Quotes about beauty
page 25

“The doctrine of the cynics is the Ideal reversed, the parody of physical and moral beauty, the crime of mind, the degradation of imagination. I could not take pleasure in it. There was too much enthusiasm within me to permit me to crawl through those sinks of the brain. My nature had wings. The dangers to which I was exposed were above, not below.”

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) French writer, poet, and politician

Book VI, Note V, p. 86
Les confidences (1849)

Pleasure, Imagination, Nature

“The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living beings breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.”

William Beebe (1877–1962) American ornithologist, marine biologist, entomologist, and explorer

The Bird (1906)

Art

“Whether be written with any trend, poetry is always carrying the beauty of primordial, to the resurrection, recreate the world, forever opposed to the bad and evil.”

Mai Văn Phấn (1955) Vietnamese poet

Vẻ đẹp và quyền năng của thơ ca (tiểu luận) - Mai Văn Phấn http://maivanphan.vn/MaiVanPhan/32/398/785/1135/Tieu-luan-tho/Ve-dep-va-quyen-nang-cua-tho-ca--tieu-luan----Mai-Van-Phan.aspx

World, Evil

“Passing thus with time away,
The sweet gifts of youth decay;
Fleet their blooms, thus one by one,
Till their very form is gone;
Memory left but to declare
How beautiful and sweet they were!
In the first blue noon of Spring,
Who can think on withering?”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(25th December 1824) Faded Flowers
The London Literary Gazette, 1824

Youth, Spring, Thinking, Memory

“Death, death. Now I won't be able to write my beautiful memoirs.”

Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946) German general

To Dr. G. M. Gilbert, after receiving the death sentence. Quoted in "Nuremberg Diary" - by G. M. Gilbert - History - 1995

Death

“Joanni, Joanni wears a golden cross
And she looks so beautiful in her armour
Joanni, Joanni blows a kiss to God
And she never wears a ring on her finger…”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Aerial (2005), A Sea of Honey (Disc 1)

God, Kiss

“That she learned ballet not with the idea of becoming a full-fledged dancer. It was just to train my body and more for the sheer joy of learning something beautiful.”

Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904–1986) Indian Bharatnatyam dancer

[Meduri, Avanthi, Rukmini Devi Arundale, 1904-1986: A Visionary Architect of Indian Culture and the Performing Arts, http://books.google.com/books?id=uNYZ1vp-xFIC, 1 January 2005, Motilal Banarsidass Publishe, 978-81-208-2740, 8, 10]

Idea, Learning, Joy, Training

“She broke off, unable to find words to frame her struggling thoughts. What life would be with Hori, she did not know. In spite of his gentleness, in spite of his love for her, he would remain in some respects incalculable and incomprehensible. They would share moments of great beauty and richness together - but what of their common daily life?”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

(1945)

Love, Life

“For the first time I understood the haunting beauty of the song. It was the song of a killer who longed to die. It was the song of justice yearned for but not yet done.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Treason (1988)

Justice, Time

“477. A poore beauty finds more lovers than husbands.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

Lovers

“Live authentically. Why would you continue to compromise something that's beautiful to create something that is fake?”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 38

“I think that anyone who will take the trouble to consider the matter carefully will arrive at the same conclusion as I have, that art owes its origin to Nature herself, that this beautiful creation the world supplied the first model, while the original teacher was that divine intelligence which has not only made us superior to the other animals, but like God Himself, if I may venture to say it.”

Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) Italian painter, architect, writer and historian

Source: The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 1900, p. 5

God, World, Art, Intelligence

“The beauty of the democratic system of thought control, as contrasted with their clumsy totalitarian counterparts, is that they operate by subtly establishing on a voluntary basis – aided by the forces of nationalism and media control by substantial interests – presuppositions that set the limits of debate, rather than by imposing beliefs with a bludgeon. Then let the debate rage; the more lively and vigorous it is, the better the propaganda system is served, since the presuppositions (U. S. benevolence, lack of rational imperial goals, defensive posture, etc.) are more firmly established. Those who do not accept the fundamental principles of state propaganda are simply excluded from the debate”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

or if noticed, dismissed as “emotional,” “irresponsible,” etc.
Source: After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, p. 30.

Rage

““At least we can put a little sense into life.”
“I don’t know whether we do or whether we find what was always there,” he replied. “Nor do I care greatly. To me, the important thing is that the purpose—order, beauty, spirit, whatever you want to call it—does exist.””

Poul Anderson book The Enemy Stars

Source: The Enemy Stars (1959), Chapter 18 (p. 148)

Life, Sense

“Death is hard to keep in mind when there is work to be done. … Work does not by its nature permit us to do anything other than take it too seriously. It must destroy our sense of perspective, and we should be grateful to it for precisely this reason, for allowing us to mingle ourselves promiscuously with events, for letting us wear thoughts of our own death and the destruction of our enterprises with beautiful lightness, as mere intellectual propositions. … We function of the basis of a necessary myopia. Therein is the sheer energy of existence, a blind will no less impressive than that which we find in a moth arduously crossing a window ledge, … refusing to contemplate the broader scheme in which he will be dead by nightfall. The arguments for our triviality and vulnerability are too obvious, too well known and tedious to rehearse. What is interesting is that we may take it upon ourselves to approach tasks with utter determination and gravity even when their wider non-sense is clear. The impulse to exaggerate the significance of what we are doing, far from being an intellectual error, is really life itself coursing through us.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 324.

Life, Death, Error, Nature

“The French call such an anima figure a femme fatale. The sirens of the Greeks and the Lorelei of the Germans embody these dangerous aspects of the anima-in a word, destructive illusions. The following Siberian tale gives a particularly apt portrayal of such a destructive anima:
: A solitary hunter once had the experience of seeing a beautiful woman appear on the opposite bank of a river. She waved to him and sang, "Come, come. I've missed you, missed you. Now I want to put my arms around you, put my arms around you. Come, come, my nest is nearby, my nest. Come, come, lonely hunter, right now in the stillness of twilight." As he threw off his clothes and began swimming across to her, she suddenly flew away in the form of an owl, laughing mockingly. Swimming back, he drowned in the ice-cold river.
Here the anima symbolizes an unreal dream of love and happiness, of motherly love and security (the nest), an illusion that holds a man back from life. The hunter freezes to death because of his pursuit of an erotic fantasy.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Source: Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche (1994), The Anima as the Woman within the Man, p. 311

Love, Life, Death, Dreams

“…What I can't understand is why come here and try and change our country into the place that you've come from? And all I ask of people is come here, respect our country, respect our laws, our culture, our way of life. Be Australian, join us, enjoy this beautiful country and everything that it has to offer.”

Pauline Hanson (1954) Australian politician

Interview on Enough Rope (September 20, 2004) http://www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/transcripts/s1203646.htm

Life, People, Law, Way

“The Apocrypha… ought to be bound up with all your Bibles; it contains much that is beautiful and wise, and there is in history nothing finer than the description of Eleazar's end.”

John Tyndall (1820–1893) British scientist

New Fragments (1892)

History

“Darwinian evolution may be the most truthful and powerful idea ever generated by Western Science, but if we continue to illustrate our conviction with an indefensible, unsupported, entirely speculative, and basically rather silly story, then we are clothing a thing of beauty in rags - and we should be ashamed, "for the apparel oft proclaims the man."”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"The Tallest Tale", p. 318
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Truth, Idea, Science, Clothes

“For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle. [It] has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.”

John Cheever (1912–1982) American novelist and short story writer

Accepting National Medal for Literature (April 27, 1982).

Youth, Universe

“That microscopic look at village life taught me to hear the heart-beat of reality. To me the common man’s society is a maskless society. He does not carry that thick mask which the professional people, the upper classes, wear so that they might look nice and beautiful. Very often they do not dare to say what they really think and feel.”

Baba Amte (1914–2008) Indian freedom fighter, social worker

His fondness for the common man page=3
Baba Amte: A Vision of New India

Life, People, Feeling, Thinking

“And what is there else but pleasure, and to what else does beauty move on?”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

Source: The Path to Rome (1902), p. 421

Pleasure

“Beauty sat bathing by a spring”

Anthony Munday (1560–1633) English playwright and miscellaneous writer

Poem Colin http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1527.html

Spring

“All this will have left you disposed to understand one of our principal Futurist efforts, which consists of abolishing in literature the apparently indissoluble fusion of the two concepts of Woman and Beauty. This ideological a fusion has reduced all romance to a sort of heroic assault that a bellicose and lyrical male launches against a tower that bristles with enemies, a story which ends when the hero, now beneath starlight, carries the divine Beauty-Woman away to new heights. Novels such as Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo or Salammbô by Flaubert can clarify my point. It is a matter of a dominant leitmotif, already worn out, c of which we would like to disencumber literature and art in general.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

1910's, Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine' 1911
Source: Poggi, Christine, and Laura Wittman, eds. Futurism: An Anthology. Yale University Press, 2009. p. 89

Art, Literature, Understanding, Effort

“I have wept a million tears:
Pure and proud one, where are thine,
What the gain though all thy years
In unbroken beauty shine?
All your beauty cannot win
Truth we learn in pain and sighs:
You can never enter in
To the circle of the wise.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

By Still Waters (1906)

Pain, Truth, Tear, Learning

“His form was of the manliest beauty,
His heart was kind and soft;
Faithful below he did his duty,
But now he ’s gone aloft.”

Charles Dibdin (1745–1814) British musician, songwriter, dramatist, novelist and actor

Tom Bowling (c. 1788).

Faith, Heart

“These new means [in the modern film, 1920's] have given us a new mentality. We want to see clearly, we want to understand mechanisms, functions, motors, down to their subtlest details. Composite wholes are no longer enough for us – we want to feel and grasp the details of those wholes – and we realise that these details, these fragments, if seen in isolation, have a complete and particular life of their own... Close-ups in the cinema are a consecration of this new vision... A shoe as beautiful as a picture. A picture as beautiful as an X-ray machine.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote from: 'Actualités, Fernand Léger', in 'Varietés nr. 1', 1928, pp. 522-23
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1920's

Life, Shoe, Feeling, Understanding

“The muddy, impure world, so undiscriminating,
Seeks always to hide beauty, out of jealousy.”

Qu Yuan (-343–-278 BC) ancient Chinese poet

Source: "Encountering Sorrow" (trans. David Hawkes), Line 107

World, Jealousy

“I always like people who have developed long and hard, particularly through introspection and a lot of dedication. I think that what they arrive at is usually…deeper and more beautiful…than the person who seems to have that ability and fluidity from the beginning. I say this because it's a good message to give to young talents who feel as I used to. You hear musicians playing with great fluidity and complete conception early on, and you don't have that ability. I didn't. I had to know what I was doing. And ultimately it turned out that these people weren't able to carry their thing very far. I found myself being more attracted to artists who have developed through the years and become better and deeper musicians. I believe in things that are developed through hard work.”

Bill Evans (1929–1980) American jazz pianist

People, Feeling, Thinking, Personality

“No no, Jock…we're going to push him out of a window. Your bedroom window, I think. Yes, and we'll undress him first and say that he was making advances to you and jumped out of the window in a frenzy of thwarted love."
"I say, Charlie, really, what a filthy rotten idea; I mean, think of my wife."
"I never think of policemen's wives, their beauty maddens me like wine.”

Kyril Bonfiglioli (1928–1985) British art dealer

Source: The Mortdecai Trilogy, Don't Point That Thing At Me (1972), Ch. 3.

Love, Idea, Thinking, Wine

“Cherish the Minnesota State Fair. Wherever you find beauty and simplicity and truth, know that there is a committee somewhere planning to improve it --- don't let them do it.”

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

University of Minnesota Alumni Association (UMAA) Annual Meeting Keynote Speech (29 April 1992) UMAA 199204 to 199306 Meeting Minutes http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/48842/1/199204-199306.pdf

Truth

“I'm weary, I'm weary. Oh! pleasure is pain
When its spell has been broken again and again.
I am weary of smiles that are bought and are sold,
I am weary of beauty whose fetters are gold,
I am weary of wealth—what makes it of me
But that which the basest and lowest might be?”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Golden Violet - The Eastern King
The Golden Violet (1827)

Pain, Pleasure, Smile, Wealth

“Passing round Point Conception, and steering easterly, we opened the islands that form, with the mainland, the canal of Santa Barbara. There they are, Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa, and there is the beautiful point, Santa Buenaventura; and there lies Santa Barbara on its plain, with its amphitheater of high hills and distant mountains. There is the old white mission with its belfries, and there the town, with its one-story adobe houses, with here and there a two-story wooden house of later build; yet little is it altered — the same repose in the golden sunlight and glorious climate, sheltered by its hills; and then, more remindful than anything else, there roars and tumbles upon the beach the same grand surf of the great Pacific… the same bright-blue ocean, and the surf making just the same monotonous, melancholy roar, and the same dreamy town.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1815–1882) United States author and lawyer

Twenty-Four Years After (1869)

Mountain, Distant, Housing

“Things are never beautiful by themselves but appear so to anyone who projects on to them his superabundance of life. But just as unconscious activity is unaware of itself as such, so man ‘forgets himself’ as the cause of these ‘beauties’ and imagines that the world itself is laden with them.”

Sarah Kofman (1934–1994) philosopher from France

Source: Nietzsche et la métaphore (1972), p. 29

Life, World, Imagination, Appearance

“When he saw Tiny, he was delighted, and thought her the prettiest little maiden he had ever seen. He took the gold crown from his head, and placed it on hers, and asked her name, and if she would be his wife, and queen over all the flowers. This certainly was a very different sort of husband to the son of a toad, or the mole, with my black velvet and fur; so she said, "Yes," to the handsome prince. Then all the flowers opened, and out of each came a little lady or a tiny lord, all so pretty it was quite a pleasure to look at them. Each of them brought Tiny a present; but the best gift was a pair of beautiful wings, which had belonged to a large white fly and they fastened them to Tiny's shoulders, so that she might fly from flower to flower.”

Hans Christian Andersen Thumbelina

Thumbelina
Fairy Tales (1835)

Pleasure, Flowers, Flying

“It was a beautiful day to grow up.”

Christopher Golden (1967) American writer

Body of Evidence

“There is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box—Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others. I have been in Hell at last. Desar was right; it is Urras; Hell is Urras.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 11 (pp. 346-347)

People, Fear, Way, Hell

“There is a fair woman in the west,
who is as bright as sunlight.
She wears a dress of the finest silk
and jewelry shines from her left, her right.
Her face is a charm, so full of grace,
lightly perfuming the breeze.
Climbing upward, she keeps watch for her loved one,
holding her sleeves, she faces the morning sun.
She hovers, she drifts through the sky,
waving her sleeves, she dances,
flies like the wind, like a cloud, in [a] trance.
Every so often, she glances at me,
but for me this beauty is out of reach.
Left alone, I lament my fate.”

Ruan Ji (210–263) One of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove

Poem XIX, translated by Wu Fusheng and Graham Hartill in The Poem of Ruan Ji (2006), p. 39, as reported in Constructing Irregular Theology (2009) by Paul S. Chung, p. 13

Love, Fate, Sun, Dance

“I remember when singers were singers. Ugly people. Aretha Franklin needed a lot of room to eat her chicken wings. Janis Joplin used to come out in clothes woven from her own vomit. Nina Simone, amazing singer, could look at a railway track and buckle it. It didn’t matter; They were beautiful people because of what they could do.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

Monster (2004)

People, Clothes

“There is beautiful in the grotesque.”

Guillermo del Toro (1964) Mexican film director

Interview with Guillermo del Toro. http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/ntn/ntn-20090526-1006-Feature_guest_-_Guillermo_del_Toro-048.mp3

“Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honor turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.”

Andrew Marvell To His Coy Mistress

To His Coy Mistress (1650-1652)

Thinking

“deprivation of the beautiful woman and sex with her until the man guarantees economic security in return; (…)”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part IV: Where do we go from here, p. 358.

Sex

“But though there be naturally a wide difference in point of delicacy between one person and another, nothing tends further to encrease and improve this talent, than practice in a particular art, and the frequent survey or contemplation of a particular species of beauty.”

David Hume book Four Dissertations

Four Dissertations (1757)

Art, Nature, Personality

“Scholars, theologians, and even poets have yet to be able to truly describe and touch upon the beauty, romance, and magic of a relationship built on 100% authenticity.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 110

“Love is a command, not just a feeling. Somehow, in the romantic world of music and theater we have made love to be what it is not. We have so mixed it with beauty and charm and sensuality and contact that we have robbed it of its higher call of cherishing and nurturing.”

Ravi Zacharias (1946) Indian philosopher

[I, Isaac, Take Thee, Rebekah: Moving from Romance to Lasting Love, 2005, 9781418515812, http://books.google.com/books?id=lhWCB2v3UlQC&pg=PA30&dq=%22Love+is+a+command%22, 39]
2000s

Love, World, Music, Feeling

“When I was born good fairies clustered round my cradle, showering me with wit, beauty, grace, freedom from dandruff, natural piety and other great gifts, but the Wicked Fairy Carabosse (who had not been invited to the party) crept to my side and screamed "Let him be cursed with Inability To Do Little Jobs Around The House", and so it has always been.”

Robertson Davies book The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

Nature, Freedom, Housing

“So quiet and subtle is the beauty of December that escapes the notice of many people their whole lives through.. Colour gives way to form. every branch distinct, in a delicate tracery against the sky.. new vistas obscured all Summer by leafage, now open up.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

December Chapter The Peverel Papers - A yearbook of the countryside ed Julian Shuckburgh Century Hutchinson 1986
The Peverel Papers

People, Way, Summer

“She sparked a prairie fire that continues to blaze brightly in the hearts of freedom-loving people in all nations; and the non-violent revolution she set in motion continues to reverberate in nation after nation as an inspiration to human liberation movements everywhere. Rosa Parks provided us with a beautiful example of the power of one. How one courageous person can make a great difference in advancing human freedom. She showed us the power of humility and disciplined nonviolence in winning hearts and minds to support our freedom struggle; and she set for the entire world a vibrant example of African American womanhood fully engaged in the work of building a more just and decent society.”

Bernice King (1963) American minister, daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Remarks at the funeral of Rosa Parks (2 November 2005) http://www.democracynow.org/2005/11/3/bernice_king_delivers_remarks_at_rosa Against New Hampshire not formally naming Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (25 January 1994) http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1994-01-25/news/9401250477_1_new-hampshire-bernice-king-holiday

Love, People, World, Courage

“In art, origin and value cannot be treated as independent. Those who enjoy poetry and painting must be at least dimly aware of a poet beyond the poem and a painter beyond the picture. If by some unimaginable process works of beauty could be produced by machinery, as a symmetrical colour pattern is produced by a kaleidoscope, we might think them beautiful till we knew their origin, after which we should be rather disposed to describe them as ingenious. And this is not, I think, because we are unable to estimate works of art as they are in themselves, not because we must needs buttress up our opinions by extraneous and irrevelant considerations; but rather because a work of art requires an artist. not merely in the order of natural causation, but as a matter of a-sthetie necessity. It conveys a message which is valueless to the recipient, unless it be understood by the sender. It must be expressive.”

Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) British Conservative politician and statesman

Theism and humanism

Art, Nature, Thinking, Painting

“The ecclesiastical description of Hell is that of a horrible place of fire and torment; in Dante's Inferno, and in northern climes, it was thought to be an icy cold region, a giant refrigerator. (Even with all their threats of eternal damnation and soul roasting, Christian missionaries have run across some who were not so quick to swallow their drivel. Pleasure and pain, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder. So, when missionaries ventured into Alaska and warned the Eskimos of the horrors of Hell and the blazing lake of fire awaiting transgressors, they eagerly asked: "How do we get there?")”

Anton LaVey book The Satanic Bible

The Satanic Bible (1969)

Pain, Pleasure, Soul, Hell

“In 1891 a student in Paris, I found myself face to face with a beautiful development of landscape painting, which was quite new to me. "Impressionism," together with its numerous progeny of eccentric offshoots, was at the time causing a great furore in the schools. Curiously enough I had been charged with copying Monet's style long before I had seen his actual work, so that my conversion into an enthusiastic Impressionist was short, in fact, an instantaneous process.”

Wynford Dewhurst (1864–1941) British artist

Source: Impressionist Painting: its genesis and development. (1904), p. vii; Preface.

School, Time, Painting

“Nietzsche … criticizes Schopenhauerian aesthetics for not freeing itself from Kant’s moralistic: ‘that is beautiful which gives us pleasure without interest’.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 95

Pleasure

“Foo, a beautiful gal wastes her time gracin' up this swamp.”

Walt Kelly (1913–1973) American cartoonist

Miz Beaver
Pogo comic strip (1948 - 1975), Others

Time

“Hunting, fishing, drawing, and music occupied my every moment; cares I knew not, and cared naught about them. I purchased excellent and beautiful horses, visited all such neighbors as I found congenial spirits, and was as happy as happy could be.”

John James Audubon (1785–1851) American ornithologist, naturalist, and painter

On his life at Mill Grove, in Pennsylvania http://pa.audubon.org/centers_mill_grove.html in "Audubon's Story of His Youth" edited by Maria R. Audubon, in Scribner's Magazine Vol. XIII, No. 3, (March 1893), p. 278

Music, Fish, Horse, Drawing

“The most beautiful discoveries since the Renaissance, indeed since the beginnings of all science, are the laws governing light, whether moving through a uniform medium, or being reflected from an opaque surface, or changing direction upon entering another transparent medium.”

Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters

Accord de différentes loix de la nature qui avoient jusqu’ici paru incompatibles (1744)

Law, Light, Science, Change

“In America, black is beautiful. To be black is to be more righteous, nobler; carry the heaviest historic baggage — heavier than the Holocaust — and be encouraged to perpetually and publicly pick at those suppurating sores. To be black is to have an unwritten, implicit social contract with wider, whiter society. To be black it to be born with an IOY (I Own You); it is to be owed apologies, obsequiousness, education, and auto-exculpation for any wrongdoing.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Rachel Dolezal: A Racially Abused Girl—Really," http://thelibertarianalliance.com/2015/07/19/rachel-dolezal-a-racially-abused-girl-really/ The Libertarian Alliance, July 19, 2015. 2010s, 2015

Education

“Could this be what people were fighting over, the many possessions that surrounded him? These objects with so much value and so little use? He thought how the sweep of a hand or the lick of a flame and they would be broken and burned. Maybe it was the weak and the fragile and the beautiful that made you the craziest and made you fight the hardest.”

Robert Olmstead (1954) American writer

Coal Black Horse (2007)

People, Fight

“Being beautiful can never hurt, but you have to have more. You have to sparkle, you have to be fun, you have to make your brain work if you have one.”

Sophia Loren (1934) Italian actress

As quoted in Bombshell (2004) by Lynda Curnyn, p. 196.

Hurt

“Well, then I'd say it takes two to tango. My guess is that both of you are right and both of you are wrong. That's the way most arguments go, anyway. People are who they are and no one is perfect, but marriage is about becoming a team. You're going to spend the rest of your life learning about each other, and every now and then, things blow up. But the beauty of marriage is that if you picked the right person and you both love each other, you'll alway figure out a way to get through it.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Jeremy's father, Chapter 11, p. 148
2000s, At First Sight (2005)

Love, Life, Marriage, People

“[My forthcoming book features] Noelle's experience as a loveable, yet very unconventional looking dog, who must find her way through life in her new adopted home, feeling different and confronting a bevy of clustered animal cliques whose ultimate reluctance to include Noelle in their world is soon offset by Noelle's true, albeit hidden, beauty. [I hope it has] special resonance with the immigrant communities in the United States (primarily of Hispanic heritage) who may, like Noelle, feel they culturally do not, and will not, fit in with a culture so foreign from their own.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

written statement on December 6, 2004
2007, 2008

Life, Books, World, Dogs

“For, among the world's incertitudes, this thing called arithmetic is established by a sure reasoning that we comprehend as we do the heavenly bodies. It is an intelligible pattern, a beautiful system, that both binds the heavens and preserves the earth. For is there anything that lacks measure, or transcends weight? It includes all, it rules all, and all things have their beauty because they are perceived under its standard.”
Haec enim quae appellatur arithmetica inter ambigua mundi certissima ratione consistit, quam cum caelestibus aequaliter novimus: evidens ordo, pulchra dispositio, cognitio simplex, immobilis scientia, quae et superna continet et terrena custodit. quid est enim quod aut mensuram non habeat aut pondus excedat? omnia complectitur, cuncta moderatur et universa hinc pulchritudinem capiunt, quia sub modo ipsius esse noscuntur.

Cassiodorus Variae

Bk. 1, no. 10; p. 12.
Variae

World, Intelligence

“Janza grinned, amazed at the accuracy of Archie's predictions. You'll have a great year, Achie had said. Which Janza echoed now: "We're going to have a great year, Bunting." Bunting nodded. Continued to stare into space. Not wanting to look at Janza nor or anybody or anything. Staring into the future, next year, beyond. Him, Bunting, in command of the entire school. Stooges at his beck and call. An army at his disposal. No rules except those he made up. The boss. More than that. Like a dictator, for crissake. Beautiful.”

Robert Cormier book Beyond the Chocolate War

Source: Beyond the Chocolate War (1985), p. 278

School, Future

“Let me start a different/ analysis by recalling an idea from Max Weber. He characterized cultural modernity as the separation of the substantive reason expressed in religion and metaphysics into three autonomous spheres. They are science, morality and art. These came to be differentiated because the unified world-views of religion and metaphysics fell apart. Since the 18th century, the problems inherited from these older world-views could be arranged so as to fall under specific aspects of validity: truth, normative rightness, authenticity and beauty. They could then be handled as questions of knowledge, or of justice and morality, or of taste. Scientific discourse, theories of morality, Jurisprudence, and the production and criticism of art could in turn be institutionalized. Each domain of culture could be made to correspond to cultural professions in which problems could be dealt with as the concern of special experts. This professionalized treatment of the cultural tradition brings to the fore the intrinsic structures of each of the three dimensions of culture. There appear the structures of cognitive-instrumental, of moral-practical and of aesthetic-expressive rationality, each of these under the control of specialists who seem more adept at being logical in these particular ways than other people are. As a result, the distance grows between the culture of the experts and that of the larger public. What accrues to culture through specialized treatment and reflection does not immediately and necessarily become the property of everyday praxis. With cultural rationalization of this sort, the threat increases that the life-world, whose traditional substance has already been devalued, will become more and more impoverished.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: Modernity — An Incomplete Project, 1983, p. 8-9

Life, People, Truth, World

“A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift —
A Love in desolation masked; — a Power
Girt round with weakness; — it can scarce uplift
The weight of the superincumbent hour;
It is a dying lamp, a falling shower,
A breaking billow; — even whilst we speak
Is it not broken? On the withering flower
The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek
The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

St. XXXII
Adonais (1821)

Love, Life, Smile, Flowers

“People understand the meaning of eating lies in the nourishment of the body only when they cease to consider that the object of that activity is pleasure. …People understand the meaning of art only when they cease to consider that the aim of that activity is beauty, i. e., pleasure.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What is Art? (1897)

People, Pleasure, Art, Understanding

“Guide, Pyaasa — these are my films that can be remade with current actors. But the music and lyrics should not be changed. Because you cannot have a samba or bhangra beat for the seduction scene in Pyaasa…the beauty will be lost.”

Waheeda Rehman (1938) Indian actress

Quote, Grace personified: Waheeda Rehman

Music, Change

“(…) Is not meanness also a form of madness? And is not madness the misuse of the mind? Humanity’s problem lies in this misuse of the mind only. All the treasures of nature and spirit are open to man who will use his mind rightly. (…) Fear and greed cause the misuse of the mind. The right use of mind is in the service of love, of life, of truth, of beauty.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Mind
Source: I am That, P.128.

Love, Life, Truth, Fear

“My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.”

Tom Stoppard (1937) British playwright

Misattributed
Source: Hermann Weyl as quoted by Freeman Dyson: "Characteristic of Weyl was an aesthetic sense which dominated his thinking on all subjects. He once said to me, half-joking, 'My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.'" - Freeman Dyson, "Obituary of Hermann Weyl," Nature (1956-03-10), pp. 457-458.

“Just as eunuchs will never know aesthetics as applied to the selection of beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness, for happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is reasoned or defined.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), V : The Rationalist Dissolution

Women, Happiness

“You're beautiful, like a May fly.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Statement to his future wife Mary Welsh, recalled in her obituaries (26 November 1986)

Flying

“Sharpe's sword was lucky. There was a soldier's goddess and her name was Fate and she had liked the sword Harper made for Sharpe. The Kligenthal was stained with the blood of friends, with the torture of flayed priests, and the beautiful sword contained not luck, but evil.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Narrator, p. 312
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Sword (1983)

Fate, Evil

“We're thinking about building the wall as a solar wall, so it creates energy, and pays for itself. And this way Mexico will have to pay much less money, and that's good, right, is that good? You're the first group I've told that to, a solar wall, makes sense, let's see, we're working it out, we'll see, solar wall, panels, beautiful. I mean actually think of it, the higher it goes the more valuable it is, it's like… pretty good imagination [points to his own head], right, good? My idea.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

President Trump Holds a Rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/06/21/president-trump-holds-iowa-rally-live-blog.html (21 June 2017) 2010s, 2017, June

Money, Way, Imagination, Idea

“Of course, my landscapes are not only beautiful or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all 'untruthful'... By 'untruthful' I mean the glorifying way we look at Nature – Nature, which in all its forms is always against us, because it knows no meaning, no pity, no sympathy, because it knows nothing and is absolutely mindless: the total antithesis of ourselves.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 108, note 61

Way, Nature

“Beauty should be around the beautiful.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Beauty

“I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty;
I woke, and found that life was Duty.
Was thy dream then a shadowy lie?
Toil on, poor heart, unceasingly;
And thou shalt find thy dream to be
A truth and noonday light to thee.”

Ellen Sturgis Hooper (1812–1848) American writer

Life a Duty, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "Straight is the line of Duty, / Curved is the line of Beauty, / Follow the straight line, thou hall see / The curved line ever follow thee", William Maccall (c. 1830).

Life, Truth, Lie, Dreams

“Beauty in art is truth bathed in an impression received from nature. I am struck upon seeing a certain place. While I strive for a conscientious imitation, I yet never for an instant lose the emotion that has taken hold of me. Reality is one part of art; feeling completes it... Before any site and any object, abandon yourself to your first impression. If you have really been touched, you will convey to others the sincerity of your emotion.”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) French landscape painter and printmaker in etching

Quote from Corot's 'Notebooks', ca. 1856, as quoted in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 241
1850s

Truth, Art, Feeling, Nature

“All, then, are agreed on the pressing nature of this problem, all are bent on its solution, and though it would doubtless be quite Utopian to expect a similar agreement as to the value of any remedy that may be proposed, it is at least of immense importance that, on a subject thus universally regarded as of supreme importance, we have such a consensus of opinion at the outset. This will be the more remarkable and the more hopeful sign when it is shown, as I believe will be conclusively shown in this work, that the answer to this, one of the most pressing questions of the day, makes of comparatively easy solution many other problems which have hitherto taxed the ingenuity of the greatest thinkers and reformers of our time. Yes, the key to the problem how to restore the people to the land — that beautiful land of ours, with its canopy of sky, the air that blows upon it, the sun that warms it, the rain and dew that moisten it — the very embodiment of Divine love for man — is indeed a Master-Key, for it is the key to a portal through which, even when scarce ajar, will be seen to pour a flood of light on the problems of intemperance, of excessive toil, of restless anxiety, of grinding poverty — the true limits of Governmental interference, ay, and even the relations of man to the Supreme Power.”

Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928) British writer, founder of the garden city movement

Introduction.
Garden Cities of To-morrow (1898)

Love, People, Hope, Question

“BEAUTIFUL BLUEBERRIES.”

Christopher McCandless (1968–1992) American hiker and explorer

Final jounal entry, August 8, 1992. http://www.christophermccandless.info/bio.html

“The good taste we speak of, which is that of literature, is not limited to what we call the sciences, but extends itself imperceptibly to other arts, such as architecture, painting, sculpture, and music. 'Tis the same discerning faculty which introduces universally the same elegance, the same symmetry, and the same order in the disposition of the parts; which inclines us to a noble simplicity, to natural beauties, and a judicious choice of ornaments. On the other hand, the depravation of taste in arts has been always a mark and consequence of the depravation of taste in literature. … The good taste of literature reaches also to public customs, and the manner of living. An habit of consulting the best rules upon one subject, naturally leads to the doing it also upon others.”

Charles Rollin (1661–1741) French historian

The Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Lettres, Vol. I, The Third Edition (1742), Part II, Ch. 2: 'General Reflections upon what is called good Taste', pp. 45–46

Art, Music, Literature, Nature

“Zest is the secret of all beauty. There is no beauty that is attractive without zest.”

Christian Dior (1905–1957) French fashion designer

Quoted in Ladies' Home Journal, April 1956 http://books.google.com/books?id=4c8fAQAAMAAJ&q=%22Zest+is+the+secret+of+all+beauty+There+is+no+beauty+that+is+attractive+without+zest%22&pg=PA90#v=onepage

Secret

“It is our own mental attitude which makes the world what it is for us. Our thought make things beautiful, our thoughts make things ugly. The whole world is in our own minds. Learn to see things in the proper light. First, believe in this world — that there is meaning behind everything. Everything in the world is good, is holy and beautiful. If you see something evil, think that you are not understanding it in the right light. throw the burden on yourselves!”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

World, Understanding, Thinking, Light

“a little more
conversation revealed
that warty bliggens
considers himself to be
the center of the said
universe
the earth exists
to grow toadstools for him
to sit under
the sun to give him light
by day and the moon
and wheeling constellations
to make beautiful
the night for the sake of
warty bliggens”

Don Marquis (1878–1937) American writer

warty bliggens, the toad

Light, Universe, Sun, Night

“The human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Preface.
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)

“It is very beautiful over there!”

Thomas Edison (1847–1931) American inventor and businessman

These have sometimes been reported as his last words, but were actually spoken several days before his death, as he awoke from a nap, gazing upwards, as reported by his physician Dr. Hubert S. Howe, in Thomas A. Edison, Benefactor of Mankind : The Romantic Life Story of the World's Greatest Inventor (1931) by Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ch. 25 : Edison's Views on Life — His Philosophy and Religion, p. 295.
1930s

“You can imagine that it is not easy to describe this modern vision of the nature of things in any manner intelligible to those who have not our advantages. There is much in this vision which will remind you of your mystics; yet between them and us there is far more difference than similarity, in respect both of the matter and the manner of our thought. For while they are confident that the cosmos is perfect, we are sure only that it is very beautiful. While they pass to their conclusion without the aid of intellect, we have used that staff every step of the way. Thus, even when in respect of conclusions we agree with your mystics rather than your plodding intellectuals, in respect of method we applaud most your intellectuals; for they scorned to deceive themselves with comfortable fantasies.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XV: The Last Men; Section 3, “A Racial Awakening” (pp. 228-229)

Way, Confidence, Imagination, Intelligence

“In general, we look for a new law by the following process: First we guess it. Then we – now don't laugh, that's really true. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what, if this is right, if this law that we guessed is right, to see what it would imply. And then we compare the computation results to nature, or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn't make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. That's all there is to it.”

Richard Feynman book The Character of Physical Law

same passage in transcript: video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2NnquxdWFk&t=16m46s The Character of Physical Law (1965) Variant: In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is – if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.

Law, Nature, Science

“The trends that produced Schumann’s early piano works started out not so much from Weber’s refined brilliance as from Schubert’s more intimate and deeply soul-searching idiom. His creative imagination took him well beyond the harmonic sequences known until his time. He looked at the fugues and canons of earlier composers and discovered in them a Romantic principle. In the interweaving of the voices, the essence of counterpoint found its parallel in the mysterious relationships between the human psyche and exterior phenomena, which Schumann felt impelled to express. Schubert’s broad melodic lyricism has often been contrasted with Schumann’s terse, often quickly repeated motifs, and by comparison Schumann is often erroneously seen as short-winded. Yet it is precisely with these short melodic formulae that he shone his searchlight into the previously unplumbed depths of the human psyche. With them, in a complex canonic web, he wove a dense tissue of sound capable of taking in and reflecting back all the poetical character present. His actual melodies rarely have an arioso form; his harmonic system combines subtle chromatic progressions, suspensions, a rapid alternation of minor and major, and point d’orgue. The shape of Schumann’s scores is characterized by contrapuntal lines, and can at first seem opaque or confused. His music is frequently marked by martial dotted rhythms or dance-like triple time signatures. He loves to veil accented beats of the bar by teasingly intertwining two simultaneous voices in independent motion. This highly inde-pendent instrumental style is perfectly attuned to his own particular compositional idiom. After a period in which the piano had indulged in sensuous beauty of sound and brilliant coloration, in Schumann it again became a tool for conveying poetic monologues in musical terms.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Love, Music, Color, Soul

“But it isn’t absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain. For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is, in the end, something good and even beautiful, because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life.”

Carlo Rovelli book The Order of Time

Source: The Order of Time (2018), p. 105

Love, Life, Pain

“The stars are forth, the moon above the tops
Of the snow-shining mountains. Beautiful!
I linger yet with Nature, for the Night
Hath been to me a more familiar face
Than that of man; and in her starry shade
Of dim and solitary loveliness,
I learn'd the language of another world.”

George Gordon Byron book Manfred

Act III, scene iv.
Manfred (1817)

World, Mountain, Star, Nature

“For me the different religions are beautiful flowers from the same garden, or they are branches of the same majestic tree. Therefore they are equally true, though being received and interpreted through human instruments equally imperfect.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Harijan, 30-1-1937, p. 407; In: My God (1962), Chapter 13. Pathways of God http://www.mkgandhi.org/god/mygod/pathwaystogod.html, Printed and Published by: Jitendra T. Desai, Navajivan Mudranalaya, Ahemadabad-380014 India Posthumous publications (1950s and later)

Religion, Flowers, Tree

“Now, such an enterprise as would be the drawing and printing [by lithography ] of a series of, for instance, thirty pages of types of workmen, a sower, a digger, a woodcutter, a plowman, a wash-woman, then also a child's cradle or a man from the almshouse - well, the whole immeasurable field lies open, there are plenty of beautiful subjects - I should think the following would be the best way: as it is useful and necessary that Dutch drawings are made, printed, and spread, destined for the houses of workmen, a few persons should unite in order to use their full strength for this end.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

quote in his letter to brother Theo, from The Hague, The Netherlands in Autumn 1882; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 249), p. 20 1880s, 1882

Way, Thinking, Drawing, Housing

“How beautiful life is! Music and dancing! The violins are sobbing. The first stopper of a bottle of champagne bangs. And now there's a mad singing and shouting. Everybody joins in and sings and shouts! Embracing, friendship, eternal friendship! How beautiful the women are! Dressed in black and red. But you are the prettiest, Hertha! … Hey, you grumblers, go to hell! Music and dancing. The violins are sobbing. Women dressed in black and red. But you are the prettiest, Hertha!”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Wie schön ist das Leben! Musik und Tanz! Die Geigen schluchzen. Der erste Sektpfropfen knallt. Und nun ein tolles Singen und Schreien. Man singt und schreit mit. Umarmung, Freundschaft, ewige Freundschaft! Welch' schöne Frauen! In schwarz und rot! Und doch bist Du die Schönste, Hertha Holk! … Heda, ihr Miesmacher, der Teufel soll euch holen! Musik und Tanz. Die Geigen schluchzen. Frauen in schwarz und rot. Und doch bist Du die Schönste, Hertha Holk!
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

Life, Women, Friendship, Music

“Beauty is one in the universe, and, whatever form it assumes, it always arouses a religious feeling in the hearts of mankind.”

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël book Corinne

Bk. 8, ch. 2
Corinne (1807)

Feeling, Universe, Heart

“Hidden beauty is sweetest.”

Francesco Petrarca Il Canzoniere

Una chiusa bellezza è piú soave.
Canzone 105, st. 4
Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Life

“Oh dear, oh dear, how stupid men are when they get an idea into their heads! I tell you he's a good dragon, and a friend of mine, and tells me the most beautiful stories you ever heard, all about old times and when he was little. And he's been so kind to mother, and mother'd do anything for him. And father likes him too, though father doesn't hold with art and poetry much, and always falls asleep when the dragon starts talking about style. But the fact is, nobody can help liking him when once they know him. He's so engaging and so trustful, and as simple as a child!”

Kenneth Grahame book The Reluctant Dragon

The Boy to St. George
Dream Days (1898), The Reluctant Dragon

Men, Stupidity, Art, Idea

“Heavenly wonderfully beautiful that Wolfhezerland with its stream and pines.. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)”

Anton Mauve (1838–1888) Dutch painter (1838–1888)

(version in original Dutch / origineel citaat van Anton Mauve, in het Nederlands:) Goddelijk heerlijk schoon dat met zijne beekje en dennen.. In a letter to Willem Maris, 1863; as cited in: 'Zó Hollands - Het Hollandse landschap in de Nederlandse kunst sinds 1850', Antoon Erftemeijer https://www.franshalsmuseum.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/zohollands_eindversie_def_1.pdf; Frans Hals museum | De Hallen, Haarlem 2011, p. 31 1860's Variant: All my canvases I paint after sketches. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)

“The pain passes but the beauty remains.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

As quoted in: Instituto Nacional de Previsión (Spain) (1974). 6.o Congreso Internacional de Medicina Fisica: 2-6 julio 1974. p. 424
Renoir replied to Matisse, who had asked him why he persisted in painting at the expense of such torture.
undated quotes

For Father, Pain

“In my first year of marriage I have often wept and the tears fall often as they did in my childhood - in large drops. They occur when I hear music and when I see beautiful things which move me. In the last analysis, I live alone just as much as I did in my childhood. This aloneness makes me sometimes sad and sometimes happy. I believe it deepens one's life. One lives less according to outward appearances... One lives inwardly.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

note from her Journal, March 1902; as quoted by Susan P. Bachrach, in 'Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Woman and Artist as Revealed Through Her Depiction of Children', (text on: Fembio - Notable Woman International: Biographies http://www.fembio.org/english/biography.php/woman/biography_extra/paula-modersohn-becker/) 1900 - 1905

Life, Marriage, Sadness, Music

“The desire for truth so prominent in the quest of science, a reaching out of the spirit from its isolation to something beyond, a response to beauty in nature and art, an Inner Light of conviction and guidance—are these as much a part of our being as our sensitivity to sense impressions?”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Source: Science and the Unseen World (1929), Ch. IV, p.42-43

Truth, Art, Nature, Sense

“One woman approached me as she walked past and, pointing to her four children who were manfully helping the smallest ones over the rough ground, whispered: 'How can you bring yourself to kill such beautiful, darling children? Have you no heart at all?' One old man, as he passed me, hissed: 'Germany will pay a heavy penance for this mass murder of the Jews.' His eyes glowed with hatred as he said this. Nevertheless he walked calmly into the gas-chamber.”

Rudolf Höss (1901–1947) German war criminal, commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp

Quoted in "Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess" - Page 150 - by Rudolf Hoess, Constantine Fitzgibbon, Primo Levi, Joachim Neugroschel - History - 2000

Children, Past, Help, Heart

Quotes about beauty page 25

Quotes about beauty
page 25