“Spiritual beauty or the good, generally not only does not coincide with the typical meaning of beauty, it is its opposite.”
What is Art? (1897)
Context: The good is the everlasting, the pinnacle of our life. … life is striving towards the good, toward God. The good is the most basic idea … an idea not definable by reason … yet is the postulate from which all else follows. But the beautiful … is just that which is pleasing. The idea of beauty is not an alignment to the good, but is its opposite, because for most part, the good aids in our victory over our predilections, while beauty is the motive of our predilections. The more we succumb to beauty, the further we are displaced from the good.... the usual response is that there exists a moral and spiritual beauty … we mean simply the good. Spiritual beauty or the good, generally not only does not coincide with the typical meaning of beauty, it is its opposite.
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Leo Tolstoy 456
Russian writer 1828–1910Related quotes
The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance (1965)

“To have beauty is to have only that,
but to have goodness
is to be beautiful
too.”
http://books.google.com/books?id=btVfAAAAMAAJ&q=%22To+have+beauty+is+to+have+only+that+but+to+have+goodness+is+to+be+beautiful+too%22&pg=PA29#v=onepage
Suzy Q. Groden translations, Beauty