Quotes about beauty
page 43

“Surrender to what is ultimate. Surrender to what you really are! Besides being John, Gary, anything you are named. What are you is what you have to understand. And serve that purpose. Serve that motive. Because what you are is far more greater than what you think you are. And because you think what you are, that… What it is inside of you, what is far more greater than you think you are, supercedes. Because that is what you are always thinking. “Oh I am -- I’m just not good.” And, “I’m just, I’m just a bum,” or, “I’m just crazy,” or, “I’ve just had it.””

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

No. There’s something within inside of you that is really beautiful. And this is what the Knowledge reveals.
Portland, Oregon, 30 January 1977
1970s

Motivation, Understanding, Knowledge, Thinking

“I, too, have made a wee-little book from the same materials, which I call the Philosophy of Jesus; it is a paradigma of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book, and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject. A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said nor saw. They have compounded from the heathen mysteries a system beyond the comprehension of man, of which the great reformer of the vicious ethics and deism of the Jews, were he to return on earth, would not recognize one feature.”

Thomas Jefferson book Jefferson Bible

Letter to Charles Thomson (9 January 1816), on his The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=JefJesu.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all (the "Jefferson Bible"), which omits all Biblical passages asserting Jesus' virgin birth, miracles, divinity, and resurrection. Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-11_Bk.pdf, pp. 498–499 1810s

Books, Time, Drawing

“I'm not for pretending that bad stuff doesn't exist, and a passion for justice and truth is a libertarian trait. But the idea of liberty should also reveal new forms of beauty in the world, astonishing evidence of order without dictate, lovely examples of innovation without planning, and other magical things. Surely these deserve some attention too.”

Jeffrey Tucker (1963) American writer

Love, Truth, World, Justice

“Automatic poetry comes straight out of the poet's bowels or out of any other of his organs that has accumulated reserves... He crows, swears, moans, stammers, yodels, according to his mood... His poems are like nature; they stink, laugh, and rhyme like nature. Foolishness, or at least what men calls foolishness is as precious to him as a sublime piece of rhetoric. For in nature a broken twig is equal in beauty and importance to the clouds and the stars.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

Source: 1940s, Abstract Art, Concrete Art (c. 1942), p. 118-119

Men, Star, Mood, Nature

“Which is the best,—
Beauty and glory, in a southern clime,
Mingled with thunder, tempest; or the calm
Of skies that scarcely change, which, at the least,
If much of shine they have not, have no storms?”

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

Erinna
The Golden Violet (1827)
Variant: Which is the best,—
Beauty and glory, in a southern clime,
Mingled with thunder, tempest; or the calm
Of skies that scarcely change, which, at the least,
If much of shine they have not, have no storms?

Passion, Change

“Here then is the pattern in my carpet, the sense of the eternal mysteries, the eternal beauty hidden beneath the crust of common and commonplace things; hidden and yet burning and glowing continually if you care to look with purged eyes.”

Arthur Machen (1863–1947) Welsh author and mystic

The London Adventure (London: Martin Secker, 1924) p. 25

Sense

“This mood hath known all beauty for it sees
O'erwhelmed majesties
In these pale forms, and kingly crowns of gold
On brows no longer bold,
And through the shadowy terrors of their hell
The love for which they fell,
And how desire which cast them in the deep
Called God too from his sleep.”

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

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Love, God, Mood, Hell

“Wit can be beautiful, because it expresses and distils an idea.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

On the subject of criteria he used to judge in The Most Beautiful Tweet contest, Hay Festival 2010[citation needed]
2010s

Idea

“And beauty immortal awakes from the tomb.”

James Beattie (1735–1803) Scottish poet, moralist and philosopher

The Hermit

“Our speech has ceased to speak, it shouts; it says cute, not beautiful, colossal, not great; it cannot find the right word any more, because the word is no longer the designation of an object, but the echo of some kind of gossip about the object.”

Paul de Lagarde (1827–1891) German polymath, biblical scholar and orientalist

“Zum Unterrichtsgesetze,” as cited in The Politics of Cultural Despair (1961), p. 31

“One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature — inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, we learn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and we soon cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of everything that melts and fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last.”

John Muir book My First Summer in the Sierra

Terry Gifford, EWDB, page 279
1860s, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1869

Death, Lie, Feeling, Nature

“Then, if when I have lov’d my round,
Thou prov’st the pleasant she,
With spoils of meaner beauties crown’d
I laden will return to thee,
Ev’n sated with variety.”

Richard Lovelace (1617–1658) English writer and poet

The Scrutiny, st. 4.
Lucasta (1649)

“To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth.
He has only to look into a human face in order to read there the soul within — not a feature deceives him; hypocrisy is as transparent as sincerity — the line of a forehead, the least lifting of a brow, the flash of an eye, reveal to him all the secrets of a heart.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. II. To the artist, all in nature is beautiful, p. 47-48

Truth, Secret, Books, Soul

“There has been the assumption that men are finite spirits. They are, that is to say, not only animals with a brief terrestrial existence, but in them is an element which comes from, and belongs to, the spiritual world. This world we postulate to be the world of eternal reality, of God; and we assume that in it whatever is of God, the things that are good, beautiful and true, will exist for ever with Him. We have then, to justify our belief that, because such God-like qualities exist in human personality, that personality will survive the destruction of the body.”

Ernest Barnes (1874–1953) English mathematician and clergyman

p, 125
Spiritualism and the Christian Faith (1918)

Men, God, World, Reality

“Meryl Streep, in her Protestant way, is stuck on words; she flashes clever accents as a mask for her deeper failures. (And she cannot deliver a Jewish line; she destroyed Nora Ephron’s snappy dialogue in Hearburn.) Streep’s work doesn’t travel. Try dubbing her for movie houses in India: there’d be nothing left, just that bony, earnest horse face moving its lips. Imagine, on the other hand, lesser technicians like Hedy Lammarr, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner: these women have an international and universal appeal, crossing the centuries. They would have been beautiful in Egypt, Greece, Rome, medieval Burgundy, or eighteenth-century Paris. Susan Hayward played Bathsheba. Try to picture Streep in a Bible epic! Streep is incapable of playing the great legendary or mythological roles. She has no elemental power, no smouldering sensuality.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 16

Women, Way, Travel, Imagination

“Many of Nature's finest lessons are to be found in her storms, and if careful to keep in right relations with them, we may go safely abroad with them, rejoicing in the grandeur and beauty of their works and ways.”

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

Terry Gifford, LLO, pages 686-687
1900s, Stickeen (1909)

Way, Nature

“We now come to a third evil, namely, our very unsatisfactory, not to say ugly, furniture. It may be objected that it does not much matter what may be the exact curve of the legs of the chair a man sits upon, or of the table off which he eats his dinner, provided the said articles of furniture answer their respective uses; but, unfortunately, what we see continually before our eyes is likely, indeed is quite sure, to exercise a very great influence upon our taste, and therefore the question of beautiful versus ugly furniture does become a matter of very great importance. I might easily enlarge upon the enormities, inconveniences, and extravagances of our modern upholsterers, but that has been so fully done in a recent number of the "Cornhill Magazine" that I may well dispense with the task.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

Eastop & Gil commented that: Burges held strong views about furniture, and protested at the "enormities, inconveniences, and upholsterers." (1865: 69) He advocated the use of the medieval style, because "not only did its duty as furniture, but spoke and told a story" (1865: 71). Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 69: Partly cited in: Dinah Eastop, ‎Kathryn Gill (2012) Upholstery Conservation: Principles and Practice. http://books.google.com/books?id=2gf50OiP8lAC&pg=PA50 p. 47.

Exercises, Question, Evil

“What shall we do, what shall we do with all this useless beauty?”

Elvis Costello (1954) English singer-songwriter

All This Useless Beauty
Song lyrics, All This Useless Beauty (1996)

“Assurance of hope is more than life. It is health, strength, power, vigor, activity, energy, manliness, beauty.”

J.C. Ryle (1816–1900) Anglican bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 16.

Life, Health, Hope

“It is interesting to note that poetry, a literary device whose very construct involves the use of words, is itself the word of choice by persons grasping to describe something so beautiful, it is marvelously ineffable.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

The Cosmos as a Poem (2010)

Personality

“One thing you must know: Just as there is no comparison between actually hearing the sound of harp-strings sweetly plucked and listening to someone talking about it, so too there is no comparison between words which are received in pure grace, issuing from a living heart, spoken by living lips, and those self-same words committed to dry parchment — especially words in German. For these somehow grow chill, losing their vitality like roses cut. For the enchanting melody which, more than anything else, moves human hearts, then fades away, so that the words are received now into the dryness of dry hearts. No harp-strings were ever so sweet but, when stretched across dry timber, they fall silent. An unloving heart can no more understand a love-filled speaker than a German an Italian. Therefore, an eager enquirer should hasten to the out-flowing streams of these sweet teachings so that she may see and observe them at their source in all its living and wondrous beauty – that is, the in-flowing of present grace which is able to restore dead hearts to life.”

Henry Suso (1295–1366) Dominican friar and mystic

The Exemplar, The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom

Love, Life, Understanding, Heart

“Great cities, or the endless beautiful plains stretched out before
his jaded gaze and disappeared into the nothingness of his feeling. ~ Fall in Love”

Steve Kilbey (1954) British artist

Lyrics

Love, Feeling

“Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. … [T]rust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.”

Mary Schmich (1953) American columnist

"Wear Sunscreen" (1997)

Youth, Way, Imagination, Photo

“O black and unknown bards of long ago,
How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?
How, in your darkness, did you come to know
The power and beauty of the minstrels' lyre?”

James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) writer and activist

O Black and Unknown Bards, st. 1.
Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917)

“When a man is actually with God, and then sees what he has tried to do and in our terms done so marvellously. it amounts to something which is utterly inadequate. That's what I'm saying: that the steeple reaching up so far, far away, that Salisbury Cathedral has a beautiful steeple, but what is it compared with the sky into which it is reaching? It is in this comparison that one is aware of on the one hand the absurdity of our efforts, and on the other the inadequacy of them”

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist

Interview with Bill Buckley

God, Effort

“I, who had never had planted single seed in the estate was expected to enjoy the comfort of a beautiful farm house, while those who had toiled there all their lives had only the meanest hovels.”

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

Baba Amte: A Vision of New India

Housing

“Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover,
Fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense.”

Joseph Addison book Cato

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

Lovers, Sense

“I cannot describe myself except to say that I am either very vain or very beautiful, and that I hope I am the latter, while suspecting I may be the former.”

John C. Wright book Orphans of Chaos

Source: Orphans of Chaos (2005), Chapter 1, “The Boundaries” Section 8 (p. 20)

Hope

“Surely you’ll at least see the Temple? Respect all religions, is my motto, believe in none. Sensible principle. Still, you know, must say, after all, two thousand beautiful priestesses! All ready, willing, able—and I must say—dextrous!— to do their best to inspire male worshippers with love for their goddess, hah-hah!”

Avram Davidson book The Phoenix and the Mirror

Source: The Phoenix and the Mirror (1969), Chapter 8

Love, Religion

“It was a love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of men — where immortality is touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane; where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same time.”

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

Thoughts on his first parachute jump in The Spirit of St Louis (1953)

Love, Life, Death, Men

“There is beauty as well as danger when you deal with the subtle realms. The beauty is that you can have realizations, revelations, and experiences that can carry over into the waking state. The danger is that you can expose yourself to negative influences. There are many positive as well as negative entities that infiltrate one’s consciousness while dreaming or disturb one during astral travel. Often they appear in the form of family members or close friends. There are also beings on the subtle plane that are in the habit of engaging the sleeping person in unwanted sexual activity.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: Dreams: A State of Reality, p. 21

Family, Dreams, Travel, Sleep

“The more Lil' Kim distorted her natural beauty to become a cartoonlike caricature of whiteness, the larger her success.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Rock My Soul (2003)

Nature, Success

“Moreover, given the unpleasant option of having to associate with either the self-satisfied beautiful or the self-pitying plain, he'd choose the former every time because beauty could sometimes transcend smugness whereas self-pity just made ugliness all the more unattractive.”

Tom Robbins Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000)

Time

“I may live in Beirut, but I think Egypt is beautiful and I feel like it’s my second country.”

Layal Abboud (1982) Lebanese pop singer

July 16, 2014; Interview by Insight Magazine http://www.insight-egypt.com/celebrities/layal-abboud/july-16/214 2014

Feeling, Thinking, Country

“Segregating science and spirituality has been the greatest crime against humanity in the past century. These two main branches of knowledge that should have gone hand in hand were divided and practitioners were either labeled as modern scientists or representatives of religious faiths. “Only scientific discoveries apply to logic and intelligence. They are the only truth. Religious faith is blind and misguided.” This was the ideology that was popularized. All the recent natural disasters and the alarming changes in the global climate are challenging the further survival of this beautiful earth we live in. Now, many people cannot help thinking that all this may be the result of weighing science and spirituality on opposite sides of a scale and deeming that one is much greater than the other.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

From Amritanandamayi's Address at the United Nations Academic Impact Conference on Technology for Sustainable Development (2015)

People, Truth, Faith, Intelligence

“Thy duty do? rejoined the voice,
Ah, do it, do it, and rejoice;
But shalt thou then, when all is done,
Enjoy a love, embrace a beauty
Like these, that may be seen and won
In life, whose course will then be run;
Or wilt thou be where there is none?
I know not, I will do my duty.”

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) English poet

The Questioning Spirit http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/C/CloughArthurHugh/verse/poemsproseremains/questioningspirit.html, st. 2 (1847).

Love, Life

“The waitress took a bar rag, and she wiped it across her eyes.
And as she spoke her voice came out as something like a sigh.
She said "I wish that I was beautiful, or that you were halfway blind.
And I wish I weren't so dog-gone fat, I wish that you were mine.
And I wish that you'd come with me, when I leave for home.
For we both know all about loneliness, and livin' all alone."”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Better Place to Be
Song lyrics, Sniper and Other Love Songs (1972)

Dogs, Home, Loneliness

“Even if mankind had any desire to rid itself of the Seven Deadly Sins, Greed had been assured of a place in our hearts by virtue of time. By writing it down on a piece of paper and parading it as law and belief, Greed could be resurrected at a moment's notice.
That was the beauty of the written word. It was invariably taken at face value and granted permit to be spoken as the truth. It lived longer than the man.
And wreaked havoc in the process.”

Stel Pavlou book Decipher

Decipher, The First Time, p. 7 (2001).

Truth, Law, Time, Heart

“I'd never seen anything more beautiful — even as I ran, gasping and screaming, I could appreciate that. And the last seven months meant nothing. And [Edward's] words in the forest meant nothing. And it did not matter if he did not want me. I would never want anything but him, no matter how long I lived.”

Stephenie Meyer (1973) American author

Bella Swan, p. 451
Twilight series, New Moon (2006)

“You run into a party and [a] woman comes up to you. She's the most beautiful creature you ever saw — Ava Gardner — and says, "I like you and why don't we get together?" What are you going to say, "No"? You'd have to be an idiot. She was an incredible creature.”

Artie Shaw (1910–2004) American clarinetist, composer, and bandleader

As quoted in

“I saw a rainbow earlier today
Lately those rainbows be comin' round like everyday
Deep in the struggle I have found the beauty of me
God is watchin' and the Devil finally let me be
Here in this moment to myself”

Macy Gray (1967) American singer-songwriter and actress

"A Moment to Myself" (co-written with Jeremy Ruzumna, Miles Tackett. Mark Morales, and Damon Wimbley)
On How Life Is (1999)

God

“Tagore once said– art has to be beautiful, but, before that, it has to be truthful.
Now, what is truth? There is no eternal truth. Every artist has to learn private truth though a painful private process. And that is what he has to convey.”

Ritwik Ghatak (1925–1976) Bengali filmmaker and script writer

[Ghatak, Ritwik, Cinema and I, 1987, Ritwik Memorial Trust, 75]

Pain, Truth, Art, Learning

“Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.”

Sophia Loren (1934) Italian actress

As quoted in Morrow's International Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations (1982) by Jonathon Green, p. 340.

Beauty, Deep, Feeling

“Our first necessity, if India is to survive and do her appointed work in the world, is that the youth of India should learn to think,—to think on all subjects, to think independently, fruitfully, going to the heart of things, not stopped by their surface, free of prejudgments, shearing sophism and prejudice asunder as with a sharp sword, smiting down obscurantism of all kinds as with the mace of Bhima. (…) When there is destruction, it is the form that perishes, not the spirit—for the world and its ways are forms of one Truth which appears in this material world in ever new bodies…. In India, the chosen land, [that Truth] is preserved; in the soul of India it sleeps expectant on that soul's awakening, the soul of India leonine, luminous, locked in the closed petals of the ancient lotus of love, strength and wisdom, not in her weak, soiled, transient and miserable externals. India alone can build the future of mankind. (…) Ancient or pre-Buddhistic Hinduism sought Him both in the world and outside it; it took its stand on the strength and beauty and joy of the Veda, unlike modern or post-Buddhistic Hinduism which is oppressed with Buddha's sense of universal sorrow and Shankara's sense of universal illusion,—Shankara who was the better able to destroy Buddhism because he was himself half a Buddhist. Ancient Hinduism aimed socially at our fulfilment in God in life, modern Hinduism at the escape from life to God. The more modern ideal is fruitful of a noble and ascetic spirituality, but has a chilling and hostile effect on social soundness and development; social life under its shadow stagnates for want of belief and delight, sraddha and ananda. If we are to make our society perfect and the nation is to live again, then we must revert to the earlier and fuller truth.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

1910-1912
India's Rebirth

Love, Life, Wisdom, God

“Henry is a beautiful player and has got complete technique, I adore watching him. I respect him very much as a man and as a footballer. He reminds me of myself.”

Thierry Henry (1977) French association football player

Ronaldinho Barcelona chief declares interest in Henry http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id=352723&cc=5901, (20 December 2005) About

Football

“‘That it is still possible for a man of initiative to make money in the East is the firm opinion of balding, plump Mr Denham who adds, however, “Not if you take a wife with you.” Mr Denham has scathing things to say about Englishwomen and their lack of domestic virtues. He particularly selects their cooking as a target, but considers also that they are far inferior to the slant-eyed beauties of the Orient in the all-important matter of fidelity to their menfolk. Mr Denham is considered an authority on the women of Japan who, he says, are lovely, demure and submissive…. On his own admission he has little time for anything except money, dalliance, and the “imbibing of liquors of all kinds”.’”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Love, Women, Money, Time

“.. there is no longer any beauty except the struggle. Any work of art that lacks a sense of aggression can never be a masterpiece.”

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

In the 'First Futurist Manifesto,' Filippo Marinetti, 1909; as quoted in Critical Writings: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, New Edition, quoted in the text on the Back Cover, Macmillan, 7 Apr 2007
1900's

Art, Sense

“Your letter became before I was up this morning – Yes nice to get. I recognize two of the drawings you speak of – Number one is the first of the dozen or more you speak of – number 2 came next The last – It didn't quite satisfy me so I tried again – the last one was so much worse than the one you like that I thought I had just about worn the idea out so quit... You ask me what I did with the rest of myself when I made number 2 -... I sat up almost all night one night this week and made the most infernally ugly little shape you ever saw – I wanted to break it when I got through – but didn't then next afternoon when I had time to look at it, it amused me so that I didn't – really its laughable – it's so ugly – and still some way it's quite beautiful – I don't know – I may break it up – or I may try to cast it just for fun – I have another idea that I'm in an awful stew to model – I am going to get a lot of patience so I can make all the little do-dangles I want to and won't have to break one up so I can make another – I want to make a big one..”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

Canyon, Texas, (September, 1916), p. 198
1915 - 1920, Letters to Anita Pollitzer' (1916)

Way, Idea, Time, Drawing

“There is often more psychic appeal in a so-called ugly woman than there is in a pretty one; and, in my ideal, I reconstruct her to bring that beauty forth in terms of line or volume.”

André Derain (1880–1954) French painter and engraver

Source: The Wild Men of Paris', 1910, pp. 406-07

“Beauty means perfect to me, but it also has an additional meaning having to do with being pleasurable, rather than painful. Beauty is hard to make. The making is painful, and involves a certain amount of craft, and a relaxation of the part of the brain that says, "Don't write that. X wrote those four notes in 1542 or 1979 or 1825 or whatever period you are worried about being influenced by."”

Beth Anderson (1950) American neo-romantic composer

Beauty is Revolution (1980)

Pain, Pleasure, Parting, Perfection

“The beauty and glory are rerlated to the non-material.”

Judah Loew ben Bezalel (1512–1609) Czech rabbi

Chidushey Agadot Chulin, 59

“What I can offer you is no different than a shovel. You’ve got the gold mine, and all I’m offering you is the shovel. What does a shovel do? It allows you to dig for the gold. It allows you an access. There are very particular techniques that I am talking about, and from there, you can have an experience is beautiful, an experience that is soothing. That’s all.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Melbourne, Australia March 26, 1985
1980s

“Love, who is most beautiful among the immortal gods, the melter of limbs, overwhelms in their hearts the intelligence and wise counsel of all gods and all men.”

Hesiod Greek poet

Source: The Theogony (c. 700 BC), line 120.

Love, Men, God, Intelligence

“The relationship of volumes, lines, and colors demands absolute orchestration and order. These values are all unquestionable influential; they have extended into modern objects such as airplanes, automobiles, farm machines, etc. Today we are in competition with the 'beautiful object'; it is undeniable. Sometimes its plastic qualities make it beautiful in itself and consequently unusable; one can only fold one's arms and admire it. There is also today an astonishing art of window display. Certain store windows are highly organized spectacles... If, pushing things to extremes, the majority of manufactured objects and 'stored spectacles' were beautiful and had plasticity, we artists would no longer have any reason to exist.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote from 'Notes on Contemporary Plastic Life', in 'Kunstblatt', Berlin 1923; as quoted in The documents of 20th century art – Functions of Painting by Fernand Léger, in Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1973, pp. 24-25
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1920's

Art, Color

“On observing his Mahālakṣmī, the beauty of whose face was like that of a spectacular lotus, the brilliance of brilliance, the Lakṣmī (prosperity) of Lakṣmī (prosperity), the brilliance of the knowledge of Brahman, the intellect of intellect, the modesty of modesty, the earth (bearer) of the earth, and the daughter of the earth, Rāma said to Lakṣmaṇa, characterized by good qualities. ॥ 16.84 ॥”

Rāmabhadrācārya (1950) Hindu religious leader

vīkṣya tāṃ vīkṣaṇīyāmbujāsyaśriyaṃ
svaśriyaṃ śrīśriyaṃ brahmavidyāśriyam ।
dhīdhiyaṃ hrīhriyaṃ bhūbhuvaṃ bhūbhuvaṃ
rāghavaḥ prāha sallakṣaṇaṃ lakṣmaṇam ॥
Śrībhārgavarāghavīyam

Knowledge, Daughters

“I saw a fullness, a brightness with which I felt myself so filled that words fail me, nor can I find anything to compare it with. I cannot tell you that I saw something with a bodily form, but he was as he is in heaven, namely, of such an indescribable beauty that I do not know how to describe it to you except as the Beauty and the All Good.”

Angela of Foligno (1248–1309) Italian saint

Source: The Memorial and Instructions, pp. 151-152

“An achieved poem is always beautiful in its own way, though such a way will many times strike people as harsh and repellent.”

Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) English poet and professor

A matter of timing: The Guardian, Saturday 21 September 2002 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview28/print

People, Way, Time

“Your daughter says, 'Dad. Mom. I want to join the armed services.' You look at her beautiful face, her life flashes before your eyes, and you see a body bag. Now's the time to let her know the biggest military secret: She can join the military and be as safe-from-death as she would be at home. How? In the war in Iraq, not a single woman has been killed in the Air Force. Nor has a single woman been killed in the Marines. And only one has died in the Navy. Your only job is to keep her out of the Army.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 30.

Life, Death, War, Secret

“Art has poisoned our life. Aesthetics has infected everyone… If one chooses a typewriter or a sewing machine in the living room, the housewife say: 'Please take it away; it destroys the harmony of the room'. Post-cards, stamps, pouches, railway-tickets, pots umbrellas, towels, pyamas, chairs, blankets, handkerchiefs and ties – everything is 'arty'. How much more refreshing are those articles which are not called art: bathrooms, bath-tubs, bicycles, automobiles, engine-rooms and flat-irons. There are still people who can make beautiful things without art. They are the progressives.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote of Van Doesburg in his article: 'The end of art'; in 'De Stijl' series XII, 1924-5, pp. 135–136
1920 – 1926

Life, People, Art

“Our “Theories of Taste,” as they are called, wherein the deep, infinite, unspeakable Love of Wisdom and Beauty, which dwells in all men, is “explained,” made mechanically visible, from “Association” and the like, …”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Love, Wisdom, Men

“Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics.”

Eric Temple Bell (1883–1960) mathematician and science fiction author born in Scotland who lived in the United States for most of his li…

Source: The Development of Mathematics (1940), p. 9

Spring, Mathematics

“Landscapes are about beauty and death. The only way you can define beauty.... is to know that death is hiding behind it. This is what haunts you when you’re doing a so-called landscape painting.”

Per Kirkeby (1938–2018) Danish artist

as quoted in Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Drawings, Helaine Posner, exhibition catalogue (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1992
1965 - 1995

Death, Way, Painting

“It's interesting for me to bring up a girl. You go to the toy store and the female characters there — Cinderella, the lady in Beauty and the Beast — their major task is to find Prince Charming. And I'm like, wait a minute — it's 2005! We've fought so hard to have a say, and not just live through our partners, and yet you're still seeing two-year-old girls with this message pushed at them that the only important thing is to find this amazing dress so that the guy will want you. It's something my mum pointed out to me when I was little — so much that I almost threw up — but she's right.”

Björk (1965) Icelandic singer-songwriter

From The Observer, March 13 2005 issue, asserting for the first time the appeal to her of feminist ideology
Other quotes

Guy, Girl, Waiting

“My works are not just rhetorical, except in the sense that all art is rhetorical. I believe in beauty.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

Art, Sense

“But we all do sort of the same thing and that is rearrange what you thought was real, and, uh, they remind you of the beauty of very simple things. You forget, because you're so busy going from A to Z, that there's, uh, 24 letters in between.”

Grace Slick (1939) American musician, writer and painter

Interview on the History Channel documentary Getting High - The History of LSD, 2001; sampled on Drop Out by Infected Mushroom

Business, Forgetting

“The idea that beauty is revolution is a revelation to me. I once believed that the concept of the music was more important than the sound, that the politics of the notation was more important than the time limits of the rehersals and therefore, more important than the sound of the performance”

Beth Anderson (1950) American neo-romantic composer

Cited (earlier) in: American Women Composers (1979) AWC news. Volumes 2-3. p. 41
Beauty is Revolution (1980)

Music, Idea, Time

“Whether naïve on my part or not, it seemed worth taking the time to try to convince others that their lives possessed beauty and meaning worth preserving and honoring.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(p. xiv).
Book Sources, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry (2014)

Time, Parting

“I admit, of course, that the artist does not see nature as the vulgar do. His emotion reveals to him the inner truths that underlie appearance. But the only principle In art is to copy what one sees. Every other method is ruinous. No one can embellish Nature. It is simply and solely a question of seeing. Doubtless a mediocre man, when he copies will never produce a work of art. He looks without seeing. No matter how minutely he observes, the result will be flat and without character. But the artist's trade is not for mediocre men, and no amount of training can supply them with talent. The artist sees - he sees with his heart. He sees deep into the heart of Nature. To the artist everything in Nature is beautiful.
The vulgarian imagines that what looks to him ugly In Nature is not material for the artist. He would forbid us to represent what displeases and offends him. He makes a grave mistake. What is commonly called ugliness in Nature may become a great beauty in art.
In the realm of realities, people regard as ugly everything that is deformed and diseased and that suggests sickness, weakness and suffering. They regard as ugly everything that defies regularity, which is to them the symbol and condition of health and strength. A hump is ugly, bow-legs are ugly, misery in rags is ugly. Ugly, again, are the soul and conduct of the immoral, the vicious, the criminal man, the abnormal man who is an enemy of society; ugly is the soul of the parricide, the traitor, the unscrupulous slave of ambition. And it is right that the lives and the of which we can expect only evil should be given an odious epithet.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Rodin on realism, 1910

Men, People, Health, Truth

“In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire,
Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned!
His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls
The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat
To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power,
On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry
He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more.
But when one, fearless, turned and clawed like bronze,
Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws,
And he would weigh the heavier on those after.
Who rests in God's mean flattery now? Your wealth
Is but his cunning to make death more hard.
Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking.
And he has made the market for your beauty
Too poor to buy, although you die to sell.
Only that he has never heard of sleep;
And when the cats come out the rats are sly.
Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawn.
But he has gnawed a fibre from strange roots,
And in the morning some pale wonder ceases.
Things are not strange and strange things are forgetful.
Ah! if the day were arid, somehow lost
Out of us, but it is as hair of us,
And only in the hush no wind stirs it.
And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes,
And restlessness still shadows the lost ways.
The fingers shut on voices that pass through,
Where blind farewells are taken easily...
Ah! this miasma of a rotting God!”

Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) English poet

written 1916 or before
On Receiving News of the War (1914), God

Death, Women, Men, God

“Nature shows us its artistic beauty that sciences explain the hows and religions contemplate the whys.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Religion, Nature, Science

“Now from the broken tower, what solemn bell still tolls,
Mourning what piteous death? Answer, O saddened souls!
Who mourn the death of beauty and the death of grace.”

Lionel Johnson (1867–1902) English poet

The Age of a Dream (1890)

Death, Soul

“Mark: I would say that you are the nuclear power puff girl, you are indestructible. You've asked for positive assistance in guidance and what I'd say is when you're phrasing things you don’t need to end each line the same way, it's about what you don’t do rather than what you do do… And you do look beautiful.”

Hayley Jensen (1983) Australian singer

Australian Idol, Final Performances, Final 4

Way, Girl

“I don’t know if I’m the right person to be doing jokes about religion; in the past few months, I’ve become religious, I’ve started to believe in god, creationism and intelligent design, and the reason that I now believe in god and creationism and intelligent design is because of Professor Richard Dawkins. Because when I look at something as complex and intricate and beautiful as Professor Richard Dawkins, I don’t think that just could’ve evolved by chance! Professor Richard Dawkins was put there by god to test us, like fossils. And facts.”

Stewart Lee (1968) English stand-up comedian, writer, director and musician

Series 1 Episode 6: "Religion"

God, Religion, Intelligence, Thinking

“For those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.”

Albert Camus book The Rebel

The Rebel (1951)

Hell

“They sat and combed their beautiful hair,
Their long, bright tresses, one by one,
As they laughed and talked in the chamber there,
After the revel was done.”

Nora Perry (1831–1896) American writer

After the Ball, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories, no efforts of memory, everything summed up in one moment. Complete art which sums up all the others and completes them. Like music, it acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses, the harmonious tones corresponding to the harmonies of sounds, but in painting, a unity is obtained which is not possible in music, where the accords follow one another, and the judgement experiences a continuous fatigue if one wants to reunite the end and the beginning. In the main, the ear is an inferior sense to the eye. The hearing can only grasp a single sound at one time, whereas the sight takes in everything and at the same time simplifies at its will.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

La peinture est le plus beau de tous les arts; en lui se résument toutes les sensations, à son aspect chacun peut, au gré de son imagination, créer le roman, d'un seul coup d'œil avoir l'âme envahie par les plus profonds souvenirs; point d'effort de mémoire, tout résumé en un seul instant. — Art complet qui résume tous les autres et les complète. — Comme la musique, il agit sur l'âme par l'intermédiaire des sens, les tons harmonieux correspondant aux harmonies des sons; mais en peinture on obtient une unité impossible en musique où les accords viennent les uns après les autres, et le jugement éprouve alors une fatigue incessante s'il veut réunir la fin au commencement. En somme, l'oreille est un sens inférieur à celui de l'œil. L'ouïe ne peut servir qu'à un seul son à la fois, tandis que la vue embrasse tout, en même temps qu'à son gré elle simplifie.
Quote of Gauguin from: Notes Synthéthiques (ca. 1884-1885), ed. Henri Mahaut, in Vers et prose (July-September 1910), p. 52; translation from John Rewald, Gauguin (Hyperion Press, 1938), p. 161.
1870s - 1880s

Art, Music, Soul, Imagination

“The country is so beautiful, where so many heroes had devoted their lives into it. Sorry that the Qin Emperor or the Han Wu Emperor lacks a sense for literacy; while the founders of the Tang and Song dynasties came short in style. The great man, Genghis Khan, only knew how to shoot eagles with an arrow. The past is past. To see real heroes, look around you.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

Qinyuanchun ["Snow"] (沁园春•雪) (1936; first published in late 1945). Variant translation of the last stanza: "All are past and gone! / For truly great men / Look to this age alone."

Sense, Past, Country

“What is peace? Is it war? No. Is it strife? No. Is it lovely, and gentle, and beautiful, and pleasant, and serene, and joyful? Oh, yes! Therefore, my friends, I wish for peace, upon you and upon yours.”

Charles Dickens book Bleak House

Source: Bleak House (1852-1853), Ch. 19

Love, War, Peace

“In the Greek world in which Homer's songs were sung, it was taken for granted that everyone's life is ruled by fate and chance. For Homer, human life is a succession of contingencies: all good things are vulnerable to fortune. Socrates could not accept this archaic tragic vision. He believed that virtue and happiness were one and the same: nothing can harm a truly good man. So he re-envisioned the good to make it indestructible. Beyond the goods of human life - health, beauty, pleasure, friendship, life itself - there was a Good that surpassed them all. In Plato, this became the idea of the Form of the Good, the mystical fusion of all values into a harmonious spiritual whole - an idea later absorbed into the Christian conception of God. But the idea that ethics is concerned with a kind of value that is beyond contingency, that can somehow prevail over any kind of loss or misfortune, came from Socrates. It was he who invented 'morality.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Vices of Morality: Socrates, the inventor of morality (p. 106)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Life, God, Friendship, Fate

“There's nothing that allays an angry mind
So soon as a sweet beauty.”

John Fletcher The Elder Brother

Act III, scene 5.
The Elder Brother (c. 1625; published 1637)

“How can America be in a position to assimilate its many races and to select intelligently its future immigrants unless it has a clear understanding of each race, a clear comprehension of its ideals and achievements and of its contributive relation to its own development? We have tried the haphazard method. We concentrated races indiscriminately in cities, and the result was colonies and ghettos. We dumped them into industries, and got immigrant slums and "dagos" and "hunkies" and "kikes". We tried to shut them out, and could think of nothing better to accomplish this than a literacy test. We set the beauty-loving Italian digging ditches and put the Greek in factories, and in our negligence we wasted both.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Love, Intelligence, Understanding, Thinking

“No doubt, the poetry, overjoyed by swallowing the beverage of passionate thoughts, delights the mind. But she does not realize the sorrows and troubles of the poor. Forget depicting the beauty of passions and present your poetry as a necklace of thought gems to swell the soul.”

Manmohan Acharya (1967–2013) Poet, lyricist

Stanza-3, Verse-1
Song of the Bumblebee (2008)

Soul, Passion, Forgetting

“Beautiful girl and talented young man—
what stirred their hearts their eyes still dared not say.
They hovered, rapture-bound, 'tween wake and dream.”

Nguyễn Du The Tale of Kieu

Source: The Tale of Kiều (1813), Lines 163–165

Dreams, Girl, Heart

“I will tell you what this people need, with regard to preaching; you need, figuratively, to have it rain pitchforks, tines downwards, from this pulpit, Sunday after Sunday. Instead of the smooth, beautiful, sweet, still, silk-velvet-lipped preaching, you should have sermons like peals of thunder, and perhaps we then can get the scales from our eyes. This style is necessary in order to save many of this people.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses 3:222 (March 2, 1856)
1850s

People

“I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programmes a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature. To which I reply and say, "Well, it's funny that the people, when they say that this is evidence of the Almighty, always quote beautiful things. They always quote orchids and hummingbirds and butterflies and roses." But I always have to think too of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in west Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he's five years old. And I reply and say, "Well, presumably the God you speak about created the worm as well," and now, I find that baffling to credit a merciful God with that action. And therefore it seems to me safer to show things that I know to be truth, truthful and factual, and allow people to make up their own minds about the moralities of this thing, or indeed the theology of this thing.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

From the BBC documentary Life on Air (2002)

God, People, Truth, Quotes

“A real atheist, needless to say, will disregard what the dervishes think it expedient to say about the "New Testament" when they make their pitch to the ignorant. He will read the myths for himself and objectively consider and appraise them as a whole, including the social gospel that is, indeed, the most important and operative part of them. And he will shudder at the Judaic malevolence that inspires them, the vicious hatred of culture and civilization. They were designed to create a foul and squalid world in which every instinctive value of our race is negated and aborted--a world in which the natural ties of family and property have been severed, leaving only rootless and helpless individuals, isolated and lost in the terrible loneliness of crowds--a world without history, without philosophy, without science, without reason--a world without beauty of any kind, without art, without literature, without culture--a world without real love, the love that unites men and women, and without even the Aryan's instinctive feeling for the beauty of women and physical health.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"The Bear in the Bush", Liberty Bell (September 1990)
1990s

Love, Women, Men, Health

“I am constantly observing things and believe that I am coming closer to beauty. In the last few days I have discovered form and have been thinking much about it. Until now I've had no real feeling for the antique. I could find it very beautiful by itself. But I could never find any thread leading from it to modern art. Now I've found it, and that's what I believe is called progress.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

excerpt of her Journal, 1899; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 198
1899

Art, Feeling, Thinking

“The leading lady of this film (Yeti) happened to be Antonella Interlenghi, the daughter of Antonella Lualdi. The girl very obviously inherited her mother's beauty, but she had the silliest pseudonym I've ever heard. She called herself "Phoenix Grant". I mean, what kind of a name is this? It's just as if I called myself, say, Hyde Park Corner Montgomery. Or Hamburg Rommel, how about that?”

Donald O'Brien (actor) (1930–2003) Italian film and TV actor

Euro Trash Cinema magazine interview (March 1996)

Girl, Daughters

“There shall he love when genial morn appears,
Like pensive Beauty smiling in her tears.”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

Part II, line 95
Pleasures of Hope (1799)

Love, Smile, Tear, Appearance

“She slapped Kestrel's face. Without thinking twice, Kestrel slapped her back, as hard as she could. The young woman burst into tears. The servant saw this, aghast. "Baby!" she exclaimed. "Oh, my poor baby!"
"You've been kind to me," said Kestrel, "and you're very beautiful, but if you hit me again I'll kill you."”

William Nicholson (1948) British screenwriter, playwright and novelist

Source: The "Wind on Fire" Trilogy (2000-2003), Slaves of the Mastery (Book 2), p. 85

Thinking, Tear, Baby

“Of course, there is one great virtue in size; and of course, London is the greatest show on earth, for never have so many human characters been gathered together in one place. Here, in a day, you can see the world. Stand at the entrance to a main-line railway station, during the rush-hour, and you see every possible human species scurrying past. One becomes amazed and transported by the multiplicity of the human face, by its infinite differences, by its almost prismatic graduations from ugliness to beauty, evil to good.”

Laurie Lee (1914–1997) British writer

An Obstinate Exile, p. 45.
I Can't Stay Long (1975)

World, Evil, Past

“To me, one of the most beautiful things to see is a group of men coordinating their efforts toward a common goal, alternately subordinating and asserting themselves to achieve real teamwork in action. I tried to do that, we all tried to do that, on the Celtics. I think we succeeded.”

Bill Russell (1934) American professional basketball player and coach

http://www.nba.com/history/players/russell_bio.html

Men, Thinking, Effort

“When Heracles was quite a young man and was nearly of the age at which you yourselves are now, while he was deliberating which of the two roads he should take, the one leading through toils to virtue, or the easiest, two women approached him, and these were Virtue and Vice. Now at once, although they were silent, the difference between them was evident from their appearance. For the one had been decked out for beauty through the art of toiletry, and was overflowing with voluptuousness, and she was leading a whole swarm of pleasures in her train; now these things she displayed, and promising still more than these she tried to draw Heracles to her. But the other was withered and squalid, and had an intense look, and spoke quite differently; for she promised nothing dissolute or pleasant, but countless sweating toils and labours and dangers through every land and sea. But the prize to be won by these was to become a god, as the narrative of Prodicus expressed it; and it was this second woman that Heracles in the end followed.”

Basil of Caesarea (329–379) Christian Saint

Source: On Greek Literature, p. 399

Women, God, Pleasure, Age

“Mordeen said: "I used to wonder why this love seemed sweeter than I had ever known, better than many people ever know. And then one day the reason came to me. There are very few great Anythings in the world. In work and art and emotion—the great is very rare. And I have one of the great and beautiful. Now say your yah, yah, Victor, like a child unanswerably answering Wisdom. You will have to do that, I think."”

John Steinbeck book Burning Bright

Mordeen on her love for Joe Saul in Act One: The Circus
Burning Bright (1950)

Love, Wisdom, People, World

“It is, then, the strife of all honorable men and women of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of the races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and imprudence and cruelty.”

W.E.B. Du Bois book The Souls of Black Folk

Source: The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. IX: Of the Sons of Master and Man

Women, Men, Strong, Future

“When we were first told the extent of Ivan's disability I thought that we would suffer having to care for him but at least he would benefit from our care. Now as I look back I see that it was all the other way round. It was only him that ever really suffered and it was us — Sam, me, Nancy and Elwen — who gained more than I ever believed possible from having and loving such a wonderfully special and beautiful boy.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

In a letter to activists after the death of his son http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tory-leader-david-camerons-moving-379874 (28 February 2009) 2000s, 2009

Love, Way, Boy, Suffering