Quotes About Beauty

The world goes this way and that. Ideas are in fashion or not, and those who should prevail are often defeated. But it doesn't matter. The virtues remain uncorrupted and uncorruptible. They are rewards in themselves, the bulwarks with which we can protect our vision of beauty, and the strengths by which we may stand, unperturbed, in the storm that comes when seeking God.

I'm a critic. I write essays about works of art. It's like being a eunuch in the seraglio, but unrequited love is the sweetest, and I have the proper distance. I can compress the qualities of beauty I've been trained to see, store them up, and bring them out at will, rapid-fire, in the combinations I want.

You don't have to believe me. It's all right if you don't. The beauty of the truth is that it need not be proclaimed or believed. It skips from soul to soul, changing form each time it touches, but it is what it is, I have seen it, and someday you will, too." He

Connoisseurs of paintings were curiously indifferent about color itself, and were seldom possessed by it. Rather, they possessed it. And they seemed to be easily seated. They were like the gourmets, who had to build castles of their food before they could eat it. They confused beauty and knowledge, passion and expertise.

people who lived in the mountains knew that all the truly great things had already been accomplished. They did not need to imagine ladders that would lead to heaven, or things of massive size that would astound the heart, because they had them in such profusion that it was difficult to get from town to town, and because of them the sun itself often was denied a chance to shine, or forced to break in gold through opaque ridges of ice and snow whiter than physics would allow.

He knew very well that love could be like the most beautiful singing, that it could make death inconsequential, that it existed in forms so pure and strong that it was capable of reordering the universe. He knew this, and that he lacked it, and yet as he stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, watching diplomats file quietly out of the gate, he was content, for he suspected that to command the profoundest love might in the end be far less beautiful a thing than to suffer its absence.

battle—a sense that time does not exist, that he himself was of no account, that all things were connected and orchestrated far beyond human will, and that the world was saturated with beauty no matter what the loss.

Rome was not meant to move, but to be beautiful. The wind was supposed to be the fastest thing here, and the trees, bending and swaying, to slow it down. Now

and she speculated that the city would be cold, completely of itself, unconscious, that its every move would be transcendent, and that each of its hundred million flashing scenes would strike a moral lesson. Such a city would extend vision, intensify pity, telescope emotion, and float the heart the way the sea is gently buoyant with great ships. To do this it would have to be a cold instrument. And, despite its beauty, it would have to be cruel.

It seems that intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us.

If you had a sad childhood, so what? You can dance with only one leg and see the snowflake falling with only one eye. —ROBERT BLY

The wildflower's reward for trusting what it senses but doesn't yet know is to become what is was born to be—a flower whose inevitable place is realized in a small moment of Oneness, as it joins with elements that were here before it came alive and which will live on once it dies.

After a child's worst day, he or she still looks completely beautiful and innocent in sleep

Nature is a beautiful gift of magic.

Oh my word, three huge ravens just flew gracefully over my head. Beautiful.

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. If the mockingbird were chirping to give us the long-sought formula for a unified field theory, the point would be only slightly less irrelevant. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

Giacometti said, "The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.

Beauty is not a hoax . . . Come on, I say to the creek, surprise me; and it does, with each new drop. Beauty is real. I would never deny it; the appalling thing is that I forget it (271).

It snowed. It snowed all yesterday and never emptied the sky, although the clouds looked so low and heavy they might drop all at once with a thud.

I watch the running sheets of light raised on the creek surface. The sight has the appeal of the purely passive, like the racing of light under clouds on a field, the beautiful dream at the moment of being dreamed. The breeze is the merest puff, but you yourself sail headlong and breathless under the gale force of the spirit.

Is this what it's like, I thought then, and think now: a little blood here, a chomp there, and still we live, trampling the grass? Must everything whole be nibbled? Here was a new light on the intricate texture of things in the world, the actual plot of the present moment in time after the fall: the way we the living are nibbled and nibbling--not held aloft on a cloud in the air but bumbling pitted and scarred and broken through a frayed and beautiful land.

Why are we reading, if not in the hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened, and its deepest mystery probed?

Beauty is real. I would never deny it; the appalling thing is that I forget it.