It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky... a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe.
Victor HugoRead
The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.
Interpretation
The ideal and beautiful are intertwined concepts, where ideals embody ideas and beauty represents their tangible form.
Victor Hugo suggests that the concepts of the ideal and beauty are fundamentally connected; the ideal represents a conceptual notion whereas beauty represents the physical manifestation of that notion. In this view, what we perceive as beauty in art or nature is a direct reflection of the ideas we hold, indicating that true beauty arises from the integrity of its underlying idea.
In practice
In a discussion about the role of art in society, this quote could exemplify the relationship between an artist's concept and their work's aesthetic appeal.
It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky... a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe.
When two mouths, made sacred by love, draw near to each other to create, it is impossible, that above that ineffable kiss there should not be a thrill in the immense mystery of the stars.
At that moment of love, a moment when passion is absolutely silent under omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, pure seraphic Marius, would have been more capable of visiting a woman of the streets than of raising Cosette’s dress above the ankle. Once on a moonlit night, Cosette stopped to pick up something from the ground, her dress loosened and revealed the swelling of her breasts. Marius averted his eyes.
Thought is the work of the intellect, reverie is its self-indulgence. To substitute day-dreaming for thought is to confuse a poison with a source of nourishment.
Taste is the common sense of genius.
Forget not, never forget that you have promised me to use this silver to become an honest man.... Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!
My kind of director is an actor-director who writes.
One of the best things about directing movies, as opposed to merely writing them, is that there's no confusion about who's to blame: you are.
I deeply wished I could make the stars all come down and breathe them; disappear in them
When we free ourselves we are not freed into a void. When we free ourselves we are freed into a dimension in which Art is an obligation.
The public needs art, and it is the responsibility of a ’self-proclaimed artist’ to realize the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses. … I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece. I am merely a middleman trying to bring ideas together.
As artists, we can help, visually and intellectually, to make people understand that, at some point, we have to accept that it is our collective impact that is putting the whole planet in jeopardy.
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