Would that we could at once paint with the eyes! In the long way from the eye through the arm to the pencil, how much is lost!
Interpretation
The quote expresses a desire for direct expression of visual imagination without the loss in translation to physical mediums.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing reflects on the frustrations of translating visual sensations and emotions into art. He muses that the intricate process of moving an image from perception through the arm to the pencil inherently results in a loss of the original vision, suggesting that a more immediate way to capture these images would enhance artistic expression.
In practice
An artist could quote this during a gallery opening to express the challenges of their creative process.
Why should not every individual man have existed more than once upon this world? Why should I not come back as often as I am capable of acquiring fresh knowledge? Is this hypothesis so laughable merely because it is the oldest? Because the human understanding, before the sophistries of the schools had dissipated and debilitated it, lighted upon it at once?
The search for truth is more precious than its possession.
A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes
Absolute truth belongs to Thee alone.
Pleasures, riches, honor and joy are sure to have care, disgrace, adversity and affliction in their train. There is no pleasure without pain, no joy without sorrow. O the folly of expecting lasting felicity in a vale of tears, or a paradise in a ruined world.
It is not the truth that a man possesses, or believes that he possesses, but the earnest effort which he puts forward to reach the truth, which constitutes the worth of a man
The reality of a poem is a very ghostly one. It suggests, it suggests, it suggests again.
Playwriting is the last great bastion of the individual writer. It's exciting precisely because it's where the money isn't. Money goes to safety, to consensus. It's not individualism.
Architecture has the power to create order out of unholy confusion.
There's a kind of despair about whether art can really do anything, but you have to incorporate that despair into the way you work. I try to soak my work in my sense of futility and fury.
An artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way
Architecture to me is whole. I cannot say I only care about this 25% and the other 75% I let go... it's just I want to work the way I want to work. In my shop, you can order certain things and other things you cannot. They are not available.
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