Honoré de Balzac · 57 pages
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“Young man,' Porbus said, seeing Poussin stare open-mouthed at a picture, 'Don't look at the canvas too long, it will drive you to despair.”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from La Obra Maestra Desconocida
“[Raphael's] great superiority is due to the instinctive sense which, in him, seems to desire to shatter form. Form is, in his figures, what it is in ourselves, an interpreter for the communication of ideas and sensations, an exhaustless source of poetic inspiration. Every figure is a world in itself, a portrait of which the original appeared in a sublime vision, in a flood of light, pointed to by an inward voice, laid bare by a divine finger which showed what the sources of expression had been in the whole past life of the subject.”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from La Obra Maestra Desconocida
“You have wavered uncertainly between two systems, between drawing and coloring, between the painstaking phlegm, the stiff precision, of the old German masters, and the dazzling ardor, the happy fertility, of the Italian painters.”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from La Obra Maestra Desconocida
“However," he continued, "this canvas is preferable to the paintings of that varlet Rubens, with his mountains of Flemish flesh sprinkled with vermilion, his waves of red hair and his medley of colors.”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from La Obra Maestra Desconocida
“A line is a method of expressing the effect of light upon an object; but there are no lines in Nature, everything is solid. We draw by modeling, that is to say, that we disengage an object from its setting; the distribution of the light alone gives to a body the appearance by which we know it.”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from La Obra Maestra Desconocida
“But, after all, too much knowledge, like ignorance, brings you to a negation.”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from La Obra Maestra Desconocida
“[...]O que está faltando? Um nada, mas um nada que é tudo. Vocês têm a aparência da vida mas não expressam o seu excesso transbordante, esse não sei o quê que talvez seja a alma e que flutua enevoadamente sobre o invólucro[...]”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from La Obra Maestra Desconocida
“The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open. ”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Dying Animal
“Observation #8: Boys are icky.
Do not even get me started on the state of the bathroom. I'm thinking of calling in a haz-mat team. Seriously.”
― quote from Megan Meade's Guide to the McGowan Boys
“Luxa stood up, her face paler than usual. She went to her cousin, sat beside him, and put her arms around him. Pressing her forehead into his shoulder, she said, “She will fly with you always. You know this. She will fly with you always.”
― Suzanne Collins, quote from Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane
“Something else is hurting you - that’s why you need pot or whiskey, or whips and rubber suits, or screaming music turned so fucking loud you can’t think.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Tales of Ordinary Madness
“And from that time on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk,
Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam,
A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat
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