"By art alone we are able to step outside of our selves, to know what another sees of this universe which is not the same as our own, the landscapes of which would remain as unknown to us as those of the moon. Through art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are offered up to us, each differing as widely from the next as those which roll round the infinite and which, be their name Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us their unique rays many centuries after the hearth from which they emanate is extinguished.

The artist’s labor to discover a means of understanding that transcends matter and experience, indeed words, something different from their appearance, is of a nature counterposed to the operation in which pride, passion, intelligence and habit are constantly engaged within us when we spend our lives without self-communion, accumulating as though to hide our true impressions, the terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life."

–Marcel Proust