Would that we could at once paint with the eyes! In the long way from the eye through the arm to the pencil, how much is lost!
Interpretation
The quote expresses a desire for direct expression of visual imagination without the loss in translation to physical mediums.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing reflects on the frustrations of translating visual sensations and emotions into art. He muses that the intricate process of moving an image from perception through the arm to the pencil inherently results in a loss of the original vision, suggesting that a more immediate way to capture these images would enhance artistic expression.
In practice
An artist could quote this during a gallery opening to express the challenges of their creative process.
Why should not every individual man have existed more than once upon this world? Why should I not come back as often as I am capable of acquiring fresh knowledge? Is this hypothesis so laughable merely because it is the oldest? Because the human understanding, before the sophistries of the schools had dissipated and debilitated it, lighted upon it at once?
The search for truth is more precious than its possession.
A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes
Absolute truth belongs to Thee alone.
Pleasures, riches, honor and joy are sure to have care, disgrace, adversity and affliction in their train. There is no pleasure without pain, no joy without sorrow. O the folly of expecting lasting felicity in a vale of tears, or a paradise in a ruined world.
It is not the truth that a man possesses, or believes that he possesses, but the earnest effort which he puts forward to reach the truth, which constitutes the worth of a man
There may be stranger reasons for being alive. There are books Thereβs interlibrary loan. There are books you can fall into and pull up over your head.
I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.
I've read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, 'Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.' I don't want to be part of that.
The history of architecture is the history of the struggle for light.
Guitar was just a hobby, but it seemed to me that the instrument had possibilities, not least of which was that there was no one else playing it. I could be, as it were, the best boy in an all-girls school.
Often I listen to songs on repeat for days and days at a time. There's something hypnotic or meditative, and it mirrors the way that I am putting the sentence together, going back over the same phrases again and again.
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