Quotes About Beauty

And now when I sway to a fitful wind, alone and listing, I will think, maple key. When I see a photograph of earth from space, the planet so startlingly painterly and hung, I will think, maple key. When I shake your hand or meet your eyes I will think, two maple keys. If I am a maple key falling, at least I can twirl.

Annie Dillard

The mountains—Tinker and Brushy, McAfee's Knob and Dead Man—are a passive mystery, the oldest of all. Theirs is the one simple mystery of creation from nothing, of matter itself, anything at all, the given. Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.

They have not been persecuted, and show no fear of man. You pass among them as though you were wind, spindrift, sunlight, leaves.

The Polyphemus moth never made it to the past; it crawls in that crowded, pellucid pool at the lip of the great waterfall. It is as present as this blue desk and brazen lamp, as this blackened window before me.

The young man proudly names his scars for his lover; the old man alone before a mirror erases his scars with his eyes and sees himself whole

The answer must be, I think, that the beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

Bad poetry is almost always bad because it attempts to claim for itself the real power of whatever it describes in ten lines: a sky full of stars, first love, or Niagara Falls.

Beauty itself is the language to which we have no key; it is the mute cipher, the cryptogram, the uncracked, unbroken code. And it could be that for beauty, as it turned out to be for French, that there is no key, that "oui" will never make sense in our language but only in its own, and that we need to start all over again, on a new continent, learning the strange syllables one by one.

nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.

I passed under a sugar maple that stunned me by its elegant unself-consciousness: it was as if a man on fire were to continue calmly sipping tea.

although we hear the buzz in our ears and the crashing of jaws at our heels, we can look around as those who are nibbled but unbroken, from the shimmering vantage of the living. Here may not be the cleanest, newest place, but that clean timeless place that vaults on either side of this one is no place at all.

Fiction can deal with all the world's objects and ideas together, with the breadth of human experience in time and space; it can deal with things the limited disciplines of thought either ignore completely or destroy by methodological caution, our most pressing concerns: personality, family, death, love, time, spirit, goodness, evil, destiny, beauty, will.

Beauty itself is the fruit of the creator's exuberance....

It's because a real and beautiful voice delicately rends the chest, discovered the heart, and holds it beating against a stainless edge until you long to be pierced utterly. For the voice is everything you do not remember. Everything you should not be able to live without and yet, tragically, do.

Frances is a diamond, passed from filthy paw to paw but never diminished. The men who handle her can leave no mark because her worth is far above them. Hard, helpless, buried. You can hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes, she is waiting for a strong and fearless miner to go way down and rescue her up to the surface where she can shine for all she's worth.

She is so beautiful. My Rose. Finer than sculpture, softer than sand. Rose, I'm kissing you now. Oh God, I have to kiss her. I will die if I don't kiss her, I know that now. It is a fact. I will die. It will kill me.

James discovered that there is nothing so congenial to lucid thought as a clear view of the sea. It aired his mind, tuned his nerves and scoured his soul. He determined always to live in sight of it.

If the impulse to act correctly did not come from yourself, Confucius said to a follower, what good could it do for you? In his mind, the moral was beautiful, and it should not succumb to rules. Rules diminish its beauty and subtlety, and adherence to them is an admission of one's own moral failure.

Bello es lo que se contempla

Mientras que las iglesias siempre están vacías, a muchas personas no les importa desplazarse para celebrar la eucaristía en un bello paisaje montañoso, en medio de la naturaleza. Allí experimentan la proximidad de Dios. Y una calma que les fascina.

It's an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after,you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you've been and whats happened. In the end, you're just happy you were there- with your eyes open- and lived to see it.

Few things are more beautiful to me than a bunch of thuggish, heavily tattooed line cooks moving around each other like ballerinas on a busy Saturday night. Seeing two guys who'd just as soon cut each other's throats in their off hours moving in unison with grace and ease can be as uplifting as any chemical stimulant or organized religion.

Everybody should come here. Everyone should see how complicated, how deeply troubled, and yet at the same time, beautiful and awesome the world can be. Everyone should experience, even as the clouds gather, what's at stake, what could be lost, what's still here.