“The sight of the intuitive and ravishing Beauty of God holds her as if asleep in its delectable bosom…This state surpasses all human definition and comparison.”

Vol. VI, p. 116, Vol. VIII, p. 266ff.
Joannis Kepleri Astronomi Opera Omnia, ed. Christian Frisch (1858)
Context: I certainly know that I owe it [the Copernican theory] this duty, that as I have attested it as true in my deepest soul, and as I contemplate its beauty with incredible and ravishing delight, I should also publicly defend it to my readers with all the force at my command.

The Golden Legend, Pt. VI, A travelling Scholastic affixing his Theses to the gate of the College.
Context: I think I have proved, by profound researches,
The error of all those doctrines so vicious
Of the old Areopagite Dyonisius,
That are making such terrible work in the churches,
By Michael the Stammerer sent from the East,
And done into Latin by that Scottish beast,
Erigena Johannes, who dares to maintain,
In the face of the truth, the error infernal,
That the universe is and must be eternal;
At first laying down, as a fact fundamental,
That nothing with God can be accidental;
Then asserting that God before the creation
Could not have existed, because it is plain
That, had he existed, he would have created;
Which is begging the question that should be debated,
And moveth me less to anger than laughter.
All nature, he holds, is a respiration
Of the Spirit of God, who, in breathing hereafter
Will inhale it into his bosom again,
So that nothing but God alone will remain.

Source: Speak, Memory

On the Principles of Genial Criticism (1814)
Context: The Good consists in the congruity of a thing with the laws of the reason and the nature of the will, and in its fitness to determine the latter to actualize the former: and it is always discursive. The Beautiful arises from the perceived harmony of an object, whether sight or sound, with the inborn and constitutive rules of the judgment and imagination: and it is always intuitive.

Source: The Memorial and Instructions, p. 208

Third Journal of Travel (1844-1845)
Context: The beauty of the forests of Indiana in the rich and lovely month of May surpasses all description. The rivers, swollen by the rains, flow through long lanes of verdure, caressing the islands they seem to carry with them in their course and which look like floating nosegays. The trees raise their straight trunks to the height of more than a hundred and twenty feet and are crowned with tops of admirable beauty. The magnolia, the dog-wood, the catalpa, covered with white flowers, the permed snow of the springtime, intermingle with the delicate green of the other trees.

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 127

Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie (1594), Book I, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).