Quotes About Appreciation

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it.

What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone.. the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

Comme rien n'est plus précieux que le temps, il n'y a pas de plus grande générosité qu'à le perdre sans compter.

Voor sommige mensen is geluk zoiets ongewoons, zo zeldzaam, nieuw of vreemd, dat ze er nooit van kunnen genieten als ze gelukkig zijn, maar altijd pas achteraf, als het besef komt dat ze toen, op dit of dat moment, gelukkig waren.

J'avais surpris mon cher surhomme en flagrant délit d'humanité : je sentis que je l'en aimais davantage. Alors, je chantai la farandole, et je me mis à danser au soleil.

Not only does one not retain all at once the truly rare works, but even within such works it is the least precious parts that one perceives first. Less deceptive than life, these great masterpieces do not give us their best at the beginning.

Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

The only true voyage of discovery . . . would be not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.

Fall in love with a dog's bum, And thou'll think it pretty as a plum.

Not caring for their lives' is it? Why, what in the world is there that we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls bloom.

It may be that I might have inferred from the pages that life teaches us to diminish the value of what we read, and shows us that the things which the writer commends to us were never worth very much; yet I might equally well have come to the opposite conclusion, that reading teaches us to place a higher value on life, a value which we did not know how to appreciate, and the true extent of which we come to realize only through the book.

It is our noticing them that puts things in a room, our growing used to them that takes them away again and clears a space for us.

so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

We need, between us and the fish which, if we saw it for the first time cooked and served on a table, would not appear worth the endless shifts and wiles required to catch it, the intervention, during our afternoons with the rod, of the rippling eddy to whose surface come flashing, without our quite knowing what we intend to do with them, the bright gleam of flesh, the hint of a form, in the fluidity of a transparent and mobile azure.

The names of Northern railway stations in a timetable where he would like to imagine himself stepping from the train on an autumn evening when the trees are already bare and smelling strongly in the keen air, an insipid publication for people of taste, full of names that he has not heard since childhood, may have far greater value for him than five volumes of philosophy, and lead people of taste to say that for a man of talent, he has very stupid tastes.

Ces jours uniques, ils se consument par l'usage, ils ne reviennent pas, on ne peut les vivre ici quand on les a vécus là.

It's far more difficult to disfigure a great work of art than to create one.

Well, how could a reader notice that? There may be something lacking there I admit. But heavens above, they ought to count themselves lucky! It's full enough of good things as it is, far more than they usually get.

Les plats se lisent et les livres se mangent.

the objects which we admire have no absolute value in themselves...

An impression of love is out of proportion to the other impressions of life, but when it is lost in their midst we are incapable of appreciating it.