Quotes About Beauty

Kenneth Robert Livingstone

Jesus illustrated the principle of wu-wei beautifully in his Nature Sermon. The wild birds neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, yet they are fed; the lilies of the field neither toil nor spin, yet they are clothed. Wu-wei is not about being lazy and doing nothing. Rather, it is about following the way of nature and not wasting energy. It is about the beauty of "letting it be"!

Enlightenment is not an achievement; it is just the seeing of reality as it is. In fact, nirvana is simply what is. We have been staring at it all our lives, and yet so few of us get it. The fact is that life is at the same time lamentable and beautiful. When we realize this humorous and absurd beauty of life, what can we do but to burst into laughter?

Zen calls our attention to the wonders of the ordinary. There is a hidden dimension of beauty, richness, and harmony in the common world surrounding us, but we seldom take notice. Zen tries to stimulate our sensitivity to these natural wonders and hence to recover the joy in our daily lives.

The fact of life is that the appreciation of true beauty cannot start without total renunciation. [...] But to live beautifully, one needs an unfettered mind, a mind that is not clogged up with all kinds of attachments, opinions, or fossilized ways of looking at things. There is no need to get rid of anything as long as we can sever our attachments to it.

When was the last time you noticed the beauty of a cool breeze or the wonder of a starry sky or the vibrancy of a wild flower on the roadside? I used to have the ability to instantly appreciate the beauty of all these when I was a child, but by the time I was twenty it was almost lost. (It took a lot of Zen practice for me to regain it.) The world has not changed that much; there are still summer breezes, night skies, and wild flowers. But where has the perception gone?

Just as a biologist cannot find life by dissecting it, an artist cannot find beauty by analyzing it.

Why are we so unhappy despite our material affluence? [...] [T]he modern world has lost the art of "ordinary magic" - the art of transforming our ordinary, mundane, and perhaps humdrum existence into a life of beauty and joy.

The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art.

What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.

To appreciate a rose, you do not sniff the soil from which it grew; to understand a rose, you must know the soil that nourished it and gave it life.

The cool wind blew in my face and all at once I felt as if I had shed dullness from myself. Before me lay a long gray line with a black mark down the center. The birds were singing. It was spring.

Oh, my Luve is like a red, red rose, That's newly sprung in June. O, my Luve is like the melodie, That's sweetly played in tune.

Or were I in the wildest waste, Sae black and bare, sae black and bare, The desert were a paradise, If thou wert there, if thou wert there.

Wee, modest, crimson-tippèd flow'r, Thou's met me in an evil hour; For I maun crush amang the stoure Thy slender stem: To spare thee now is past my pow'r, Thou bonie gem.

Beauty's of a fading nature Has a season and is gone!

What would you rather be? 52 and look 52, or 52 and look like a 28-year-old lizard?

She was quite the most wonderful animal that I have ever looked upon, and what few of her charms her apparel hid, it quite effectively succeeded in accentuating.

And what does the money machine eat to shit it out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity.

Art does not have to be dull, to be effective; the artist does not have to be a bore, to be real.

My real love is jewelry. I love glittery things. I can't help myself.

My mother turned her face up toward the highest branches and got a shiny look in her eyes.

Down through the years my face has been called a sour puss, a dead pan, a frozen face, The Great Stone Face, and, believe it or not, "a tragic mask." On the other hand that kindly critic, the late James Agee, described my face as ranking "almost with Lincoln's as an early American archetype, it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful." I can't imagine what the great rail splitter's reaction would have been to this, though I sure was pleased.

After 'Freaks and Geeks ' I dealt with several producers who wanted to cover up all my beauty marks, every single mole on my body. They tried to cover them on my first two episodes of 'Dawson's Creek ' and it just looked ridiculous, so I had to put my foot down. But it's not something I'm insecure about.