Light (1919), Ch. XXII - Light
Context: You can form no idea of the beauty that is possible! You cannot imagine what all the squandered treasure can provide, what can be brought on by the resurrection of misguided human intelligence, successively smothered and slain hitherto by infamous slavery, by the despicable infectious necessity of armed attack and defense, and by the privileges which debase human worth. You can have no notion what human intelligence may one day find of new adoration. The people's absolute reign will give to literature and the arts — whose harmonious shape is still but roughly sketched — a splendor boundless as the rest. National cliques cultivate narrowness and ignorance, they cause originality to waste away; and the national academies, to which a residue of superstition lends respect, are only pompous ways of upholding ruins.
1930s, Obituary for Emmy Noether (1935)
“Wit can be beautiful, because it expresses and distils an idea.”
On the subject of criteria he used to judge in The Most Beautiful Tweet contest, Hay Festival 2010[citation needed]
2010s
Source: 300 Tang Poems: A New Translation (1987), p. xxii
Stanislaus Grumman in Ch. 10 : The Shaman
His Dark Materials, The Subtle Knife (1997)
Context: People here cannot conceive of worlds where dæmons are a silent voice in the mind and no more. Can you imagine my astonishment, in turn, at learning that part of my own nature was female, and bird-formed, and beautiful?
The Evolution of Physics (1938) (co-written with Leopold Infeld)
1930s
“Life is so beautiful that even the idea of death must be born before it can be realized.”
A vida é tão bela que a mesma idéia da morte precisa de vir primeiro a ela, antes de se ver cumprida.
Source: Dom Casmurro (1899), Ch. 133, p. 255
