Quotes About Beauty

Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. —RACHEL CARSON

Be grateful for anything that still cuts. Dissonance is a beauty that familiarity hasn't destroyed yet.

The morning was glorious, one of those crystalline, dry, blue, fall days when the temperature hovers right at anticipation.

Nobody's perfect, she liked to say. But, man, we all fall short so beautifully.

The polite applause of aspens.

I wouldn't need to be so very different for sun to seem to be about sun, for green to be about green, for joy and boredom and anguish and terror and death to all be themselves, beyond the need for any killing clarity, and then this-- this , the growing rings of light and water and stone--would take up all of me, and be all the words I need.

Where the deer bound, where the trout rise, where your horse stops to slather a drink from icy water while the sun is warm on the back of your neck, where every breath you draw is exhilaration — that is where the Aspens grow. . . .

The gardener sees only the gardener's garden. The eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible. MAY WE NOT SEE GOD?

The moon is a blazing telephone that anyone on Earth might call him on, simply by looking up and seeing what he sees.

that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a

People think they need to be healed, but the truth is much more beautiful. Even a minute is more than we deserve. No one should be anything but dead. Instead we get honey of out rocks. Miracles from nothing. It's easy. We don't need to get better. We're already us. And everything that is, is ours.

Trees give it all away, don't they?

photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation's entire cathedral.

The sunlight's blaze doesn't threaten the yellow of a flower. We only resent what we can still hope to be.

a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches the soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A tech that copies itself and even drops food for free. A device so beautiful it's the stuff of poems.

Define a feather when condemned to the wind. Say how the shaft tapers, straining to be weightless. Describe what the vanes do on the air, how they luff and ruffle and flute, how the barbs somersault on the downward curve of their resisting ride.

We made this! It's so beautiful. The word lay beyond the rest of the team's list of formal descriptors. It seemed to have a real referent; the new woman apparently meant something when she used it. Beauty might even have had some physical reality, some selective advantage conferred over the last billion or so years. But what formal rules the quality adhered to, what behaviors it meant to elicit, not even Spider Lim's body could begin to guess.

Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don't even know what the experiment is testing. My wife would have known how to talk to the doctors. Nobody's perfect, she liked to say. But, man, we all fall short so beautifully.

High up, beyond his sight, rocky outcrops crawl with manzanita, shedding their curling, crimson barks. Bay laurels rim the logger-made meadows. Canyons thicken with orange madrone peeling to creamy, clammy green. Coast live oaks like the one that crippled him gather on the crags. And down in cool riparian corridors smelling of silt and decaying needles, redwoods work a plan that will take a thousand years to realize.

leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze. as certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. there is no knowing for a fact. the only dependable things are humility and looking.

real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze.

No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees—trees are invisible.