What is art for? Gustave Flaubert answered with this:
What seems to me the highest and most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, nor to arouse our lust or rage, but to do what nature does -- that is, to set us dreaming. The most beautiful works have this quality. They are serene in aspect, inscrutable. The means by which they act on us are various: they are as motionless as cliffs, stormy as the ocean, leafy, green and murmurous as forests, forlorn as the desert, blue as the sky.
(Quoted from page 286 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg.)
For a brief biography of Gustave Flaubert, click here. For images of or relating to Gustave Flaubert, click here.
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