Quotes About Beauty

This is not just surprise and pleasure. This is not just beauty sometimes too hot to touch. This is not a blessing with a beginning and an end. This is not just a wild summer. This is not conditional.

Late, late, but now lovely and lovelier. And the two of us, together—a part of it.

Percy (One) Our new dog, named for the beloved poet, ate a book which unfortunately we had    left unguarded. Fortunately it was the Bhagavad Gita, of which many copies are available. Every day now, as Percy grows into the beauty of his life, we touch his wild, curly head and say, "Oh, wisest of little dogs.

from Emerson's journals. In the context, it is written in the past tense; changing the verb to present tense it reads: The poem is a confession of faith. Which is to say, the poem is not an exercise. It is not 'wordplay.' Whatever skill or beauty it has, in contains something beyond language devices, and has a purpose other than itself.

This morning two mockingbirds in the green field were spinning and tossing the white ribbons of their songs into the air. I had nothing better to do than listen. I mean this seriously.

When I think of death it is a bright enough city

Everyone now and again wonders about those questions that have no ready answers: first cause, God's existence, what happens when the curtain goes down and nothing stops it, not kissing, not going to the mall, not the Super Bowl. Wild roses, I said to them one morning. Do you have the answers? And if you do, would you tell me? The roses laughed softly. Forgive us, they said. But as you can see, we are just now entirely busy being roses.

and also I am the leaves and the blossoms, and, like them, I am full of delight, and shaking.

When I have to die, I would like to die on a day of rain— long rain, slow rain, the kind you think will never end.

This is the earnest work. Each of us is given only so many mornings to do it— to look around and love the oily fur of our lives, the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle.

A poem requires a design--a sense of orderliness. Part of our pleasure in the poem is that it is a well-made thing. . . .

I stood like Adam in his lonely garden On that first morning, shaken out of sleep, Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves, Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift.

From the time of snow-melt, when the creek roared and the mud slid and the seeds cracked, I listened to the earth-talk, the root-wrangle, the arguments of energy, the dreams lying just under the surface, then rising, becoming at the last moment flaring and luminous -- (excerpt from the poem, Wild Trilliums)

standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.

Now the fire rises and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red roses of flame.

The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening to his dog voice, crow voice, frog voice; now, he said, and now, and never once mentioned forever

I know someone who kisses the way a flower opens, but more rapidly. Flowers are sweet. They have short, beatific lives. They offer much pleasure. There is nothing in this world that can be said against them. Sad, isn't, that all they can kiss is the air. Yes, yes! We are the lucky ones.

Every year the hatchlings wake in the swaying branches, in the silver baskets, and love the world. Is it necessary to say any more? Have you heard them singing in the wind, above the final fields? Have you ever been so happy in your life?

But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,     to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly; for example—I think this     as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch— the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the     daisies for the field.

Come with me to visit the sunflowers, they are shy but want to be friends;

Have you noticed? Where so many millions of powerful bawling beasts lay down on the earth and died it's hard to tell now what's bone, and what merely was once.

This morning the water lilies are no less lovely, I think, than the lilies of Monet. And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead children out of the fields into the text of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.

Butterflies don't write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn't mean they don't know, in their own way, what they are. That they don't know they are alive—that they don't feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world.

What does it mean... that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it?