The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.
Interpretation
Loss can highlight beauty just as much as gaining something new.
This quote by Marcel Proust suggests that experiencing loss, such as the loss of a sense, can enhance our appreciation of beauty in the world. It implies that the absence of something can lead to a deeper understanding and recognition of value, illustrating the complexity of human perception and experience. In essence, it reflects the idea that beauty is often revealed more profoundly in the juxtaposition of presence and absence.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a discussion about overcoming challenges in an art class.
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
At that time, he was satisfying a sensual curiosity by experiencing the pleasures of people who live for love. He had believed he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows; how small a thing her charm was for him now compared with the astounding terror that extended out from it like a murky halo, the immense anguish of not knowing at every moment what she had been doing, of not possessing her everywhere and always!
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.
A person does not...stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface...but is a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating...a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.
We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
Self-examination - when the whole world around you is pressuring that and challenging you - is very, very hard. Looking at a whole structure - in my case, let us say of snobbery, basking in certain privileges, marks of what appear to be superiority - that's ugly to look at.
Rich Mullins was the uneasy conscience of Christian music. He didn't live like a star. He'd taken a vow of poverty so that what he earned could be used to help others.
I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.
We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.
If slaughterhouses had glass walls the whole world would be vegetarian.
There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.