“In its purest distillation beauty had always been merciless.”
Alastair Reynolds (1966) British novelist and astronomer
Plague Music (p. 294)
Short fiction, Belladonna Nights and Other Stories (2021)
“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
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Stephen Fry93
English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist 1957Related quotes
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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.
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Source: The Hundred Days
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Source: prevale.net
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Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor
quote from an extract of 'Barbara Hepworth – the Sculptor carves because he must, The Studio, London, vol. 104, December 1932, p. 332
1932 - 1946