QuoteProject
Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.
William Faulkner
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Beauty is subjective, and imagination plays a key role in the perception of it.

This quote by William Faulkner emphasizes the idea that beauty is not a universal concept but rather a personal interpretation shaped by one's experiences and imagination. He suggests that rather than focusing on the literal representation of beauty, such as a tree, we should pay attention to the subtleties that inspire creativity in our minds, such as the shadow or gesture.

Themes

BeautySubjectivityImaginationCreativityPerception

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in an art class to inspire students to think about their own interpretations of beauty.

More from William Faulkner

When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.
William FaulknerRead
I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
William FaulknerRead
When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not be old enough to desire the fruits of it...his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it...
William FaulknerRead
Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.
William FaulknerRead
He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
William FaulknerRead
Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.
William FaulknerRead

Similar quotes

What I do is unusual: chordal movements that have never been used before, changing keys and modalities mid-song.
Joni MitchellRead
It was - I'm very didactic in my lyrics, but I've always been drawn to mock my own emotions, and so I write this very lyric-heavy stuff, which suits theater and comedy much more than it suits pop.
Tim MinchinRead
I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying.
Thomas BernhardRead
In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it.
Alex HaleyRead
Like dancers with choreography or actors with scripts, jazz singers could take material that was known, even loved, then risk interpreting and revising it. They could conceal even as they revealed themselves. Inflection, timing and tonality were their language, at least as much as words.
Margo JeffersonRead
Well, you know, with every character, if you're going to expose yourself, you've got to figure out every detail that you're going to play. So there's no character that you can just go put on his shirt and be fully prepared.
Albert BrooksRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.