Quotes About Beauty

The beauty that I am speaking of now was that of a woman who has come into knowledge and strength and who, knowing her hardships, trusts her strength and goes about her work even with a kind of happiness, serene somehow and secure.

Shall we do without hope? Some days there will be none. But now to the dry and dead woods floor they come again, the first flowers of the year, the assembly of the faithful, the beautiful, wholly given to being.

That one is sometimes able, among the disturbances of the present world, to wander into some good and beautiful whereabouts of the woods, grow quiet, and come to rest is a gift, a wonder, and a kind of grace.

It was a pretty place, its prettiness not so much made as allowed. It was a place of work, but a place too of order and rest, where work was done in a condition of acknowledged blessedness and of gratitude.

My mind became/ beautiful by the sight of him. He had the beauty only/ of himself alive in the only moment of his life./ He had upon him like a light the whole/beauty of the living world that never dies. Sabbaths 2003 VI

The hill is like an old woman, all her human obligations met, who sits at work day after day, in a kind of rapt leisure, at an intricate embroidery. She has time for all things. Because she does not expect ever to be finished, she is endlessly patient with details. She perfects flower and leaf, feather and song, adorning the briefest life in great beauty as though it were meant to last forever.

A music attends the things of the earth. To sense that music is to be near the possibility of health and joy.

The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but how to be alive, as these worn hills still tell, and some paintings of Paul Cezanne, and this mere singing wren, who thinks he's alive forever, this instant, and may be.

She was another gift, surely, to us all. She was a happiness that made me cry.

Woods I part the out thrusting branches and come in beneath the blessed and the blessing trees. Though I am silent there is singing around me. Though I am dark there is vision around me. Though I am heavy there is flight around me.

Some days, sitting here on my porch over the river, my memory seems to enclose me entirely; I wander back in my reckoning among all of my own that have lived and died until I no longer remember where I am. And then I lift my head and look about me at the river and the valley, the great, unearned beauty of this place, and I feel the memoryless joy of a man just risen from the grave.

If you see the world's goodness and beauty, and if you love your own place in it (no deed required), then your love itself will be one of your life's great rewards.

joy teaches him to rise, to stand and move out through the opening the light has made. He stands on the green hilltop amid the cedars, the skewed stones, the earth all opened doors… Sabbaths 2001 I

In the summer dusk there is always a pewee calling his name from a dead branch somewhere on the edge of an opening. The Carolina wren sings the whole year round. I hear the frogs and toads at night, starting with the peepers in early spring, and later the crickets and katydids. Something wild is always blooming, from twinleaf and bloodroot early in spring to beeweed in late fall, things of intricate, limitless beauty. Often I fear that I am not paying enough attention.

strewn with wildflowers and overhead were making shade. Everybody was busy about the fields and plant beds and gardens. The season had made its claim. And then there came a day of brittle-feeling showers driven over the town by a cold wind that, after the warm days, seemed to come through your clothes in slices.

you're too pretty for your own good, maybe. It could get you an early start on a miserable life.

become good. It would become beautiful. It would make us happy, and not with the future happiness of political promising. It would make us happy as soon as we began to do it.

He didn't know, as we grownups knew, what the war meant and might mean. He had only understood that what we were that day was lovely and could not last.

Sometimes hidden from me in daily custom and in trust, so that I live by you unaware as by the beating of my heart, Suddenly you flare in my sight, a wild rose blooming at the edge of thicket, grace and light where yesterday was only shade, and once again I am blessed, choosing again what I chose before

A well-made sentence, I think, is a thing of beauty.

I remember too how spring came, just when I thought it might stay winter forever, at first in little touches and strokes of green lighting up the bare mud like candle flames, and then it covered the whole place with a light pelt of shadowy grass blades and leaves. And I remember how, as the days and the winds passed over, the foliage shifted and sang.

A window opening on nothing but the blank sky was endlessly attractive to me…. A window that looked out into a tree was a source of inexpressible happiness…

But the earth speaks to us of Heaven, or why would we want to go there? If we knew nothing of Hell, how would we delight in Heaven should we get there?

What repair, what return, will undo the consuming self-belittlement that inherits, disvalues, neglects, and ruins the decent small farm- the earned, kept, and cherished good of a lifetime's work gone- to break the heart? And yet the light comes. And yet the light is here. Over the long shadows the late light moves in beauty through the living woods.