If in my youth I had realized that the sustaining splendour of beauty of with which I was in love would one day flood back into my heart, there to ignite a flame that would torture me without end, how gladly would I have put out the light in my eyes.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the painful beauty of love that lingers in the heart long after its active presence has faded.
Michelangelo expresses a poignant awareness of how love and beauty can leave lasting impressions on our hearts. He implies that had he known the intense emotional turmoil and longing would arise from a past love, he might have chosen to stay blind to that love altogether, illustrating the paradox of how beauty can bring both joy and suffering.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about the complexities of love and heartbreak.
The art of creation lies in the gift of perceiving the particular and generalizing it, thus creating the particular again. It is therefore a powerful transforming force and a generator of creative solutions in relation to a given problem.
The best artist has that thought alone Which is contained within the marble shell; The sculptor's hand can only break the spell To free the figures slumbering in the stone.
Art lives on constraint and dies of freedom.
If it be true that any beautiful thing raises the pure and just desire of man from earth to God, the eternal fount of all, such I believe my love.
Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come.
There is an angel imprisoned in it and I must set it free.
The only true language in the world is a kiss.
There is love in me the likes of which you've never seen. There is rage in me the likes of which should never escape. If I am not satisfied int he one, I will indulge the other.
Love is reducing the universe to one being.
She recognized the strange happiness that came from loving something without knowing why you did, that strange happiness that was sometimes so big that it felt like sadness. It was the way she felt when she looked at the stars.
Of all the bright cruel lies they tell you, the cruelest is the one called love.
You will reciprocally promise love, loyalty and matrimonial honesty. We only want for you this day that these words constitute the principle of your entire life and that with the help of divine grace you will observe these solemn vows that today, before God, you formulate.
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