Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
Interpretation
Art allows us to explore our identity while also helping us escape from it.
This quote by Thomas Merton suggests that the experience of engaging with art is dualistic; it serves as a means for self-discovery and introspection, while simultaneously offering an escape from the constraints of our identity and everyday life. Through art, individuals can delve deeply into their inner selves and express emotions and thoughts that may be difficult to articulate otherwise, creating a space where they can both confront and transcend their own realities.
In practice
During a workshop on creativity, this quote can inspire participants to embrace both their personal experiences and the freedom that art provides.
The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything.
Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny....To work out our identity in God.
Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.
You are made in the image of what you desire.
But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for.
I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings.
Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible
The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical - their data are in the way they sound. A poet's biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.
Music is worth doing just because. It doesnβt have to be justified by some political point of view, and itβs kind of insulting to the music to make it a tool for something else.
Most of us do not consciously look at movies.
We do not make photographs with our cameras. We make them with our minds, with our hearts, with our ideas.
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