Quotes About Beauty

the world can give you these glimpses as well as fairy tales can--the smell of rain, the dazzle of sun on white clapboard with the shadows of ferns and wash on the line, the wildness of a winter storm when in the house the flame of a candle doesn't even flicker.

You have to suffer in order to be beautiful.

Every person has one particular time in his life when he is more beautiful than he is ever going to be again. For some it is at seven, for others at seventeen or seventy, and as Laura Fleischman read out loud from Shakespeare, I remember thinking that for her it was probably just then.

It was the upward-reaching and fathomlessly hungering, heart-breaking love for the beauty of the world at its most beautiful, and, beyond that, for that beauty east of the sun and west of the moon which is past the reach of all but our most desperate desiring and is finally the beauty of Beauty itself, of Being itself and what lies at the heart of Being.

To sentimentalise something is to look only at the emotion in it and at the emotion it stirs in us rather than at the reality of it, which we are always tempted not to look at because reality, truth, silence are all what we are not much good at and avoid when we can. To sentimentalise something is to savour rather than to suffer the sadness of it, is to sigh over the prettiness of it rather than to tremble at the beauty of it, which may make fearsome demands of us or pose fearsome threats.

Sitting there in the Alabama winter with my mouth full of cold turnip and mud, I could see at least for a moment how if you ever took truly to heart the ultimate goodness and joy of things, even at their bleakest, the need to praise someone or something for it would be so great that you might even have to go out and speak of it to the birds of the air.

To sentimentalize something is to savor rather than to suffer the sadness of it, is to sigh over the prettiness of it rather than to tremble at the beauty of it, which may make demands of us or pose fearsome threats.

Glory is to God what style is to an artist. Glory is what God looks like when, for the time being, all you have to look at Him with is a pair of eyes.

And over there, London is also on fire, and they say that Hyde Park is carpeted with crocuses purple as flame, and botanists haunt bomb craters for flowers, unknown since the great fire of 1666, brought to life by nitrates from the burning bombs, life blossoming out of death, beauty out of pain, the past out of the present, these fundamental things of life as time goes by. (78-79)

Maybe the truth of it is that it's too good not to be true.

From apparently the basest metals we have the finest toned bells.

It takes chaos to give birth to a dancing star

The color and shape of flowers are a precise record of what bees find attractive

When you look out of a window, when you look at anything, you know what you're seeing? Yourself. A thing can only look beautiful or romantic or inspiring only if the beauty or romance or inspiration is inside you.

Surely, of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest.

I paint flowers so they will not die.

A arte é o grande estimulante da vida

What is all that men have done and thought over thousands of years, compared with one moment of love. But in all Nature, too, it is what is nearest to perfection, what is most divinely beautiful! There all stairs lead from the threshold of life. From there we come, to there we go.

Ja, vergiß nur, daß es Menschen gibt, darbendes, angefochtenes, tausendfach geärgertes Herz! und kehre wieder dahin, wo du ausgingst, in die Arme der Natur, der wandellosen, stillen und schönen.

Friedrich Hölderlin

But the sower Loves to see a woman Fallen asleep in the daytime Over a half-knitted stocking.

It is beautiful to unfold our souls And our short lives

Hälfte des Lebens Mit gelben Birnen hänget Und voll mit wilden Rosen Das Land in den See, Ihr holden Schwäne, Und trunken von Küssen Tunkt ihr das Haupt Ins heilignüchterne Wasser. Weh mir, wo nehm' ich, wenn Es Winter ist, die Blumen, und wo Den Sonnenschein, Und Schatten der Erde? Die Mauern stehn Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde Klirren die Fahnen.

There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.