Quotes About Beauty

A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,--and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.

If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets.

There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate, and not a grain more. ... A man sees only what concerns him.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

Autumn came, with wind and gold.

There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.

It has come to this, that the lover of art is one, and the lover of nature another, though true art is but the expression of our love of nature.

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man -- a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.

Beauty is where it is perceived. When I see the sun shinning on the woods across the pond, I think this side the richer which sees it.

It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.

It is the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us. The question is not what you look at but what you see.

The delicious soft, spring-suggesting air,—how it fills my veins with life! Life becomes again credible to me. A certain dormant life awakes in me, and I begin to love nature again.

The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere.

As I love nature, as I love singing birds...I love thee, my friend.

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.

How silent are the footsteps of Spring!

Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth.

There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon—said Damodara

on the morning of many a first spring day...the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead. There needs no stronger proof of immortality.

We get only transient and partial glimpses of the beauty of the world. Standing at the right angle, we are dazzled by the colors of the rainbow in colorless ice. From the right point of view, every storm and every drop in it is a rainbow.

Nature is mythical and mystical always, and works with the license and extravagance of genius.

Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her. The birds with their plumage and their notes are in harmony with the flowers, but what youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth.

Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised. Heaven might be defined as the place which men avoid.