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
The only thing we are as actors are messengers. That's all we are. Correct? We are delivering the playwright's intention through the concept of the director. And I come on stage; if I feel confident in the role, then I give it away.
Patti LuponeRead
The reverie we intend to study is poetic reverie. This is a reverie which poetry puts on the right track, the track an expanding consciousness follows. This reverie is written, or, at least, promises to be written. It is already facing the great universe of the blank page. Then images begin to compose and fall into place.
Gaston BachelardRead
The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.
Henry MillerRead
To make films, it always begins with two words: what and how. First of all, you have to find a story, or what are you going to tell? And you have to find a way to tell it visually.
Wong Kar-WaiRead
I love playing with makeup. Makeup has become a thing where it's an art form. It's not a thing where you use it because you need to feel beautiful or because you don't like the way you look.
ZendayaRead
For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
Virginia WoolfRead