Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.
Lawrence DurrellRead
For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Art allows artists to reconcile their challenges and emotions through creative expression, embracing life's experiences.
Lawrence Durrell emphasizes that artists have a unique opportunity to transform their struggles and defeats from daily life into artistic expression. Rather than avoiding or escaping their destiny, artists channel their experiences through imagination to realize its true potential, creating a deeper understanding and appreciation of life through their work.
Themes
ArtImaginationCreativityExpressionDestiny
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of creativity in education, this quote can inspire students to embrace their experiences.
More from Lawrence Durrell
All quotes →I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.
Lawrence DurrellRead
Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.
Lawrence DurrellRead
The whole Mediterranean, the sculpture, the palm, the gold beads, the bearded heroes, the wine, the ideas, the ships, the moonlight, the winged gorgons, the bronze men, the philosophers - all of it seems to rise in the sour, pungent taste of these black olives between the teeth. A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.
Lawrence DurrellRead
The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you.
Lawrence DurrellRead
Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
Lawrence DurrellRead
Similar quotes
We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not posses.
Ralph Waldo EmersonRead
Chaplin and Keaton are still the best. They know that there is nothing more serious than laughter, an art demanding infinite work, and that as long as the world revolves, making others laugh is the most splendid of activities.
Eduardo GaleanoRead
When I see an Alfa Romeo go by, I tip my hat.
Henry FordRead
We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way (there is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.
C. S. LewisRead
I get to use fiction as a way to work out my thinking and to delight readers in the process. I can't think of any deal that's better for me, and I'm always so grateful that readers have indulged me as I argue with myself in my stories.
Ken LiuRead
It's an artist's duty to reflect the times in which we live.
Nina SimoneRead