Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.
Interpretation
Art expands our perception, allowing us to experience multiple worlds through the creativity of different artists.
Marcel Proust emphasizes the transformative power of art, suggesting that it allows us to transcend our singular experiences and access the diverse realities represented by various artists. Each artist creates a unique world that continues to resonate and illuminate our lives, long after their time has passed, reminding us of the richness and complexity of human creativity.
In practice
During a motivational speech about the power of creativity.
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.
Fiction—and poetry and drama— cleanse the doors of perception.
Because you have things like 'American Idol' and you've got radio stations that play music made entirely by computers, it's easy to forget there are bands with actual people playing actual instruments that rock.
My goal in life is to give to the world what I was lucky to receive: the ecstasy of divine union through my music and my dance.
The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
I tell myself that I created the wardrobe of the contemporary woman, that I participated in the transformation of my times.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.