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.
Ere I could make thee open thy white hand, and clap thyself my love; then didst thou utter, I am your's for ever!
Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.
Love is at the Center of our being, and the calm, continuous pulsations of life are governed by Love.
I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy?
One of the good things that come of a true marriage is, that there is one face on which changes come without your seeing them; or rather there is one face which you can still see the same, through all the shadows which years have gathered upon it.
The sight of lovers feedeth those in love.
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