Quotes about beauty
page 35

“In spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.”

Bk. I, l. 11
Endymion (1818)

“It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make man better be;
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log, dry, bald and sere:
A lily of a day,
Is fairer far, in May,
Although it fall, and die that night;
It was the plant and flower of light.
In small proportions we just beauties see,
And in short measures life may perfect be.”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

LXX, To the Immortal Memory of Sir Lucius Cary and Sir Henry Morison, lines 65-74
The Works of Ben Jonson, Second Folio (1640), Underwoods

Life, Flowers, Tree, Light

“And for one beautiful day there was peace.”

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic

Notes for CXVII et seq
Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII

Peace

“No one can imagine the beauty of the view from anything witnessed in England. It had never been seen before by European eyes; but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight.”

David Livingstone (1813–1873) Scottish explorer and missionary

Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1039/1039-h/1039-h.htm

Love, Angels, Imagination

“What is that land of hill and dale
That is so beautiful,
The land aglow with summer days,
Land with the northern lights ablaze,
Whose beauty all the seasons share,
What is that land so fair?

There many thousand lakes are bright
With twinkling stars at night
There many kanteles resound
And all around make hillsides sing
And on the golden heath firs ring:
That is the Finnish land.”

Aleksis Kivi (1834–1872) Finnish writer

The Finnish Land.

Star, Light, Singing, Summer

“The beautiful are shyer than the ugly, for they move in a world that does not ask for beauty.”

Ned Rorem (1923–2022) American composer

[Who's Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History: From World War II to the Present Day, ISBN 041522974X, 2001, Aldrich, Robert and Wotherspoon, Gary (eds)]

World

“It represents a conscious rejection of the failed experience of the entire boomer generation, one that exalted tackiness above beauty, and sexual freedom above the liturgy of courtship.”

Jeffrey Tucker (1963) American writer

Source: "Saved by Swing" by Jeff Tucker, The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, August 1998, UNZ.org, 2016-05-22 http://www.unz.org/Pub/RothbardRockwellReport-1998aug-00004,

Freedom

“The Raelian Movement is an atheistic religion that perfectly merges science and spirituality, and it includes many female priests. Men and women must rise above their previous cultural conditioning and look to the future with a new awareness encompassing beauty and femininity.”

Raël (1946) Author of Raëlism and founder and current leader of the Raëlian Movement

Spanish Raelian Movement supports Zapatero's female majority cabinet http://raelianews.org/news.php?extend.278, Raelianews.org (May 14, 2008).

Women, Men, Religion, Science

“Who but a stupid barbarian could burn so much beauty in his stove and destroy that which he cannot make?”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Act I
Uncle Vanya (1897)

Stupidity

“Hate leaves ugly scars, love leaves beautiful ones.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Love

Love, Hate

“On the floor Tien Pao had held Beauty-of-the-Republic tightly against him, while with his other hand he'd twisted his cap into a prop to shove into the bullethole through which the river water came welling. He had lain on the prop to keep the water from pushing it out again, and he'd lain half over the baby sister to shield her if the airplanes and the bullets should come again.”

Meindert DeJong book The House of Sixty Fathers

The House of Sixty Fathers (1956)

Sister, Water, Baby

“Bread and beauty grow best together. Their harmonious integration can make farming not only a business but an art; the land not only a food-factory but an instrument for self-expression, on which each can play music to his own choosing.”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

"The Conservation Ethic" [1933]; Published in The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold, Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott (eds.) 1991, p. 191.
1930s

Food, Art, Music, Business

“Beauty cannot be defined by abscissas and ordinates; neither are circles and ellipses created by their geometrical formulas.”

Carl von Clausewitz book On War

On War (1832), Book 3

“I kind of had a disaster, I was doing a show, and I changed there, and I couldn’t wear underwear — I don’t think I can tell this story on TV … Let’s just say everyone went scrambling for a razor, so I went from being the most beautiful to the most humiliated in one day.”

Gwyneth Paltrow (1972) American actress, singer, and food writer

In an interview in The Ellen DeGeneres Show. http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2013/04/gwyneth-paltrow-ellen/ (April 26, 2013)

Thinking, Change

“One does not live half a life in Asia without return. When it would be I did not know, nor even where it would be, or to what cause. In our changing world nothing changes more than geography. The friendly country of China, the home of my childhood and youth, is for the time being forbidden country. I refuse to call it enemy country. The people in my memory are too kind and the land too beautiful.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

A Bridge for Passing (1962)

Life, People, Youth, World

“All clear and transparent words appear to be beautiful sounds. Yes and no are not precisely clear words, but definite words. In clear words, there is more light than movement or attitude.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Light, Appearance

“The English Bible,—a book which if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

On John Dryden (1828)

Books

“Our civilization depends on peace among Western nations, and therefore on united strength, for Peace is a virgin who dare not show her face without Strength, her father, for protection. We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.
We need peace to let our best men live to work out those more subtle, but equally dangerous, problems brought by this new environment in which we dwell, to give us time to turn this materialistic trend, to stop prostrating ourselves before this modern idol of mechanical efficiency, to find means of combining freedom, spirit, and beauty with industrial life — a peace which will bring character, strength, and security back to Western peoples.”

Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974) American aviator, author, inventor, explorer, and social activist

Aviation, Geography, and Race (1939)

Life, Men, People, Peace

“… It was (in part) Gross’s excessive enthusiasm for string theory in the mid-80s that drove me (as an impressionable grad student at Princeton) away from theoretical physics (and into astronomy). String theory may have been a beautiful idea, but it made no predictions that could be tested experimentally in the then-foreseeable future. That’s not science.  A quarter century later and the theoretical physics community has yet to wake up and realize that there is new physics right under their noses – just not the new physics they’ve been expecting (GUTs, strings, membranes, etc.). Galaxy dynamics are consistent with a single, universal force law, but this unexpected behavior has largely been ignored because it doesn’t fit with particle theorists’ dreams of super symmetric dark matter particles. That we do not understand the observed behavior makes it more interesting than the “expected” (but unobserved) new physics: who ordered this?”

Stacy McGaugh (1964) American astronomer

Law, Dreams, Behavior, Communication

“Against all the retrogressive endeavors (Bohm, Schrödinger etc. and in some sense also Einstein) I am sure that the statistical character of the ψ-function and hence of nature’s laws – on which you insisted from the very beginning against Schrödinger’s resistance – will define the style of the laws at least for some centuries. It may be that later, e. g. in connection with the living processes, one will find something entirely new, but to dream of a way back, back to the classical style of Newton-Maxwell (and these are just dreams these gentlemen are giving themselves up to) seems to me hopeless, digressive, bad taste. And, we could add, it is not even a beautiful dream.”

Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) Austrian physicist, Nobel prize winner

Letter to Max Born, December 1954, in Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel mit Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg u.a, Springer, 1999, p. 887, as translated in J. Kofler and A. Zeilinger, "Quantum Information and Randomness", European Review, Vol. 18, No. 4, 2010, pp. 469–480

Law, Dreams, Way, Nature

“In art economy is always beauty.”

Henry James book The Altar of the Dead

The Altar of the Dead.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

Art

“I believe that my wife is the most beautiful woman in the world.”

Shahrukh Khan (1965) Indian actor, producer and television personality

From interview with Pratim D. Gupta

World

“For when we are interested in the beauty of a thing, the oftener we can see it the better; but when we are interested only by the story of a thing, we get tired of hearing the same tale told over and over again, and stopping always at the same point — we want a new story presently, a newer and better one — and the picture of the day, and novel of the day, become as ephemeral as the coiffure or the bonnet of the day. Now this spirit is wholly adverse to the existence of any lovely art. If you mean to throw it aside to-morrow, you can never have it to-day.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

On the Condition of Modern Art, lecture (1867).

Love, Art

“But whoever thinks that beauty is something he can enjoy exclusively for himself just by abandoning other people and closing his eyes to the human life of which he is part—he is not the friend of beauty. He ends up either as Pétur Þríhross's poet, or his secretary. He who doesn't fight every day of his life to the last breath against the representatives of evil, against the living images of evil who rule Sviðinsvík—he blasphemes by taking the word beauty into his mouth.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Örn Úlfar
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

Parting, Evil, Thinking, Life

“Thus, whether it be wit or beauty that a man’s in love with, there are no great hopes of a lasting happiness; beauty, with all the helps of arts, is of no long date; the more it is, the sooner it decays; and he, who only or chiefly chose for beauty, will in a little time find the same reason for another choice.”

Mary Astell (1666–1731) English feminist writer

Reflection upon Marriage, as quoted in Astell: Political Writings, p. 42, by Mary Astell, Editor Patricia Springborg. Editorial Cambridge University Press, 1996. ISBN 0521428459.

Love, Hope, Art, Time

“It never grows old, putting on a beautiful dress. For me, it's a great distraction. It's always ridiculous, and it always feels like it should be happening to somebody else.”

Sarah Jessica Parker (1965) American actress

Interview for Allure magazine, February 2008

Feeling

“Those who are the most devout, outstanding Unification Church members are they the most beautiful people externally or just so-so? Very often, those who have the features of an Idaho potato are the most loyal members of the Unification Church.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

Our Pride http://www.tparents.org/Moon-Talks/sunmyungmoon81/811213.htm 1981-12-13.

People

“Colour, as the strange and magnificent expression of the inscrutable spectrum of Eternity, is beautiful and important to me as a painter; I use it to enrich the canvas and to probe more deeply into the object. Colour also decided, to a certain extent, my spiritual outlook, but it is subordinated to life, and above all, to the treatment of form. Too much emphasis on colour at the expense of form and space would make a double manifestation of itself on the canvas, and this would verge on craft work.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

Source: 1930s, On my Painting (1938), pp. 18-19

Life

“1 Corinthians 6:9–10 lists homosexual behavior as a sin that will bring judgment by God on the unrighteous. The beautiful truth of Christ’s gospel is found in verse 11, “And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.” Yes we should be welcoming of practicing homosexuals with the love of Christ, but with a clear presentation of His death for their sinful perversion of God-ordained sexuality between one man and one woman in Genesis 2:24. Anything less misses the meaning of what the love of God really is, not an inclusive message but a saving gospel (John 3:16). The church shouldn’t encourage people who struggle with same-sex attraction to engage in sinful sexual practices. No, church leaders like those at Highland Baptist should be finding ways to share the gospel with unbelievers and encourage Christians to live in a way that’s pleasing to God.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

"Kentucky Baptist Church allows first 'Gay Marriage'" http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2014/07/11/kentucky-baptist-church-allows-its-first-gay-marriage/, Around the World with Ken Ham (July 11, 2014) Around the World with Ken Ham (May 2005 - Ongoing)

Love, Death, God, People

“The greatest truths are wronged if not linked with beauty, and they win their way most surely and deeply into the soul when arrayed in this their natural and fit attire.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Self-Culture (1838)

Truth, Way, Soul, Nature

“In our online descriptions and program literature we describe the cloisters as a public sphere for networked interaction, the gathering place for students, professors, and librarians engaged in planning, evaluating, or reviewing the efforts of research and study utilizing the whole range of technologies of literacy. We go further and describe the task of the cloisters as to "channel flows of research, learning and teaching between the increasingly networked world of the library and the intimacy and engagement of our classrooms and other campus spaces". There we continue to explore the "collectible object", which I tentatively described in Othermindedness in terms of maintaining an archive of "the successive choices, the errors and losses, of our own human community" and suggesting that what constitutes the collectible object is the value which suffuses our choices. It seemed to me then that electronic media are especially suited to tracking such "changing change".
I think it still seems so to me now but I do fear we have lost track of the beauty and nimbleness of new media in representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian, the ordinary mindfulness which makes human life possible and valuable.
It is interesting, I think, that recounting and rehearsing this notion leaves this interview layered and speckled with (self) quotations, documentations, implicit genealogies, images, and traditions of continuity, change, and difference. Perhaps the most quoted line of afternoon over the years has been the sentence "There is no simple way to say this."”

Michael Joyce (1945) American academic and writer

The same is true of any attempt to describe the way in which the collectible object participates in (I use this word as a felicitous shorthand for the complex of ideas involved in what I called "representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian" above) the library as living archive. An interview with Michael Joyce and review of Liam’s Going at Trace Online Writing Centre Archive (2 December 2002) http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/review/index.cfm?article=33

Life, World, Fear, Way

“Always when we walked, it was clear to me how much he loved nature, wild flowers, animals in their natural habitat and the simple pleasures of a beautiful sunset. My love for the environment did not develop out of a vacuum.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

p 21, describing his father
Achieving The Impossible (2010)

Love, Pleasure, Flowers, Nature

“We don’t need to be in dire straits to need to feel hope. On a perfectly beautiful, sunny, clear day when everything is going just right, you can still use hope. That we are able to be content within is the most hopeful message there is. That we can find that one thing the heart has searched for, for so long, is a very hopeful message. That’s the message I bring. And that brings people hope. That is what is important for all of us: that hope, that idea of self-fulfillment, that idea of being able to have contentment in one’s life.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Undated
Source: Conversation with Prem Rawat The Prem Rawat Foundation

Life, People, Hope, Feeling

“But we believed if we kept on working, if we kept on marching, if we kept on voting, if we kept on believing, we would make America beautiful for everybody.”

Al Sharpton (1954) American Baptist minister, civil rights activist, and television/radio talk show host

From the 2004 DNC

“An Asian peasant who labors through all of his waking hours, with tools created in Biblical times—a South American aborigine who is devoured by piranha in a jungle stream—an African who is bitten by the tsetse fly—an Arab whose teeth are green with decay in his mouth—these do live with their 'natural environment,' but are scarcely able to appreciate its beauty. Try to tell a Chinese mother, whose child is dying of cholera: 'Should one do everything one can? Of course not.' Try to tell a Russian housewife, who trudges miles on foot in sub-zero weather in order to spend hours standing in line at a state store dispensing food rations, that America is defiled by shopping centers, expressways and family cars.”

Ayn Rand book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

Source: The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), p. 88

Family, Food, Cars, Nature

“To say that a thing is beautiful is simply an act of faith, not a measurement on some kind of scale.”

Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940) French painter

2 April 1891.
Private Journal - A collage of notes and images, sketches kept 1888-1895 & 1907 to 1940

Faith

“Alas! The beauty
of the flowers has faded
and come to nothing,
while I have watched the rain,
lost in melancholy thought.”

Ono no Komachi (825–900) Japanese poet

Source: Helen Craig McCullough's translations, Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry (1985), p. 35

Flowers

“I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home? I have been quoted as saying captious things about travel; but I mean to do justice. …. He that does not fill a place at home, cannot abroad. He only goes there to hide his insignificance in a larger crowd. You do not think you will find anything there which you have not seen at home? The stuff of all countries is just the same. Do you suppose there is any country where they do not scald milk-pans, and swaddle the infants, and burn the brushwood, and broil the fish? What is true anywhere is true everywhere. And let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book The Conduct of Life

The Conduct of Life, Chapter 4, “Culture,” p. 145

Men, Justice, Travel, Quotes

“As I was leaving the hotel this morning, a doorman asked me, "Where are you headed, General?" and when I replied, "West Point," he remarked, "Beautiful place. Have you ever been there before?"”

Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) U.S. Army general of the army, field marshal of the Army of the Philippines

Source: Reminiscences (1964), p. 423

“Everything rhythmically organic is true. Everything, which results from the proper feeling for rhythmically organized spiritual units, is true and alive — alive within itself. When we lose the sense for such true beauty we lose our natural sense for the rich flavor of life, which is the basis for all inspirational work.
Things generally taken for beautiful are nothing other than the product of frozen, stereotyped taste, bound by sterile rules and purely exterior judgment.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Painting and Culture' p. 57
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Life, Feeling, Nature, Sense

“We must always give our users pure sex. It's like a rendezvous in the back seat of an automobile with a beautiful girl. One's experience with the personal computer should be better than the greatest orgasm you could have.”

Jean-Louis Gassée (1944) French businessman

Personal Computer World, July 1990
On the user experience of the Apple Macintosh

Sex, Girl, Personality

“There he was. The infant Titus. His eyes were open but he was quite still. The puckered-up face of the newly-born child, old as the world, wise as the roots of trees. Sin was there and goodness, love, pity and horror, and even beauty for his eyes were pure violet. Earth’s passions, earth’s griefs, earth’s incongruous, ridiculous humours—dormant, yet visible in the wry pippin of a face.”

Mervyn Peake book Titus Groan

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 13 “Keda” (p. 73)

Love, World, Tree, Passion

““Age Before Beauty.” “Pearls Before Swine.””

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Widely attributed to Dorothy Parker and Clare Boothe Luce. “Age before beauty” said Luce while yielding the way. “And pearls before swine,” replied Parker while gliding through the doorway.
Attributed

Age, Swine

“An artistic atmosphere does not create artists a literary atmosphere does not create literators; poets and painters spring up where there was never a verse made or a picture seen. This suggests that God is no more idle now than He was at the beginning, but that He is still and forever shaping the human chaos into the instruments and means of beauty.”

William Dean Howells (1837–1920) author, critic and playwright from the United States

My Literary Passions (1895)

God, Spring

“Then, on the slight turn of the Lower Hope Reach, clusters of factory chimneys come distinctly into view, tall and slender above the squat ranges of cement works in Grays and Greenhithe. Smoking quietly at the top against the great blaze of a magnificent sunset, they give an industrial character to the scene, speak of work, manufactures, and trade, as palm-groves on the coral strands of distant islands speak of the luxuriant grace, beauty and vigour of tropical nature. The houses of Gravesend crowd upon the shore with an effect of confusion as if they had tumbled down haphazard from the top of the hill at the back. The flatness of the Kentish shore ends there. A fleet of steam-tugs lies at anchor in front of the various piers. A conspicuous church spire, the first seen distinctly coming from the sea, has a thoughtful grace, the serenity of a fine form above the chaotic disorder of men’s houses. But on the other side, on the flat Essex side, a shapeless and desolate red edifice, a vast pile of bricks with many windows and a slate roof more inaccessible than an Alpine slope, towers over the bend in monstrous ugliness, the tallest, heaviest building for miles around, a thing like an hotel, like a mansion of flats (all to let), exiled into these fields out of a street in West Kensington. Just round the corner, as it were, on a pier defined with stone blocks and wooden piles, a white mast, slender like a stalk of straw and crossed by a yard like a knitting-needle, flying the signals of flag and balloon, watches over a set of heavy dock-gates. Mast-heads and funnel-tops of ships peep above the ranges of corrugated iron roofs. This is the entrance to Tilbury Dock, the most recent of all London docks, the nearest to the sea.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Hope Point to Tilbury / Gravesend
The Mirror of the Sea (1906), On the River Thames, Ch. 16

Men, Hope, Nature, Distant

“The big artist does not sit down monkey like & copy a coal scuttle or an ugly old woman like some Dutch painters have done nor a dungpile, but he keeps a sharp eye on Nature & steals her tools. He learns what she does with light the big tool & then colour then form and appropriates them to his own use. Then he's got a canoe of his own smaller than Nature's but big enough for every purpose except to paint the midday sun which is not beautiful at all. It is plenty strong enough though to make midday sunlight or the setting sun if you know how to handle it. With this canoe he can sail parallel to Nature's sailing. He will soon be sailing only where he wants to selecting nice little coves & shady shores or storms to his own liking, but if ever he thinks he can sail another fashion from Nature or make a better shaped boat he'll capsize or stick in the mud & nobody will buy his pictures or sail with him in his old tub.”

Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) American painter

Letter to Benjamin Eakins (1868-03-03).

Fashion, Nature, Thinking, Light

“Tier on tier of beautiful mountains and streams
Blue green vistas locked in white clouds
The mist makes my bandana wet
Dew coats my grass cape
My feet climb in straw sandals
My hand holds an old wooden stick
When I gaze down again on the dusty world
It has become a land of phantoms and dreams to me”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

World, Dreams, Mountain, Grass

“Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for “vulgarity”; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful.”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

“What is liberal education,” p. 8
Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968)

Education

“We've put animals in categories. There's bad ones — rats and whatever — and there's beautiful ones like dogs and fluffy ones. And that's just gross. Man should love all animals equally and realize it's part of their family.”

K-os (1972) Canadian rapper, singer, songwriter and record producer

"k-os Is Never Silent About Animals", video interview with PETA (11 September 2012) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kRYrf69tWE.

Love, Family, Dogs, Animals

“.. drawing, always all my learning had to do with drawing. And I never really thought about color at all. When I first started thinking about color it was sort of out of perversity. In other words, say around 1950 and '51, it occurred to me that something ugly or muddy could be a color as well as something clear and bright and a nameable, beautiful, known color.”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

quote about her years 1950-51 - reacting on the general view that her painting art was mainly focused on color and not on drawing / line
1960s, Interview with Barbara Rose', Archives - American Art, 1968

Color, Thinking, Learning, Drawing

“That's five stars to start with. That's five stars to start with. That's Gil Evans, isn't it? The only thing that disturbed me about this—the whole thing, in its entirety, was tremendously satisfying: performance, orchestration is good, the harmonic usage is beautiful, the contrasting texture of orchestra, the whole thing is just great—but there are certain sections there when the background was so lovely it just seemed like the alto saxophone was out of place. Now this is the type of thing that just makes me smile. I enjoy every minute of it. I don't have to go for a "peak" and then think about something else while I'm listening. Gil Evans' writing, to me, is such a boon that when he came along with the Miles Ahead album, I was thankful, because since about the Stan Kenton Orchestra of 1952, where the writing had been very good, between Mulligan and Rugolo and the whole works, between those periods there had been a void, a retrogression back to the roots, and this took writing back to a standpoint which just wasn't interesting. So when Evans came along, I just flipped.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Reviewing Evans' arrangement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao4dcHdoR4k of Dizzy Gillespie's "Manteca,", from New Bottle, Old Wine; as quoted in "Clare Fischer: Blindfold Test" http://www.mediafire.com/view/fix6ane8h54gx/Clare_Fischer#rjvay58eo774rhe

Love, Smile, Star, Thinking

“The poet felt completely free now as he stood there on the deck in his collar and boots, sailing past new and ever newer districts; even if he did not own this land's resources, he owned its beauty.</b”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Four: The Beauty of the Heavens

Past

“What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

" Civilization in the United States http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=ArnCivi.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all" (1888)

“Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee;
Sounds of the rude world heard in the day,
Lull'd by the moonlight have all pass'd away.”

Stephen Foster (1826–1864) American songwriter

Beautiful Dreamer, Firth, Pond & Co. (1862).

World, Waiting

“[On meditation] …that's the single most important thing that I do…there's something about understanding who you truly are. The essence of everyone is so beautiful that it's startling.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

Better Nutrition magazine (March 2004) http://jennifer-beals.com/images/press_images/better_nutrition/better4.jpg.

Understanding

“This place was truly the highest and the lowest of all worlds — the most beautiful senses, the most exquisite emotions… the most malevolent desires, the darkest deeds. Perhaps it was meant to be so. Perhaps without the lows, the highs could not be reached.”

Stephenie Meyer book The Host

Wanderer, p. 141
The Host (2008)

World, Sense

“I said: "Baseball is the hurrah game of the republic!" He was hilarious: "That's beautiful: the hurrah game! well — it's our game: that's the chief fact in connection with it: America's game: has the snap, go fling, of the American atmosphere — belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life."”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Conversation with Whitman (4 July 1889) as quoted in With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906) by Horace Traubel, Vol. IV

Life, Law, Game

“The Beauty which old Greece or Rome
Sung, painted, wrought, lies close at home.”

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery

To ———, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Home, Painting

“Boats and ships are female because they are beautiful, lovable, expensive—and unpredictable.”

Robert A. Heinlein book I Will Fear No Evil

Source: I Will Fear No Evil (1970), Chapter 26, p. 452

“Expression, child of soul! I fondly trace
Thy strong enchantment, when the poet's lyre,
The painter's pencil cathch thy sacred fire,
And beauty wakes for thee her touching grace”

Helen Maria Williams (1759–1827) British writer

From 'Sonnet - to Expression', Poems 1786, kindle ebook ASIN B00849523Q

Soul, Strong

“Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

"James Clarence Mangan" (1902)

Life, Truth, World, Imagination

“I was passing the doorman of the Biltmore, and I hated him at once, with his yellow braids and six feet of height and all that dignity, and now a black automobile drove to the curb, and a man got out. He looked rich; and then a woman got out, and she was beautiful, her fur was silver fox, and she was a song across the sidewalk and inside the swinging doors, and I thought oh boy for a little of that, just a day and a night of that, and she was a dream as I walked along, her perfume still in the set morning air.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Hate, Dreams, Boy, Night

“Jobs: Let me compare it with IBM. How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
Playboy: Are you saying that the people who made the PCjr don’t have that kind of pride in the product?
Jobs: If they did, they wouldn’t have turned out the PCjr.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

Steve Jobs, Playboy interview http://reprints.longform.org/playboy-interview-steve-jobs, Feb 1985 1980s

People, Way, Thinking, Sleep

“Hasten slowly. Run faster than beauty.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Diary of an Unknown (1988)

“It is a part of puberty that we just want to go somewhere far away. We only have a vague image, like behind that mountain or a place more beautiful…”

Makoto Shinkai (1973) Japanese anime director and former graphic designer

Interviewed on Otaku Mode https://otakumode.com/news/51a71457e918f6a32a072a6e/Interview-with-Director-Makoto-Shinkai-on-His-New-Work-ldquo-The-Garden-of-Words-rdquo-Vol-2 About The Garden of Words

Mountain, Parting

“.. I served Beauty by drawing her enemies.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote of Paul Klee, from 'Diaries I', 1901; as quoted in 'Klee & Kandinsky', 2015 exhibition text, Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau Munich, 2015-2016 https://www.zpk.org/en/exhibitions/review_0/2015/klee-kandinsky-969.html on his caricatures and his satirical drawings Klee made then 1895 - 1902

Drawing

“Oh look, an ATM! Ok, here we go! I lost all my money, now what do I do? Get a gun! Rob a casino! Good idea! Look at all the lights! This is beautiful.”

Bill Burr (1968) American actor, comedian and a celebrity podcaster

Premium Blend, episode [2.03], June 20, 1998

Money, Idea, Light

“If until now colour and form were used as inner agents, it was mainly done subconsciously. The subordination of composition to geometrical form is no new idea (cf. the art of the Persians). Construction on a purely spiritual basis is a slow business, and at first seemingly blind and unmethodical. The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul, so that it can weigh colours in its own scale and thus become a determinant in artistic creation. If we begin at once to break the bonds that bind us to nature and to devote ourselves purely to combination of pure colour and independent form, we shall produce works that are mere geometric decoration, resembling something like a necktie or a carpet. Beauty of form and colour is no sufficient aim by itself, despite the assertions of pure aesthetes or even of naturalists obsessed with the idea of "beauty". It is because our painting is still at an elementary stage that we are so little able to be moved by wholly autonomous colour and form composition. The nerve vibrations are there (as we feel when confronted by applied art), but they get no farther than the nerves because the corresponding vibrations of the spirit which they call forth are weak. When we remember however, that spiritual experience is quickening, that positive science, the firmest basis of human thought is tottering, that dissolution of matter is imminent, we have reason to hope that the hour of pure composition is not far away. The first stage has arrived.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote from Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky, Munich, 1912; as cited in Kandinsky, Frank Whitford, Paul Hamlyn Ltd, London 1967, p. 15
1910 - 1915

Hope, Art, Feeling, Soul

“The truly beautiful, the great and sublime, when it overpowers us with astonishment and admiration, still does not surprise us as a thing foreign, never heard of, never seen; but, on the other hand, our own inmost nature in such moments becomes clear to us, our deepest remembrances are awakened, our dearest feelings made alive.”

Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) German poet, translator, editor, novelist, and critic

Das wahrhaft Schöne, Große und Erhabene, so wie es uns in Erstaunen und Verwunderung setzt, überrascht uns doch nicht als etwas Fremdes, Unerhörtes und Niegesehenes, sondern unser eigenstes Wesen wird uns in solchen Augenblicken klar, unsre tiefsten Erinnerungen werden erweckt, und unsre nächsten Empfindungen lebendig gemacht. "Der Pokal", from Phantasus (1812-16) http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/misc/gutenberg-de/1996/gutenb/tieck/pokal/pokal2.htm; translation from Thomas Carlyle German Romance: Specimens of its Chief Authors, (London: Tait, 1827), vol. 2, p. 163.

Feeling, Nature

“All her lovers have passed, her beautiful lovers have passed,
The young and eager men that fought for her arrogant hand,
And the only voice which endures to mourn for her at the last
Is the voice of the lonely land.”

Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) English writer and gardener

"Mariana In The North"
Orchard and Vineyard (1921)

Men, Lovers

“The superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty.”

Thorstein Veblen book The Theory of the Leisure Class

Source: The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), p. 128

Sense

“"Llorio, you are a woman of surpassing beauty, though you would seem to lack that provocative warmth which draws man to woman, and adds dimension to the character."
The Murthe responded curtly: "The quality you describe is a kind of lewd obsequiousness which, happily, has now become obsolete. As for the 'surpassing beauty,' it is an apotheotic quality generated by the surging music of the female soul, which you, in your crassness, perceive only as a set of pleasing contours."”

Jack Vance Dying Earth

"The Murthe", chapter 3
Dying Earth (1950-1984), Rhialto the Marvellous (1984)

Music, Soul, Drawing

“When Machiavelli advises the Prince to carry out the Machiavellian scheme of action, he invests those actions with no sort of morality or beauty. For him morality remains what it is for everyone else, and does not cease to remain so because he observes (not without melancholy) that it is incompatible with politics. … For him evil, even if it aids politics, still remains evil. The modern realists are the moralists of realism. For them, the act which makes the State strong is invested with a moral character by the fact that it does so, and this whatever the act may be. The evil which serves politics ceases to be evil and becomes good.”

Julien Benda (1867–1956) French essayist

Source: Treason of the Intellectuals (1927), pp. 107-108

Strong, Evil

“All of us want to be loved with unconditional, eternal love — a love that sees beyond beauty, intelligence, or any other superficial quality. We want to be loved simply because we are. At the same time, we all have a natural, innate tendency to share our love with others. This preoccupation with love arises because in reality we are eternal, loving beings whose souls are filled with knowledge and bliss. In this physical embodiment we are temporarily covered by material energy, but our nature is inherently divine, and we are always seeking the blissful love of the spiritual kingdom where our real fulfillment lies.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume III: Solace for the Heart in Difficult Times (Hari-Nama Press, 2000), Chapter 2

Love, Soul, Intelligence, Nature

“This is from my granny. She was a beautiful, spiritual person. She always used to say: "Doesn't matter how big the fucker is. They all have a neck." Another thing she used to say was: "Never get involved with more than 11 people sexually at one time. You cannot keep everybody happy. Work on the farm deteriorates almost immediately. Don’t do that."”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

Yeah, Yeah (2011)

People, Time, Personality, Happiness

“I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful — a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.”

John Keats book La Belle Dame sans Merci

Stanza IV
La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819)

Light

“Creation smiles in various beauty gay
While day to night, and night succeeds day”

Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784) American poet

Works of Providence from Poems on Various Subjects kindle ebook ASIN B0083ZJ7SU

Smile, Night

“All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

“Einstein's theory has the very highest degree of æsthetic merit: every lover of the beautiful must wish it to be true. It gives a vast unified survey of the operations of nature, with a technical simplicity in the critical assumptions which makes the wealth of deductions astonishing. It is a case of an advance arrived at by pure theory: the whole effect of Einstein's work is to make physics more philosophical (in a good sense), and to restore some of that intellectual unity which belonged to the great scientific systems of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but which was lost through increasing specialization and the overwhelming mass of detailed knowledge. In some ways our age is not a good one to live in, but for those who are interested in physics there are great compensations.”

Hendrik Lorentz (1853–1928) Dutch physicist

p, 125
Theory of Relativity: A Concise Statement (1920)

Age, Way, Lovers, Nature

“If, therefore, you've already considered that Signac and the others who are doing pointillism often make very beautiful things with it - Instead of running those things down, one [Bernhard] should respect them and speak of them sympathetically, especially when there's a falling out. Otherwise one becomes a narrow sectarian oneself, and the equivalent of those who think nothing of others and believe themselves to be the only righteous ones. This extends even to the academic painters, because take, for example, a painting by Fantin-Latour — and above all his entire oeuvre. Well then — there's someone who hasn't rebelled, and does that prevent him, that indefinable calm and righteousness that he has, from being one of the most independent characters in existence?”

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

Quote in Vincent's letter to Emile Bernard, from Paris, about December 1887; from letter 575 - vangoghletters http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let575/letter.html] 1880s, 1887

Thinking, Painting

“Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You can't change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson - who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!”

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

Tweets by @realDonaldTrump https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/898169407213645824 (17 August 2017) 2010s, 2017, August

Sadness, History, Learning, Change

“I first saw Wittgenstein in the Michaelmas term of 1938, my first term at Cambridge. At a meeting of the Moral Science Club, after the paper for the evening was read and the discussion started, someone began to stammer a remark. He had extreme difficulty in expressing himself and his words were unintelligible to me. I whispered to my neighbour, ‘Who is that?’: he replied, ‘Wittgenstein.’ I was astonished, because, for one reason I had expected the famous author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to be an elderly man, whereas this man looked young—perhaps about 35. (His actual age was 49.) His face was lean and brown, his profile was aquiline and strikingly beautiful, his head was covered with a curly mass of brown hair. I observed the respectful attention that everyone in the room paid to him. After his unsuccessful beginning he did not speak for a time but was obviously struggling with his thoughts. His look was concentrated, he made striking gestures with his hands as if he were discoursing. All the others maintained an intent and expectant silence. I witnessed this phenomenon count less times thereafter and came to regard it as entirely natural.”

Norman Malcolm (1911–1990) American philosopher

Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 1958

Age, Nature, Silence, Science

“Flowers fade and fly, and flying fill the sky;
Their bloom departs, their perfume gone, yet who stands pitying by? …
Oh, let me sadly bury them beside these steps to-night! …
Farewell, dear flowers, for ever now, thus buried as 'twas best,
I have not yet divined when I with you shall sink to rest.
I who can bury flowers like this a laughing-stock shall be;
I cannot say in days to come what hands shall bury me.
See how when spring begins to fail each opening floweret fades;
So too there is a time of age and death for beauteous maids;
And when the fleeting spring is gone, and days of beauty o'er,
Flowers fall, and lovely maidens die, and both are known no more.”

Herbert Giles book A History of Chinese Literature

"The Hung Lou Mêng", p. 368
A History of Chinese Literature (1901)

Love, Death, Age, Spring

“Architecture is not about building the impossible, which we can do if we have enough money and enough tools and enough computers, it is about building what is appropriate and about attaining beauty through such an approach. I describe this premise as "inherent buildability and I believe it is central to what I do.”

Moshe Safdie (1938) Israeli-Canadian architect

from lecture Megascale, Order and Complexity held in Emmertal, Germany on July 27, 2008

Money

“That's the way beauty is found, by accident [referring to the Glass house he lived in, with the family]. You don't recognize it when you are looking for it, and you won't find it by looking in a magazine. It's right here in the moon, the stars, the horizon, the snow formations... In this house we can see all those things. But what I miss are the songs in the fields. No one sings them any more because everyone has become a little businessman. And there are no more plows. I love a plow more than anything else on a farm.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

1942 - 1948, A Painter in a Glass House' (1948)

Love, Family, Way, Star

“All Nature's wildness tells the same story: the shocks and outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring, thundering waves and floods, the silent uprush of sap in plants, storms of every sort, each and all, are the orderly, beauty-making love-beats of Nature's heart.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

" Three Adventures in the Yosemite http://books.google.com/books?id=k8dZAAAAYAAJ&pg=P656", The Century Magazine volume LXXXIII, number 5 (March 1912) pages 656-661 (at page 661); modified slightly and reprinted in The Yosemite http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/the_yosemite/ (1912), chapter 4: Snow Banners 1910s

Love, Making love, Nature, Heart

“The beauty other people create is not for the artists. Artists have to live alone.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

People

“Probably even more than the architecture I'd be drawn to landscape. That's my first love, landscape... All kinds of landscape, if it's not cluttered up and vandalised. Yesterday we went out to Blenheim, and I love the flatness and the trees. I like all kinds. And where I'm from, the central valley of Virginia, is not one of the most exciting landscapes in the world, but it's one of the most beautiful. It's very beautiful because it has everything. It has mountains, there are streams, there are fields, beautiful trees. And architecture sits very well in it... And I've always lived in the south of Italy, because it’s more excitable. It's volcanic. The land affects people naturally, that's part of the characteristics, for me, of a people, in a sense.”

Cy Twombly (1928–2011) American painter

Source: 2000 - 2011, Cy Twombly, 2000', by David Sylvester (June 2000), p. 173

Love, People, World, Mountain

“People come to see beauty, and I dance to give it to them.”

Judith Jamison (1943) American dancer

WomenSports magazine, p. 14 (September 1975)

People, Dance

“In that mysterious dimension where the body meets the soul the stereotype is born and has her being. She is more body than soul, more soul than mind. To her belongs all that is beautiful, eve the very word beauty itself. All that exists, exists to beautify her.”

Germaine Greer book The Female Eunuch

The Stereotype
The Female Eunuch (1970)

Soul

“Seeing my mother’s red shoes disappear, I almost leaped up screaming again, but then, the boy next to me said, “Calmate,” in Spanish, “we’re going to be okay, mano.” I turned and looked at this boy. My God, his Spanish sounded so soft and comforting, and he was the most darkly handsome boy that I’d ever seen. His eyes were as large and beautiful as a goat’s eyes. Looking at him, I stopped crying.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

God, Shoe, Boy, Cry

“A time will come, a time will come,
(Though the world will never be quite the same),
When the people sit in the summer sun,
Watching, watching the beautiful game.”

Arnold Wall (1869–1966) university professor, philologist, poet, mountaineer, botanist, writer, radio broadcaster

Poem: A Time Will Come (1915); Cited in: John Arlott, ‎Fred Trueman (1971) Arlott and Trueman on cricket. p. 173
He is referring to cricket; later, "the beautiful game" was used to describe football.

People, World, Game, Time

“After a considerable walk through the forest, where I became acquainted with several of the little lakes I am so fond of, I came to Hestehaven and Lake Carl. Here is one of the most beautiful regions I have ever seen. The countryside is somewhat isolated and slopes steeply down to the lake, but with the beech forests growing on either side, it is not barren. A growth of rushes forms the background and the lake itself the foreground; a fairly large part of the lake is clear, but a still larger part is overgrown with the large green leaves of the waterlily, under which the fish seemingly try to hide but now and then peek out and flounder about on the surface in order to bathe in sunshine. The land rises on the opposite side, a great beech forest, and in the morning light the lighted areas make a marvelous contrast to the shadowed areas. The church bells call to prayer, but not in a temple made by human hands. If the birds do not need to be reminded to praise God, then ought men not be moved to prayer outside of the church, in the true house of God, where heaven's arch forms the ceiling of the church, where the roar of the storm and the light breezes take the place of the organ's bass and treble, where the singing of the birds make up the congregational hymns of praise, where echo does not repeat the pastor's voice as in the arch of the stone church, but where everything resolves itself in an endless antiphony — Hillerød, July 25, 1835”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

1830s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1830s

Men, God, Bird, Fish

“We are at the classic-romantic barrier now, where on one side we see a cycle as it appears immediately—and this is an important way of seeing it—and where on the other side we can begin to see it as a mechanic does in terms of underlying form—and this is an important way of seeing things too. These tools for example—this wrench—has a certain romantic beauty to it, but its purpose is always purely classical. It's designed to change the underlying form of the machine.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 8

Way, Appearance, Change

“To me, the irony of this involvement with size, as I observed earlier, is the unwillingness or inability of so many Americans to identify themselves with something as vast as the United States. Bigger cars, bigger parking lots, bigger corporate structures, bigger farms, bigger drug stores, bigger supermarkets, bigger motion-picture screens. The tangible and the functional expand, while the intangible and the beautiful shrink. Left to wither is the national purpose, national educational needs, literature and theater, and our critical faculties. The national dialogue is gradually being lost in a froth of misleading self-congratulation and cliche. National needs and interests are slowly being submerged by the national preoccupation with the irrelevant.”

J. William Fulbright (1905–1995) American politician

"In Need of a Consensus," Penrose Memorial Lecture to the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia (April 20, 1961), in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, August 1961, p. 352.

Education, Cars, Literature