Quotes about beauty
page 31

“Francis Bacon once said there is no beauty that hath not some strangeness to its proportion. Cameron Diaz proves that- she's got a mouth like a slice of watermelon. But the Flying Scotsman proves it to be wrong. There is no strangeness at all. He is exquisite to behold, partly because he is so nicely balanced and partly because he seems to shout "I AM VERY POWERFUL.'”

Jeremy Clarkson (1960) English broadcaster, journalist and writer

I Know You Got Soul (2004)

Flying

“When you are very young, you tend to accept standards for such momentous judgments as to whether a girl is beautiful; when you reach the age of experience you come to know beauty in the sense that “knowing” is to possess. Beauty does more than reflect light, it is the action of energy on form, glowing as a total function. This is singularly true of a grouse dog in his consecration to his bird.”

George Bird Evans (1906–1998) American writer

An Affair with Grouse (1982)

Age, Dogs, Girl, Bird

“I have always known what I wanted, and that was beauty… in every form.”

Joan Crawford (1904–1977) American actress

Interview, Hollywood Reporter (1949)

“The author has accused her own mother of indulging in deviant sexuality. Yet, Mary Roy takes pride in the "beautiful work" by her daughter. "Why is it so?"”

E. M. S. Namboodiripad (1909–1998) Indian politician

Above quotes on Arundhati Roy’s novel "The God of Small Things" in which she had criticized E.M.S. cited in EMS attacks literary content of Arundhati Roy's novel, 29 November 1997, 13 December 2013, Rediff.com http://www.rediff.com/news/nov/29roy.htm,

Daughters

“At fourteen months he began speaking in sentences, short and of his own structure, but sentences. The subjects of his conversation, or, rather, his statements, were consistently egocentric. Normal again—no one expects an infant to write essays on the beauties of altruism.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Beyond This Horizon

Source: Beyond This Horizon (1948; originally serialized in 1942), Chapter 14, “—and beat him when he sneezes”, p. 131

“Divine in hookas, glorious in a pipe
When tipp'd with amber, mellow, rich, and ripe;
Like other charmers, wooing the caress
More dazzlingly when daring in full dress;
Yet thy true lovers more admire by far
Thy naked beauties—give me a cigar!”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

The Island (1823), Canto II, Stanza 19.

Lovers

“What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original, for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated in many copies rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and beauty, wherever it may be seen.”

Norbert Wiener book The Human Use of Human Beings

VIII. Role of the Intellectual and the Scientist. p. 135
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)

School, Disappointment, Learning, Universe

“If God hath made this world so fair,
Where sin and death abound,
How beautiful beyond compare
Will paradise be found!”

James Montgomery (1771–1854) British editor, hymn writer, and poet

The Earth full of God's Goodness.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Death, God, World

“Today we preach that science is not science unless it is quantitative. We substitute correlations for causal studies, and physical equations for organic reasoning. Measurements and equations are supposed to sharpen thinking, but, in my observation, they more often tend to make the thinking noncausal and fuzzy. They tend to become the object of scientific manipulation instead of auxiliary tests of crucial inferences.
Many - perhaps most - of the great issues of science are qualitative, not quantitative, even in physics and chemistry. Equations and measurements are useful when and only when they are related to proof; but proof or disproof comes first and is in fact strongest when it is absolutely convincing without any quantitative measurement.
Or to say it another way, you can catch phenomena in a logical box or in a mathematical box. The logical box is coarse but strong. The mathematical box is fine-grained but flimsy. The mathematical box is a beautiful way of wrapping up a problem, but it will not hold the phenomena unless they have been caught in a logical box to begin with.”

John R. Platt (1918–1992) American physicist

John R. Platt (1964) " Science, Strong Inference -- Proper Scientific Method (The New Baconians) http://256.com/gray/docs/strong_inference.html. In: Science Magazine 16 October 1964, Volume 146, Number 3642. Cited in: Gerald Weinberg (1975) Introduction to General Systems Thinking. p. 1, and in multiple other sources.

Way, Mathematics, Problem, Thinking

“One of the biggest box-office successes in movie history — probably because for young audiences it's like getting a box of Cracker Jack that is all prizes. Written and directed by George Lucas, the film is enjoyable in its own terms, but it's exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids to the circus. There's no breather in the picture, no lyricism; the only attempt at beauty is in the image of a double sunset. The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, and the relentless pacing drive every idea out of your head, and even if you've been entertained, you may feel cheated of some dimension — a sense of wonder, perhaps. It's an epic without a dream.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

"Star Wars," p. 714.
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

Dreams, Feeling, History, Idea

“Lacan conceives the difference between the two deaths as the difference being real (biological) death and its symbolization, the settling of accounts the accomplishment of symbolic destiny (deathbed confession in Catholicism, for example). This gap can be filled in various ways; it can contain either sublime beauty or fearsome monsters: in Antigone's case, her symbolic death, her exclusion from the symbolic community of the city, precedes her actual death and imbues her character with sublime beauty, whereas the ghost of Hamlet's father represents the opposite case, - actual death unaccompanied by symbolic death, without a settling of accounts - which is why he returns as a frightful apparition until his debt has been repaid. This place between the two deaths, a place of sublime beauty as well as terrifying monsters, is the site of das Ding, of the real-traumatic Kernel in the midst of symbolic order.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

150
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Death, Way, Communication

“Minimizing the role of sexual attraction in rape denies our responsibility for reinforcing men's addiction to female sexual beauty and then depriving men of what we've helped addict them to.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 311.

Men, Help

“No more of courts, of triumphs, or of arms,
No more of Valour’s force, or Beauty's charms!
The themes of vulgar lays with just disdain
I leave unsung, the flocks, the amorous swain,
The pleasures of the land, and terrors of the main.
How abject, how inglorious 'tis to lie
Grovelling in dust and darkness, when on high
Empires immense, and rolling worlds of light,
To range their heavenly scenes the muse invite!”

Richard Blackmore (1654–1729) English poet and physician

Book I, opening lines
Creation (1712)

Pleasure, Lie, World, Light

“It needs a poet like Schwitters to show us that unobserved elements of beauty are strewn and spread all around us and we can find them everywhere in the portentous as well as in the insignificant, if only we care to look, to choose and to fit them into a comely order.”

Naum Gabo (1890–1977) Russian sculptor

Attributed to Gabo in: Andrew Lambirth (2013) " Finding beauty in junk http://www.spectator.co.uk/arts/exhibitions/8839071/finding-beauty-in-junk/" in: The Spectator 9 February 2013 <br class="br">1936 - 1977

“One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Circles

Wisdom, Justice

“Use harms and even destroys beauty. The noblest function of an object is to be contemplated.”

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

El use estropea y hasta destruye toda belleza. La función más noble de los objetos es la de ser contemplados.
Niebla [Mist] (1914)

“In the progress of the work he founded a Collegium Biblieum, or Bible club, consisting of his colleagues Melanchthon, Bugenhagen (Pommer), Cruciger, Justus Jonas, and Aurogallus. They met once a week in his house, several hours before supper. Deacon Georg Rörer (Rorarius), the first clergyman ordained by Luther, and his proof-reader, was also present; occasionally foreign scholars were admitted; and Jewish rabbis were freely consulted. Each member of the company contributed to the work from his special knowledge and preparation. Melanchthon brought with him the Greek Bible, Cruciger the Hebrew and Chaldee, Bugenhagen the Vulgate, others the old commentators; Luther had always with him the Latin and the German versions besides the Hebrew. Sometimes they scarcely mastered three lines of the Book of Job in four days, and hunted two, three, and four weeks for a single word. No record exists of the discussions of this remarkable company, but Mathesius says that "wonderfully beautiful and instructive speeches were made."
At last the whole Bible, including the Apocrypha as "books not equal to the Holy Scriptures, yet useful and good to read," was completed in 1534, and printed with numerous woodcuts.
In the mean time the New Testament had appeared in sixteen or seventeen editions, and in over fifty reprints.
Luther complained of the many errors in these irresponsible editions.
He never ceased to amend his translation. Besides correcting errors, he improved the uncouth and confused orthography, fixed the inflections, purged the vocabulary of obscure and ignoble words, and made the whole more symmetrical and melodious.
He prepared five original editions, or recensions, of his whole Bible, the last in 1545, a year before his death.
The edition of 1546 was prepared by his friend Rörer, and contains a large number of alterations, which he traced to Luther himself. Some of them are real improvements, e. g., Die Liebe höret nimmer auf, for, Die Liebe wird nicht müde (1 Cor. 13:8). The charge that he made the changes in the interest of Philippism (Melanchthonianism), seems to be unfounded.”

Philip Schaff (1819–1893) American Calvinist theologian

Luther's Bible club

Death, Books, Error, Knowledge

“I think that it's when we step out of the road, step outside the box, become our own person and we walk fearlessly down paths other people wouldn't look at, that true progress comes. And sometimes true beauty as well.”

John McAfee (1945) American computer programmer and businessman

BBC News: "John McAfee: Addict, coder, runaway" https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-24441931 (11 October 2013)

People, Thinking, Personality, Box

“Truth is … one approach to the attainment of the good, but in and of itself, it is neither the good nor the beautiful … Socrates, Pascal, and others regarded knowledge of the truth with regard to purposeless objects as incongruous with the good … [by] exposing deception, truth destroys illusion, which is the principle attribute of beauty.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What is Art? (1897)

Truth, Knowledge

“I always felt like Baba hated me a little. And why not? After all, I had killed his beloved wife, his beautiful princess, hadn't I? The least I could have done was to have the decency to have turned out a little more like him.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Amir (19)
The Kite Runner (2003)

Hate, Princess

“During the last quarter of a century all the authority associated with the function of spiritual guidance … has seeped down into the lowest publications. … Between a poem by Valéry and an advertisement for a beauty cream promising a rich marriage to anyone who used it there was at no point a breach of continuity. So as a result of literature’s spiritual usurpation a beauty cream advertisement possessed, in the eyes of little village girls, the authority that was formerly attached to the words of priests.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

“Morality and literature,” p. 164
On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)

Marriage, Girl, Literature

“And sorrowing I to see the sommer flowers,
The lively greene, the lusty lease, forlorne,
The sturdy trees so shattred with the showers,
The fieldes so fade, that florisht so beforne:
It taught mee well, all earthly things be borne
To dye the death: for nought long time may last:
The sommer's beauty yeeldes to winter's blast.”

Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset (1536–1608) English politician and poet

Source: The Induction (1563), Line 50, p. 311

Death, Flowers, Tree, Winter

“There is danger in deep water, and danger is more real than beauty in a boy’s mind.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 50, section 2 (p. 661)

Boy, Water

“With careless joy we thread the woodland ways
And reach her broad domain.
Thro' sense of strength and beauty, free as air.
We feel our savage kin,
And thus alone with conscious meaning wear
The Indian's moccasin!”

Elaine Goodale Eastman (1863–1953) American novelist, poet

Moccasin Flower, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 519.

Way, Feeling, Sense, Joy

“The sentiments of men often differ with regard to beauty and deformity of all kinds, even while their general discourse is the same … In all matters of opinion and science, the case is opposite: The difference among men is there oftener found to lie in generals than in particulars; and to be less in reality than in appearance.”

David Hume book Four Dissertations

Four Dissertations (1757)

Men, Lie, Reality, Appearance

“To see a man as beautiful – means to make him really beautiful. There is no cunning, no deceit; this happens every time, everyone knows that.”

Simon Soloveychik (1930–1996) Russia writer and philosopher

Book 2 part 3, ch. 10
Pedagogika dlya vseh (Parenting For Everyone) (1977–1986)

Time

“On the bank of the Nile opposite Old Cairo is the place known as The Garden, which is a pleasure park and promenade, containing many beautiful gardens, for the people of Cairo are given to pleasure and amusements. I witnessed a fete once in Cairo for the sultan's recovery from a fractured hand; all the merchants decorated their bazaars and had rich stuffs, ornaments and silken fabrics hanging in their shops for several days.”

Ibn Battuta (1304–1377) Moroccan explorer

Travels in Asia and Africa (Rehalã of Ibn Battûta)

People, Pleasure

“What we call objective reality is, in the last analysis, what is common to many thinking beings, and could be common to all; this common part, we shall see, can only be the harmony expressed by mathematical laws. It is this harmony then which is the sole objective reality, the only truth we can attain; and when I add that the universal harmony of the world is the source of all beauty, it will be understood what price we should attach to the slow and difficult progress which little by little enables us to know it better.”

Henri Poincaré book The Value of Science

Introduction, p. 14
The Value of Science (1905)

Truth, World, Law, Mathematics

“It's a beautiful day…
Don't let it get away”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

"Beautiful Day"
Lyrics, All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000)

“Expressions are many
but Thy loveliness is one;
Each of us refers
to that single Beauty.”

Fakhruddin 'Iraqi (1213–1289) Persian philosopher

Lama’at (Divine Flashes)

“Ah! why do women condescend to receive a degree of attention and respect from strangers different from that reciprocation of civility which the dictates of humanity and the politeness of civilization authorize between man and man? And why do they not discover, when, "in the noon of beauty's power", that they are treated like queens only to be deluded by hollow respect. Confined, then, in cages like the feathered race, they have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch.”

Mary Wollstonecraft book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Source: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Ch. 4

Women

“Each man in his life honors, and imitates as well as he can, that god to whose choir he belonged, while he is uncorrupted in his first incarnation here; and in the fashion he has thus learned, he bears himself to his beloved as well as to the rest. So, then, each chooses from among the beautiful a love conforming to his kind, and then, as if his chosen were his god, he sets him up and robes him for worship.”

Mary Renault book The Charioteer

Phaedrus by Plato, as translated in the novel, p. 104
The Charioteer (1953)

Love, Life, God, Fashion

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which is a pity because this week the National Association of Beholders wrote to tell me that I've got a face like a rucksack full of dented bells.”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

Screenwipe S4E1
Screenwipe

“A sensitive personality is like a great organ. Press the keys of discord and harshness comes forth. Play the keys of beauty and melody delight are given.”

Natacha Rambova (1897–1966) American film personality and fashion designer

On personality, p. 118
Photoplay: "Wedded and Parted" (December 1922)

Personality

“To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in, was a mark of the Greek spirit, which distinguished it from all that had gone before. It is a vital distinction.”

Edith Hamilton (1867–1963) American teacher and writer

Source: The Greek Way (1930), Ch. 1

Life, World

“I had the feeling that another kind of life -- perhaps in a transcendental area -- would give me a better possibility to influence, or to work, or to act within this contradiction. So, this was my general feeling: on the one side, this beautiful undamaged nature form which I took a lot and had a lot of possibilities for contemplation, meditation, research, collecting things, making a kind of system; and on the other side, this social debacle that I felt already as a coming dilemma.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Source: 1980's, Interview with Kate Horsefield, 1980, p. 62; also quoted in: Video Data Bank, School/Art Institute Chicago, (1981) Profile, Volume 1

Life, Feeling, Nature

“I look at things for the art sake and the beauty sake and for the deal sake.”

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

New York Magazine (11 July 1988), p. 24
1980s

Art

“No argument or logic carries the same degree of conviction as insight, and it is the kind of conviction by which we know that dawn over the Alps on a perfect morning is beautiful. Argument cannot produce it and doubt cannot remove it. The outward beauty meets the inward recognition and in our hearts we know.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.33

Heart, Perfection

“This was in Milwaukee when I was eleven years old. I went to see my sister give a dramatic reading. She'd been taking drama lessons. I walked into the hall, and there was a little stage at the other end, and maybe 150 people, parents mostly, or children like myself. The lights went down slowly, very slowly. Then it was dark. Spotlights hit the stage, and there was my sister, standing there in the. At that moment I thought, that must be the most beautiful thing in the world, to be able to arrange things so that people have to listen to you. "So, that's why I became an actor. Well, anyway, my analyst says it's better than running naked in Central Park…”

Gene Wilder (1933–2016) American actor

Interview with Roger Ebert (July 11, 1971) INTERVIEW WITH GENE WILDER http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/interview-with-gene-wilder

Children, People, World, Parent

“Magic is not about having a puzzle to solve. It's about creating a moment of awe and astonishment. And that can be a beautiful thing”

David Blaine (1973) American illusionist and endurance artist

Interview with Brett Martin for Time Out New York (April 1-8, 1999, on-line). http://www.hwwilson.com/_home/bios/1997004856.htm

“The life of a godly man is like a river, not like a stagnant pool or a dead sea. It is ever in motion, sometimes sparkling in the sunbeam, and sometimes shivering in the clouds; sometimes chanting through scenery as beautiful as Eden, and sometimes moaning through districts of miserable desolation; sometimes clear as the day, and sometimes black as the night. Still it is ever moving to its ocean destiny — progress is its law, infinitude is its home.”

David Thomas (born 1813) (1813–1894) 19th-century Welsh preacher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 566.

Life, Law, Home, Sea

“For beauty is enhanced by clothes of style.”

Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso

Che talor cresce una beltà un bel manto.
Canto XXVIII, stanza 12 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Clothes

“Life is, without a doubt, complex and confusing. My faith is my sanity. There are people who choose to live on the surface of things. I have yet to find the surface. And with all the beauty in the underneath, I am not certain I want to live on the surface should I find it. I stopped looking a long time ago.”

Donald Miller (1971) American writer

Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)

Life, People, Faith, Time

“You can see the roughness of structure and the spots like wounds from battles on the canvas. The tops of skyscrapers with windows like eyes constantly remind you that there are laws surrounding the wastelands, and so you hide in the deep grass when you make love to a girl in dirty clothes, and experience how your nerves of seeing become stronger and stronger and every little sound more and more intense. That's what Pasolini's poetry is partly about; he was a street guy and therefore I avoided beautiful new wood or metal for his sculpture... The wasteland was Pasolini's other side; the boys, the knives, the nights, the tensions.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

Appel is referring to the Italian movie-maker Pasolini
Source: Karel Appel – the complete sculptures,' (1990), pp. 75-77 'Quotes', K. Appel (1989)

Love, Making love, Law, Guy

“To find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

Statement (5 August 1888), as quoted in The life of Thomas Hardy 1840-1928 (1962) by Florence Emily Hardy

“She was forcing it with her scorn, the kiss she gave me, the hard curl of her lips, the mockery of her eyes, until I was like a man made of wood and there was no feeling within me except terror and a fear of her, a sense that her beauty was too much, that she was so much more beautiful than I, deeper rooted than I. She made me a stranger unto myself, she was all of those calm nights and tall eucalyptus trees, the desert stars, that land and sky, that fog outside, and I had come there with no purpose save to be a mere writer, to get money, to make a name for myself and all that piffle.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Money, Fear, Feeling, Star

“I just wanted to study how to portray clairvoyance, and I finally took an ocular approach. She has these beautiful blue eyes and her gaze is gently penetrating. All the obvious stuff about her you can find online but I wanted more of the nitty-gritty, like how did it affect her sex life? If you're domestic ballbuster by day and a ghostbuster by night, how does that affect your home life? I opted not to go down to their museum of the occult that they maintain in the basement, Patrick and I both. We stayed upstairs.”

Vera Farmiga (1973) American actress

On getting to know Lorraine Warren for her role in The Conjuring, as quoted in " Vera Farmiga on The Conjuring, Bates Motel, maternal angst … and knitting https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/01/vera-farmiga-conjuring-bates-motel-interview" by John Patterson at The Guardian (August 2, 2013)

Life, Sex, Home, Study

“What I'm trying to do when I visit your beautiful country, Australia, is warn Australians that even though it might not be the case today, learn from the mistakes that we made in Europe: be vigilant and look at Islam for what it really is. Islam is not a religion of peace.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Anti-Islam campaigner coming to Australia http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2013/s3689995.htm. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Broadcast: 13/02/2013. Reporter: Tony Jones. <br class="br">2010s

Peace, Religion, Learning, Country

“The most beautiful thing about music is that it transcends most anything.”

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

blogs.legacyrecordings.com (February 5, 2008)
2007, 2008

Music

“If you capture a ship, Sharpe, you keep the old name unless it's really obnoxious. Nelson took the Franklin at the Nile, an eighty gun thing of great beauty, but the navy will be damned if it has a ship named after a traitorous bloody Yankee so we call her the Canopus now.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Captain Joel Chase, p. 15
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Trafalgar (2000)

“People say, I am afraid of changes. But who is asking you to change? Knowledge is not a change. When you see yourself in the mirror, the first thing you will realize is that beauty that you have always looked for is right there. That's the first thing you will realize. That, to me, is the magic of this Knowledge.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Escobar, Argentina, January 23, 1991
1990s

People, Knowledge, Change

“The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exists as an independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot.
But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress. In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests. In their labors they will have to avail themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in humanity itself. This is, to be sure, a more difficult but an incomparably more worthy task.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1940s, Science and Religion (1941)

God, Fear, Religion, Hope

“For the moment we will put aside the consideration of the effect upon others — which is so infinitely more important — and think only of the results for the man himself. It is necessary to do this because one of the objections frequently brought against vegetarianism is that it is a beautiful theory, but one the working of which is impracticable, since it is supposed that a man cannot live without devouring dead flesh. That objection is irrational, and is founded upon ignorance or perversion of facts. I am myself an example of its falsity; for I have lived without the pollution of flesh food — without meat, fish or fowl — for the last thirty-eight years, and I not only still survive, but have been during all that time in remarkably good health. Nor am I in any way peculiar in this, for I know some thousands of others who have done the same thing. I know some younger ones who have been so happy as to be unpolluted by the eating of flesh during the whole of their lives; and they are distinctly freer from disease than those who partake of such things.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: Vegetarianism and Occultism (1913), p. 4-5

Health, Disease, Food, Way

“Machinery of a very beautiful kind has been contrived for copying accurately, on a reduced or an enlarged scale, both medals and statues. The Venus de Medici itself could not be justly excluded from a purely industrial exhibition, if, placed in the centre of a series diminishing on the one side to a statuette of a foot high, and increasing on the other to a figure double her own height. Such a series, though fairly introduced as an illustration of industrial art, would, indeed, itself be highly interesting to the fine arts, as exhibiting the effect of change of magnitude, when the proportions remain identical.”

Charles Babbage (1791–1871) mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable c…

Source: The Exposition of 1851: Views Of The Industry, The Science, and the Government Of England, 1851, p. 52-53

Art, Change

“Poor pitied youth! …
Bring fragrant flowers, the whitest lillies bring,
With all the purple beauties of the spring;
These gifts at least, these honours I'll bestow
On the dear youth, to please his shade below.”

Christopher Pitt (1699–1748) English poet

Book VI, line 1259
The Æneid of Virgil (1740)

Youth, Spring, Flowers

“When my neighbor A—broke in business, and twenty-four hours made him a bankrupt, he came home, saying to himself, "Well, my money is gone, but Jesus is left." He did not merely come down to "hardpan," he came to something far more solid — to the everlasting arms. When another friend laid her beautiful boy in his coffin, after the scarlet fever had done its worst, she laid her own sorrowful heart upon the everlasting arms. The dear little sleeper was there already. The Shepherd had His lamb.”

Theodore L. Cuyler (1822–1909) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 594.

Money, Home, Boy, Business

“I loved King Kong with Fay Wray. That was one of my favorite pictures. I admired Fay. I thought Fay Wray was so beautiful. I remember later I went to a party and she was there and I sat at her feet and said, 'You were my favorite actress', and I told her how much I worshiped her.”

Peggy Moran (1918–2002) actress

Interview with Monster Kid Magazine

Love

“A Right Mind, and Generous Affection, [has] more Beauty and Charm, than all other Symmetrys in the World besides.”

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) English politician and Earl

Vol. 2, p. 209; "Miscellany III".
Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711)

World

“She strode like a grenadier, was strong and upright like an obelisk, had a beautiful face, a candid brow, pure eyes, and not a thought of her own in her head.”

Joseph Conrad book The Return

Tales of Unrest http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1202/1202-h/1202-h.htm. The Return (1902)

Strong

“We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that it divided; but the men: — Divided into mere segments of men — broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished, — sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is — we should think that there might be some loss in it also. And the great cry that rises from our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, — that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages. And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads can be met only in one way: not by teaching nor preaching, for to teach them is but to show them their misery, and to preach at them, if we do nothing more than preach, is to mock at it. It can only be met by a right understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labour.”

John Ruskin book The Stones of Venice

Volume II, chapter VI, section 16.
The Stones of Venice (1853)

Life, Men, Way, Soul

“God doesn't make mistakes. So if I'm supposed to die, there's a very good reason for it. I'm not going to question him. I'm just going to enjoy all these beautiful things that God created.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Take The Risk (2008), p. 168

God, Question

“He sows June fields with clover, and the world
Broadcasts with little common kindnesses.
The plain good souls He sends us, who fulfill
Life's homely duties in the daily path
With cheerful heart, ambitious of no more
Than to supply the wants of friend and kin,
Yet serve God's higher love to human hearts;
Giving a secret sweetness to the home,
The hidden fragrance of a kindly heart,
The simple beauty of a useful life,
That never dazzles, and that never tires.”

Samuel Longfellow (1819–1892) American clergyman

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 544.

Love, Life, God, Secret

“When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want the space to reappear, to make a comeback, because it's lost space when there's something in it. If I see a chair in a beautiful space, no matter how beautiful the chair is, it can never be as beautiful to me as the plain space.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Ch. 10: Atmosphere

“Do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter downriver. Certainly not the waters, which we assume have no function except to turn turbines, float barges, and carry off sewage. Certainly not the plants, of which we exterminate whole communities without batting an eye. Certainly not the animals, of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "The Land Ethic", p. 204.

Love, Home, Communication, Water

“We have dancing … from soon after sundown until a few minutes after nine o’clock…. Occasionally the boys who play the female partners in the dances exercise their ingenuity in dressing to look as girlish as possible. In the absence of lady duds they use leaves, and the leaf-clad beauties often look very pretty and always odd enough.”

Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) American politician, 19th President of the United States (in office from 1877 to 1881)

Letter to Sophia Birchard Hayes (10 July 1862)
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922 - 1926)

Exercises, Boy, Dance

“Lay your sleeping head, my love
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral;
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie:
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.”

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) Anglo-American poet

Lay your sleeping head, my love (1937), lines 1–2, written January 1937; also known as Lullaby.

Love, Children, Lie, Sleep

“Were you with these, my prince, you'd soon forget
The pale, unripened beauties of the north.”

Joseph Addison book Cato

Act I, scene iv.
Cato, A Tragedy (1713)

Forgetting

“I must learn how to express the gentle vibration of things, their roughened textures, their intricacies. I have to find an expression for that in my drawing, too, in the way I sketched my nudes here in Paris, only more original, more subtly observed. The strange quality of expectation that hovers over muted things [skin, Otto's Otto Modersohn forehead, fabrics, flowers]; I must try to get hold of the great and simple beauty of all that. In general, I must strive for the utmost simplicity united with the most intimate power of observation. That's where greatness lies.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

excerpt of her Journal, Paris, 1898; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, pp. 197-198
1898

Way, Flowers, Learning, Drawing

“Beauty is something that disappears when you try to define it.”

Iain Banks (1954–2013) Scottish writer

Source: Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991) “State of the Art” (p. 128)

“At another level, market crashes constitute beautiful examples of events that we would all like to forecast. The arrow of time is inexorably projecting us toward the undetermined future. Predicting the future captures the imagination of all and is perhaps the greatest challenge.”

Didier Sornette (1957) French scientist

Preface, p. xvi.
Why Stock Markets Crash - Critical Events in Complex Systems (2003)

Imagination, Time, Future

“Only straight discovering in the nearest stone or tree, sound or thought, the shelter of His often desecrated goodness, the treasury of His waiting form man's heart to affiliate with His will — this is the rapture of faith. It is an echo to a pleading voice, a reply to the inconceivable in all beauty.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

"The Holy Dimension", p. 331
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

Faith, Tree, Waiting, Heart

“You've got to get up every morning with a smile on your face
And show the world all the love in your heart
The people gonna treat you better,
You're gonna find, yes you will,
That you're beautiful as you feel.”

Carole King (1942) Nasa

Beautiful
Song lyrics, Tapestry (1971)

Love, People, World, Smile

“The future is more beautiful than all the pasts.”

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881–1955) French philosopher and Jesuit priest

Letter (5 September 1919), in The Making of a Mind: Letters from a Soldier-Priest 1914–1919

Past, Future

“There are very different programming styles. I tend to see them as Mozart versus Beethoven. When Mozart started to write, the composition was finished. He wrote the manuscript and it was 'aus einem Guss' (from one cast). In beautiful handwriting, too. Beethoven was a doubter and a struggler who started writing before he finished the composition and then glued corrections onto the page. In one place he did this nine times. When they peeled them, the last version proved identical to the first one.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (2001) Source: Denken als discipline https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Uae9_pgZzE#t=280, a program from Dutch public TV broadcaster VPRO from April 10th, 2001 about Dijkstra <br class="br">2000s

Time