Source: Little Women
"Mi Ultimo Adios", st. 5
The Most Beautiful Girl in the World
Song lyrics, The Gold Experience (1995)
“Gardens are not made by singing 'Oh, how beautiful!' and sitting in the shade.”
Source: Complete Verse
“The children of the sun, the children of their sun — oh, how beautiful they were!”
Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), III
Context: The children of the sun, the children of their sun — oh, how beautiful they were! Never had I seen on our own earth such beauty in mankind. Only perhaps in our children, in their earliest years, one might find, some remote faint reflection of this beauty. The eyes of these happy people shone with a clear brightness. Their faces were radiant with the light of reason and fullness of a serenity that comes of perfect understanding, but those faces were gay; in their words and voices there was a note of childlike joy. Oh, from the first moment, from the first glance at them, I understood it all! It was the earth untarnished by the Fall; on it lived people who had not sinned. They lived just in such a paradise as that in which, according to all the legends of mankind, our first parents lived before they sinned; the only difference was that all this earth was the same paradise. These people, laughing joyfully, thronged round me and caressed me; they took me home with them, and each of them tried to reassure me. Oh, they asked me no questions, but they seemed, I fancied, to know everything without asking, and they wanted to make haste to smoothe away the signs of suffering from my face.
“How I'm moved.
How you move me
With your beauty's potency.”
Song lyrics, The Kick Inside (1978)
“you show me
The world as it could be
Through your kaleidoscope
It's beautiful”
Kaleidoscope
Song lyrics
“The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful anyway.”
Source: The Handmaid's Tale
When You Are Old http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1756/, st. 1–3
The Rose (1893)
Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
Context: p>When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.</p
“A single question remained, the age-old cry of anguish: “How could one so beautiful be so base?””
Source: Lyonesse Trilogy (1983-1989), The Green Pearl (1985), Chapter 6, section 1 (p. 434)
