Quotes About Beauty

The hills cast a shadow on themselves, bruise-blue turning to forgetful black. High up, [...] 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 [...] gather on the crags. And down in cool ripatian corridors smelling of silt and decaying needles, redwoods work a plan that will take a thousand years to realize [...]

He tells her, on their drives, about all the oblique miracles that green can devise.

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

In the dark-paneled courtroom, her words come out of hiding. Love for trees pours out of her—the grace of them, their supple experimentation, the constant variety and surprise.

Back in Brooklyn, a poet-nurse to the Union dying writes: A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

Something magnificent and enduring hid under music's exhausted surface. Somewhere behind the familiar staff lay constellations of notes, sequences of pitches that could bring the mind home.

Six different kinds of forest all around us. Seventeen hundred flowering plants. More tree species than in all of Europe. Thirty kinds of salamander, for God's sake. Sol 3, that little blue dot, had a lot going for it, when you could get away from the dominant species long enough to clear your head. Above us, a raven the size of an Oz winged monkey flew up into a white pine.

Els had staked his life on finding that larger thing. Something magnificent and enduring hid under music's exhausted surface. Somewhere behind the familiar staff lay constellations of notes, sequences of pitches that could bring the mind home.

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 (p. 423).

A chemical semaphore passes through Nick's brain: Suppose a person had sculpted any one of these, just as they stand. That single work would be a landmark of human art.

Priži?r?ti sodai visi panaš?s. O kiekvienas laukinis sodas laukinis savaip.

Earth may be alive: not as the ancients saw her—a sentient Goddess with a purpose and foresight—but alive like a tree. A tree that quietly exists, never moving except to sway in the wind, yet endlessly conversing with the sunlight and the soil. Using sunlight and water and nutrient minerals to grow and change. But all done so imperceptibly, that to me the old oak tree on the green is the same as it was when I was a child. —JAMES LOVELOCK

Composers, skilled in theory, hear music differently. CAT profiles of their listening brains show more verbal hemisphere activity, as if they don't just let the associative sensations of timber and rhythm swell through them, but somehow eavesdrop on a point being argued on thought's original instruments. Can the effect be any less beautiful for being better articulated?

Let other trees do the work of the world. Let the Beech stand, where still it holds its ground

Out in the yard, all around the house, the things they've planted in years gone by are making significance, making meaning, as easily as they make sugar and wood from nothing, from air, and sun, and rain. But humans hear nothing.

Branches, combing the sun, laughing at gravity, still unfolding. Something moves at the base of the motionless trunks. Nothing. Now everything. This, a voice whispers, from very nearby. This. What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end.

Death is everywhere, oppressive and beautiful.

Ao testemunhar o fracasso da medicina perante o meu filho, desenvolvi uma teoria esdrúxula: A vida é algo que temos de parar de corrigir. O meu pequeno era um universo de bolso que eu jamais poderia aspirar a sondar. Cada um de nós é uma experiência, e nem sequer sabemos o que está a experiência a testar. Ninguém é perfeito. Mas, caramba, todos ficamos tão lindamente aquém.

Fond lovers, cruel as their flame, cut in these trees their mistress' name. Little, alas, they know or heed how far these beauties hers exceed!

This life form thing was breathtakingly beautiful. As he stared at it, he found himself being pulled out of the human world into a world where moral boundaries blur and finally dissolve completely. He was lost in wonder and admiration, even though he knew that he was the prey.

Looking at Ebola under an electron microscope is like looking at a gorgeously wrought ice castle. The thing is so cold. So totally pure.

He saw a cross on a wall with another cross behind it, a shadow cross, the shadow of what God left behind when God was gone, the continued need for joy and beauty, a commitment to hope where there appeared to be none, and to grace in spite of everything.

Mechanical proficiency and practical gadgets in America counterbalanced to an extent the beauty of Italy.

Do I love you because you're beautiful, or are you beautiful because I love you?