Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.
Lawrence DurrellRead
For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Art allows artists to reconcile their challenges and emotions through creative expression, embracing life's experiences.
Lawrence Durrell emphasizes that artists have a unique opportunity to transform their struggles and defeats from daily life into artistic expression. Rather than avoiding or escaping their destiny, artists channel their experiences through imagination to realize its true potential, creating a deeper understanding and appreciation of life through their work.
Themes
ArtImaginationCreativityExpressionDestiny
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of creativity in education, this quote can inspire students to embrace their experiences.
More from Lawrence Durrell
All quotes →I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.
Lawrence DurrellRead
Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.
Lawrence DurrellRead
The whole Mediterranean, the sculpture, the palm, the gold beads, the bearded heroes, the wine, the ideas, the ships, the moonlight, the winged gorgons, the bronze men, the philosophers - all of it seems to rise in the sour, pungent taste of these black olives between the teeth. A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.
Lawrence DurrellRead
The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you.
Lawrence DurrellRead
Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
Lawrence DurrellRead
Similar quotes
I wept when the muse Ulla bent over me. Blinded by tears I could not prevent her from kissing me, I could not prevent the Muse from giving me that terrible kiss. All of you who have ever been kissed by the Muse will surely understand that Oskar, once branded by that kiss, was condemned to take back the drum he had rejected years before, the drum he had buried in the sand of Sapse Cemetery.
Gunter GrassRead
To a true artist only that face is beautiful which, quite apart from its exterior, shines with the truth within the soul.
Mahatma GandhiRead
In a rehearsal room, your real resource as an actor aren't the things around you; your resources are your imagination and your director and the other actors. In those close quarters, your imagination and your skills are what you turn to.
Stephen LangRead
Look, then, into thine heart, and write! Yes, into Life's deep stream! All forms of sorrow and delight, All solemn Voices of the Night, That can soothe thee, or affright, - Be these henceforth thy theme. (excerpt from "Voices of the Night")
Henry Wadsworth LongfellowRead
For me, the subject is of secondary importance: I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject.
Claude MonetRead
As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.
Rachel CuskRead