To substitute day-dreaming for thought is to confuse a poison with a source of nourishment.
Taste is the common sense of genius.
Forget not, never forget that you have promised me to use this silver to become an honest man.... Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!
Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again.
If you already have a piece of music ingrained in your body, why would you not play it?
When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.
The main objective in any song, the songs that I write, has always been that it reflect the way I feel, that it touch me when I'm finished with it, that it moves me, that it can take me along with it and involve me in what its saying.
I can't distract myself enough here, for sketches to a new opera are constantly buzzing around in my head, to the extent that I need all my strength to wrest myself from them.
When I provided the disembodied arm as the logo for 'The Man With the Golden Arm,' it was the first time an advertising-publicity campaign was based on a single symbol. Until then film companies used a variety of symbols and photographs to cover all bets. The concept of using one logo was mine and Otto Preminger's.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.