Source: The Functions of the Executive (1938), p. vii
“Beauty compelled admiration and erotic yearning; such was its organic function. But never by itself could it command love.”
Source: Lyonesse Trilogy (1983-1989), The Green Pearl (1985), Chapter 6, section 5 (p. 449)
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Jack Vance 213
American mystery and speculative fiction writer 1916–2013Related quotes

Letter to Sister Mary James Power (1 October 1934); published in The Wild God of the World : An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers (2003), edited by Albert Gelpi, p. 189; also partly quoted in the essay "Robinson Jeffers, Pantheist Poet" http://web.archive.org/20011119074326/members.aol.com/PHarri5642/jeffers.htm by John Courtney
Context: I believe that the Universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars, none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love and there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one's affections outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on one's self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions — the world of spirits.
I think it is our privilege and felicity to love God for his beauty, without claiming or expecting love from him. We are not important to him, but he to us.

The Song of the Bell (1799)

Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939

Source: The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (1939), p. 27

Vanna Bonta Talks Sex in Space (Interview - Femail magazine)