Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like.
Emile ZolaRead
Selling beauty is something I can understand. Even selling false beauty seems perfectly natural; it's a sign of progress.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the commercialization of beauty, acknowledging both genuine and artificial beauty as part of societal progress.
Emile Zola's quote explores the concept of beauty in the commercial realm, suggesting that the act of selling beauty, whether authentic or not, is a relatable endeavor. It implies that even the promotion of false beauty is an indicator of societal development, highlighting how societal values and perceptions of beauty evolve with time and economic progress.
In practice
In a presentation on the impact of advertising on beauty standards.
Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like.
I believe that all is illusion and vanity outside the treasure of truths slowly accumulated, and which will never again be lost. I believe that the sum of these truths, always increasing, will at last confer on man incalculable power and peace, if not happiness. Yes, I believe in the final triumph of life.
A ruined man fell from her hands like a ripe fruit, to lie rotting on the ground.
Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they've been taught is wrong!
Did not one spend the first half of one's days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?
They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.
Adornment, what a science! Beauty, what a weapon! Modesty, what elegance!
Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist - whatever.
Design is inherently optimistic. That is its power.
In Irenaβs head the alcohol plays a double role: it frees her fantasy, encourages her boldness, makes her sensual, and at the same time it dims her memory. She makes love wildly, lasciviously, and at the same time the curtain of oblivion wraps her lewdness in an all-concealing darkness. As if a poet were writing his greatest poem with ink that instantly disappears.
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
My visual landscape as a child was the inside of a lot of these old churches. And the Baroque drama of the things was what I was first engaging with artwise. I'm much more attracted to the aesthetic of religious iconography than the actual religious side. The passion and the blood and the violence and the gaudy side of it I find really fascinating.
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