And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of personal interpretation and artistic expression over strict measurement and objective analysis.
Marcel Proust suggests that when we observe and study faces, it is not merely a mathematical or scientific endeavor. Instead, we should engage with them as artists would, focusing on the emotions, stories, and individual nuances that give life to each face, emphasizing the subjective nature of perception in art.
In practice
A discussion on the role of perception in art classes.
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
At that time, he was satisfying a sensual curiosity by experiencing the pleasures of people who live for love. He had believed he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows; how small a thing her charm was for him now compared with the astounding terror that extended out from it like a murky halo, the immense anguish of not knowing at every moment what she had been doing, of not possessing her everywhere and always!
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.
A person does not...stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface...but is a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating...a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.
We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
For me, the intellect is always the guide but not the goal of the performance. Three things have to be coordinated, and not one must stick out. Not too much intellect because it can become scholastic. Not too much heart because it can become schmaltz. Not too much technique because you become a mechanic.
The funniest thing is that all the things every director goes through, I thought I could shortcut, but there was no getting around those issues.
When I really have to push and grope and scratch and claw to make a story work, that's a telltale sign that maybe something conceptually isn't right.
An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that.
Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.
Art is doing. Art deals directly with life.
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