Quotes About Beauty

In Bottletown, even our tears flicker like jewels.

A bird painted not with beauty but with all the dirt and wounds collected in a long hard life, in battle, in love, with torn feathers and a busted leg and a chipped beak and one of its eyes half closed; and yet a bird of deeper loveliness for all of that.

You were right about the stars, each one is a setting sun.

I do believe very much in the idea of unexpected or 'convulsive' beauty - beauty in the service of liberty.

God, but the coast here was painfully beautiful, the dark lush greens of the fir trees piercing his brain, the half-raging sky and sea, the surge of salt water against the rocks twinned to the urgent wash of blood through his arteries as he waited for her to kill him or hear him out. Seditious thoughts: there would be nothing too terrible about dying out here, about becoming part of all of this.

What am I? How am I connected? What is my purpose? What is all of this, felt in the flesh? Why is it so beautiful? What is beautiful? Why do I not know? What else don't I know? When will I know it? Will I ever know? Would knowing be too much?

The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower. Didn't

Hadn't the hummingbird been a kind of miracle? Hadn't it diminished us not to see this as a miracle and protect it?

a girl as pale as the moon's reflection in a rain barrel.

How can you tell if a streak of light across the sky is sincere?

But there would come a terrible and obliterating day when beauty was the only thing that mattered, and it mattered little if the pure part of beauty was blood. And on that day, the globes embedded in the walls hurt to look upon because the price paid for the wonders displayed within was too high. It had become a death cult, under a veneer of what was inevitable and necessary, and anything else was illogical.

The world is always full of the sound of waves. The little fishes, abandoning themselves to the waves, dance and sing, and play, but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows its depth?

We can all avoid travel that is unnecessary; we do not need to travel around the world when the source of all joy and all beauty is right within us.

How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.

This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky.

Beauty always takes place in the particular.

Permitted to inhabit neither the realm of the ideal nor the realm of the real, to be neither aspiration nor companion, beauty comes to us like a fugitive bird unable to fly, unable to land.

This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education.

Beauty as lifesaving. Beauty quickens. It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid, animated, living worth living.

Something beautiful fills the mind yet invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger or something of the same scale with which it needs to be brought into relation. Beauty, according to its critics, causes us to gape and suspend all thought.

Our desire for beauty is likely to outlast its object because, as Kant once observed, unlike all other pleasures, the pleasure we take in beauty is inexhaustible. No matter how long beautiful things endure, they cannot out-endure our longing for them.

The generation is unceasing. Beauty, as both Plato's Symposium and everyday life confirm, prompts the begetting of children: when the eye sees someone beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce the person.

Beauty as a "greeting". At the moment one comes into the presence of something beautiful, it greets you. It lifts away from the neutral background as though coming forward to welcome you – as thought the object were designated to "fit" your perception.

When one goes on to find better, or higher, or truer, or more enduring, or more widely agreed upon forms of beauty, what happens to our regard for the less good, less high, less true, less universal instances? Simone Weil says, He who has gone farther, to the very beauty of the world itself, does not love them any less but much more deeply than before.