If in my youth I had realized that the sustaining splendour of beauty of with which I was in love would one day flood back into my heart, there to ignite a flame that would torture me without end, how gladly would I have put out the light in my eyes.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the painful beauty of love that lingers in the heart long after its active presence has faded.
Michelangelo expresses a poignant awareness of how love and beauty can leave lasting impressions on our hearts. He implies that had he known the intense emotional turmoil and longing would arise from a past love, he might have chosen to stay blind to that love altogether, illustrating the paradox of how beauty can bring both joy and suffering.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about the complexities of love and heartbreak.
The art of creation lies in the gift of perceiving the particular and generalizing it, thus creating the particular again. It is therefore a powerful transforming force and a generator of creative solutions in relation to a given problem.
The best artist has that thought alone Which is contained within the marble shell; The sculptor's hand can only break the spell To free the figures slumbering in the stone.
Art lives on constraint and dies of freedom.
If it be true that any beautiful thing raises the pure and just desire of man from earth to God, the eternal fount of all, such I believe my love.
Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come.
There is an angel imprisoned in it and I must set it free.
Imagine what the world could be if we were on the offense with love instead of on the defense with hate.
...for, however all other feelings may be withered in a woman's nature, there is always one bright smiling spot in the maternal breast, and that is where a dearly-beloved child is concerned.
I may not be a smart man, but I know what love is.
I've been told that people in the army do more by 7:00 am than I do in an entire day But if I wake at 6:59 am and turn to you to trace the outline of your lips with mine I will have done enough and killed no one in the process.
When you love you should not say, “God is in my heart,” but rather, “I am in the heart of God.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
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