A thing which is present can be invisible, hidden by what it shows
Interpretation
Visibility can be deceiving; what we see may hide deeper truths.
This quote by Rene Magritte reflects the paradox of perception in art and reality. It suggests that things may appear prominent to our senses yet still cloak essential aspects beneath their surface, urging us to look beyond mere appearances to uncover hidden meanings and truths.
In practice
In a discussion about the interpretation of modern art.
I detest my past, and anyone else's. I detest resignation, patience, professional heroism and obligatory beautiful feelings. I also detest the decorative arts, folklore, advertising, voices making announcements, aerodynamism, boy scouts, the smell of moth balls, events of the moment, and drunken people.
Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.
Everything that is visible hides something that is invisible.
The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture βThis is a pipeβ, I'd have been lying!
Nothing is confused except the mind.
We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world.
The ideal and the beautiful are identical; the ideal corresponds to the idea, and beauty to form; hence idea and substance are cognate.
To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another, in a picture.
The thing I love about music is that you can take things that are painful, deep things that hurt you, and you can turn them into something beautiful.
I often find in the film world, that it's very self-referring. If you talk to someone about films, they talk about them in terms of other films - rather than as something that happened to them in their life. And I'm really keen to get back to film as a reference to real things, not necessarily to other films.
To express your emotions, you have to be very loose and receptive. The unconscious will come to you if you have that gift that artists have. I only know if I'm inspired by the results.
An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.
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