Quotes About Beauty

If there is a secular equivalent of standing in a great spired Cathedral with marble pillars and streams of mystic light slanting through two-tier Gothic windows, it would be watching children in their little bedrooms fast asleep. Girls especially.

She was plain except when she laughed. She was someone on the subway. She wore loose skirts and plain shoes and was full-figured and maybe a little clumsy but when she laughed there was a flare in nature, an unfolding of something half hidden and dazzling.

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

We still want what we want. We want a haircut.

They passed out of the shade beneath the eaves and flew into sunglare and silence and it was an action she only partly saw, elusive and mutely beautiful, the birds so sunstruck they were consumed by light, disembodied, turned into something sheer and fleet and scatter-bright.

Her eyes had to adjust to the night sky. She walked away from the house, out of the spill of electric light, and the sky grew deeper. She watched for a long time and it began to spread and melt and go deeper still, developing strata and magnitudes and light-years in numbers so unapproachable that someone had to invent idiot names to represent the arrays of ones and zeros and powers and dominations because only the bedtime language of childhood can save us from awe and shame.

A sunset is the story of the world's day.

When a writer doesn't show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God's famous reluctance to appear. We're all drawn to remoteness. A hard-to-reach place is necessarily beautiful. Beautiful and a little sacred, maybe. And a person who becomes inaccessible has a grace and wholeness the rest of us envy.

There is a seaward bulge of stratocumulus. Sun glint and littoral drift. I see blooms of plankton in a blue of such Persian richness it seems an animal rapture, a colour change to express some form of intuitive delight.

A clean light soaked into the shaggy bark of a eucalyptus and it was a powerful thing to see, the whole tree glowed, it showed electric and intense, the branches ran to soft fire, the tree seemed revealed.

He said, The word for moonlight is moonlight. This made her happy. It was logically complex and oddly moving and circularly beautiful and true - or maybe not so circular but straight as straight can be.

It's hard to be beautiful. You have an obligation to people. You almost become public property. You can lose yourself and get almost mentally disturbed on just the public nature of being beautiful. Don't think I haven't thought about it. You can get completely lost in that whole dumb mess. And anyway who's to say what's beautiful and what's ugly?

We create beautiful and lasting things, build vast civilizations." "Gorgeous evasions," he said. "Great escapes.

I would think of it with affection because of its scenes of fragmentary beauty, because it brought men closer together through their perversity and fear, because it enabled us to pretend that death could be a tender experience, and because it breached the long silence.

It is just so interesting, he says at last. The colors and all. The colors and all.

What can you think about in the face of this kind of beauty? I get scared, I know that.

He comes floating down out of the endless pale, struck simultaneously by the beauty of the earth and a need to ask forgiveness. He is a stranger, in a mask, falling.

We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless identical structures.

I stood there, battered by the raw power and sheer magnificence of a land I'd never known

There was something exquisite and poetic about those fucking catastrophes.

Beauty comes from conscious reflection and experience. It is influenced by knowledge, learning, and culture. Objects that are unattractive on the surface can give pleasure. Discordant music, for example, can be beautiful. Ugly art can be beautiful.

If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

Herbert Read thought we would need a mystical theory to connect beauty and function. Well, it took one hundred years, but today we have that theory, one based in biology, neuroscience, and psychology, not mysticism.

Attractive things certainly should be preferred over ugly ones, but why would they work better? Yet in the early 1990s, two Japanese researchers, Masaaki Kurosu and Kaori Kashimura, claimed just that.