It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

The line contrasts ordinary lived experience (“life”) with the shaping, ordering power of creative work (“art”). It suggests that day-to-day existence is often contingent, compromised, and driven by necessity, whereas art allows a person to impose form, intention, and meaning—thereby achieving a more complete sense of self. Read this way, “self-fulfillment” is not mere pleasure or success but the feeling of becoming coherent and fully expressed through making: selecting, refining, and transforming experience into something deliberate. The aphorism also carries a slightly cynical edge typical of epigrammatic wit: if life disappoints, art becomes the arena where one can finally realize ideals that reality refuses.