Quotes About Beauty

A Chipewyan guide named Saltatha once asked a French priest what lay beyond the present life. 'You have told me heaven is very beautiful,' he said. 'Now tell me one more thing. Is it more beautiful than the country of the muskoxen in the summer, when sometimes the mist blows over the lakes, and sometimes the water is blue, and the loons cry very often? That is beautiful. If heaven is still more beautiful, I will be glad. I will be content to rest there until I am very old.

To be inspired is to feel God funnelling into one's work. We always want light from the darkness. We know something is there before we see it. The objective for a writer is to try to get some part of the face of a God on a piece of paper. It is a fearful undertaking going into something profound without knowing what you are looking for. Beauty is incomprehensible. Isn't that what God is? Witnessing the loss of beauty and the enduring effort to restore beauty, isn't this God?

In those minutes of gazing at the boiling cistern of waves and watching the albatrosses addressing the storm with great seriousness, I could fix only on what I admired most often in other human beings, their enduring grace and poise.

we have a way of talking about beauty as though beauty were only skin deep. But real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness in order to understand what beauty is.-Barry Lopez, Interview with Bill Moyers, Journal, April 30, 2010

The illusion that each person can have the body that he or she wants is especially painful for women, and especially in societies, like ours, in which the "ideal" body is extremely thin.

April's air stirs in Willow-leaves...a butterfly Floats and balances

On a bare branch a crow is perched - autumn evening

Mountain-rose petals Falling, falling, falling now... Waterfall music

Ballet in the air... Twin butterflies until, twice white They Meet, they mate

Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.

Come, butterfly It's late- We've miles to go together.

Come, see the true flowers of this pained world.

How I long to see among dawn flowers, the face of God.

Even in Kyoto/Hearing the cuckoo's cry/I long for Kyoto

The picture that bowls you over at first sight and the next day loses even the power to attract your attention is one that looks always the same. It has a moment of life but dies immediately thereafter.

When a thing is put down in such permanent mediums as paint or stone it should be a thing well worthy of record. It must be the work of one who has looked at all things, has interested himself in all life.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days--but not without poetry.

Oh! Moeten wij eeuwig lijden of altijd vluchten voor wat mooi is?

Het weidse park bezwijmt onder het brandend oog van de zon, net als de jeugd onder de heerschappij van de Liefde.

I don't want to think too much about art, you see. I don't want to attend symposia, listen to papers, or discuss it at cocktail parties ... What I want to do is clutch my heart and fall down when I see it. (Mr. Nannuzzi to Edgar)

It was, he thought, fine to be young and in love. Even in the graveyard which this world has become, it was fine.

I want to make sure I remember what real ugly is. I might want to tell my grandchildren someday.

Thunderheads were pouring toward them through the ragged teeth of the White Mountains, and Lisey counted seven dark spots where the high slopes had been smudged away by cauls of rain. Brilliant lightnings flashed inside those stormbags and between those two of them, connecting them like some fantastic fairy bridge, was a double rainbow that arched over Mount Cranmore in a frayed loophole of blue.

When I say truth, I mean beauty.