Decorating is not about making stage sets, it's not about making pretty pictures for the magazines, it's really about creating a quality of life, a beauty that nourishes the soul.
Interpretation
Decorating transcends aesthetics, focusing on enhancing life and enriching the soul.
The quote emphasizes that the essence of decorating lies not merely in creating visually appealing spaces for decoration's sake, but rather in fostering an environment that enhances one’s life experience and nurtures the spirit. It suggests that true beauty in design should serve a deeper purpose, contributing to the emotional and spiritual well-being of individuals who inhabit those spaces.
In practice
A designer might use this quote during a home decor workshop to inspire participants to think beyond mere aesthetics.
So many young decorators are trying to reinvent the wheel, and the results are sometimes very dubious. They're striving to do things that have never been done before. Quite often it is done without authority, without knowledge, and without a background in taste. They need to be educated about the past, and they need a richer vocabulary.
The essence of interior design will always be about people and how they live.
Too much of what passes for design now is theater. It's one thing to be eccentric- and by the way, most eccentrics tend to be rather well-educated people - and quite another to be a faddist, by which I mean someone who tries to conjure a totally foreign aesthetic in a misplaced environment.
Decoration is really about creating a quality of life, and a beauty in that life that nourishes the soul, that makes life beautiful.
Creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.
In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman’s eyes. You have used up the years and they have used up you, and still, and still, you have not written the poem.
By and large, most of the work that we see in the great museums throughout the world are populated with people who don't happen to look like me.
Nursing is an art: and if it is to be made an art, it requires an exclusive devotion as hard a preparation as any painter's or sculptor's work; for what is the having to do with dead canvas or dead marble, compared with having to do with the living body, the temple of God's spirit? It is one of the Fine Arts: I had almost said, the finest of Fine Arts.
I don't know much about God. But if everything does originate with God, then certainly songs do as well.
For two extraordinary years I have been working on it - learning to write - but mostly learning how to tell the truth. At first it is quite impossible. You make yourself better than anybody, then worse than anybody, and when you finally come to see you are "like" everybody - that is the bitterest blow of all to the ego. But in the end it is only the truth, no matter how ugly or shameful, that is right, that fits together, that makes real people, and strangely enough - beauty.
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