Quotes About Beauty

Now we are more inclined to speak of information than of learning, and to think of the means by which information is transmitted rather than of how learning might transform, and be transformed by, the atmospheres of a given mind. We may talk about the elegance of an equation, but we forget to find value in the beauty of a thought.

In St. Louis one of the girls had said to her, Just pretend you're pretty so they can pretend you're pretty.

And she was old, too. For a woman being old just means not being young, and all the youth had been worked out of her before it had really even set in.

That old black coat he always wore to preach in was the one he put over her shoulders one evening when they were walking along the road together and he was throwing rocks at the fence posts the way a boy would do, still shy of her. But on a Sunday morning, with the sermon in front of him he'd spent the week on and knew so well he hardly need to look at it, he was a beautiful old man, and it pleased her more than almost anything that she knew the feel of that coat, the weight of it.

I've often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come.

Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?

Sylvie was pretty, but she was prettiest when something had just startled her into feeling that the world had to be dealt with in some way, and then she undertook the most ordinary things with an arch, tense, tentative good will that made them seem difficult and remarkable, and she was delighted by even partial successes.

We walked north, with the lake on our right hand. If we looked at it, the water seemed spread over half the world. The mountains, grayed and flattened by distance, looked like remnants of a broken dam, or like the broken lip of an iron pot, just at a simmer, endlessly distilling water into light.

In St. Louis they had made a sort of game of it, trying to pretty her up. Everything looked wrong. Just pretend you're pretty.

There was no more the stoop of her high

My father said, "I would never have thought this place could be beautiful. I'm glad to know that.

Beauty is a conversation between humankind and reality. . . .

We can feel deficiency in what we know or do, we can hear inadequacy in our most painfully considered phrases. And gracious and chimerical beauty will bless us with the certainty that there is more to be hoped for, more to be tried.

I write a book because there is a voice in my mind, a burden of narrative. Of course I am pleased that these voices interest other people, too. When I write I am always aware that perception is beautiful, and that to be human is a very high and very complicated privilege. I want my fiction to be true, and to me these are very essential truths.

I don't know exactly what covetise is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else's virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.

His lovely wife tends her zinnias in the mild morning light and his find young man comes fondly mishandling that perpetually lost sheep of a cat, Soapy, once more back from perdition for the time being, to what would have been general rejoicing.

I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.

Each morning I'm like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes--old hands, old eyes, old mind, a very diminished Adam altogether, and still it is just remarkable. What of me will I still have? Well, this old body has been a pretty good companion. Like Balaam's ass, it's seen the angel I haven't seen yet, and it's lying down in the path.

Each morning I'm like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes - old hands, old eyes, old mind, a very diminished Adam altogether, and still it is just as remarkable.

Beauty is a conversation between humankind and reality, and we are an essential part of it, bringing to it our singular gifts of reflection and creation.

The whole point of Art Must Be Beautiful, Art Must Be Beautiful was to destroy that image of beauty. Because I had come to believe that art must be disturbing, art must ask questions, art must predict the future. If art is just political, it becomes like newspapers. It can be used once, and the next day it's yesterday's news. Only layers of meaning can give long life to art - that way, society takes what it needs from the work over time.

Once, Picasso was asked what his paintings meant. He said, Do you ever know what the birds are singing? You don't. But you listen to them anyway. So, sometimes with art, it is important just to look.

a world in a grain of sand | And a heaven in a wild flower'.

Either because of mate selection, cognition, predator avoidance, or a combination of all three, our minds are attracted to and are finely tuned to the detection of symmetry. The question of whether symmetry is truly fundamental to the universe itself, or merely to the universe as perceived by humans, thus becomes particularly acute.