“How goodness heightens beauty!”

St. 2
Thyrsis (1866)

[Mizan al-Hikmah, Muhammadi Reishahri, Muhammad, Dar al-Hadith, 2010, 3, Qum, 114]

Variant: What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
Source: The Kreutzer Sonata

"Conversation with a Stone".
Poems New and Collected (1998), Salt (1962)
Context: No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.
Even sight heightened to become all-seeing
will do you no good without a sense of taking part.
You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what the sense should be,
only its seed, imagination.

Source: A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 8: 'Hunger Was Good Discipline'
Context: You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you were skipping meals at a time when you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to do it was the Luxembourg gardens... There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were heightened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry.

Source: How To Have A Beautiful Mind

Source: Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)

Sec. 2
The Antichrist (1888)

Attributed in Lewis Copeland, Best Quotations for All Occasions (1965), p. 19
Attributed