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.
Beth ceased to fear him from that moment, and sat there talking to him as cozily as if she had known him all her life, for love casts out fear, and gratitude can conquer pride.
It may take two people to make a really beautiful mistake.
Whether we love, or close our hearts to love, is a mental choice we make, every moment of every day.
My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.
The first time she kissed me, I truly thought I'd had an aneurysm - my pulse was thundering so loud and my senses were exploding. This, I remember thinking, the only word I could hold on to in a sea of feelings.
To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.
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