“The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they’re seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?”

“In a time when so many artists have learned to confabulate with extremes of horror and alienation, the most daring thing an artist can do is to fill a book, a gallery, or a theater with joy, hope, and beauty.”

“The hardest thing these days is to make something that’s beautiful; it’s easy to make ugly art. I think it takes a lot more talent to make something beautiful. Beauty to me is when you show something to someone that they’ve never seen before. That’s what a great work of art does; it shows you something that you didn’t know existed.”

“I’ve never seen the moon look so lovely as the night I saw it with you.
It let me know I’d never seen the moon before. (Never seen the moon before)
So many speak of the moon as though it had no flaws.
But to compare it to a beauty like yours would give one pause.”

“No one hath seen beauty in its highest lustre who hath never seen it in distress.”

“In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.”

“One can never do anything so beautiful as nature.”

“If there is anything beautiful other than absolute beauty, that can only be beautiful as far as it partakes of absolute beauty—and this I should say of everything. …by beauty all things become beautiful. …by greatness only great things become great and greater and greater, and by smallness the less becomes less.”

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

“Stories aren’t the beauty of what did happen. They’re the beauty of what could happen.”