Daily Inspiration Quote by Simone Veil

Art doesn t float in from the ether; it is disciplined looking. Simone Veil s line reads like a quiet rebuke to every romantic myth of the poet as a glamorous eccentric channeling feelings. Beauty, she suggests, is not manufactured from pure imagination but extracted from the stubborn grain of reality once someone has the nerve and patience to stare at it long enough.

Coming from a lawyer and public figure defined by testimony, institutions, and consequence, the sentence carries an ethical charge. Veil knew that attention is never neutral: in courtrooms and parliaments, what you notice becomes what can be argued, protected, or denied. Her phrasing implies that the poet s job resembles the advocate s. Both take something real often messy, unphotogenic, politically inconvenient and frame it so others are forced to see it. Fixing attention is an act of selection, but also of refusal: refusal to look away, to anesthetize, to swap the difficult world for a prettier substitute.

The subtext is almost anti-aesthetic in the best way. Beauty here is not decoration; it is a byproduct of fidelity. By anchoring the beautiful in the real, Veil closes the escape hatch where art becomes alibi. In an era of spectacle and abstraction, the line insists that the raw material of meaning is still the actual: bodies, history, suffering, daily life. The poet earns beauty the hard way, by paying attention like it costs something.