Beauty

One evening, I sat Beauty in my lap.—And I found her bitter.—And I cursed her.

The Stately Homes of England,

O, beauty, are you not enough? / Why am I crying after love?

Spend all you have for loveliness, / Buy it and never count the cost; / For one white singing hour of peace / Count many a year of strife well lost, / And for a breath of ecstasy / Give all you have been, or could be.

Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls.

 

Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky.

Your kneesare a southern breeze—or a gust of snow. Agh! what sort of man was Fragonard?

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.

But who is this, what thing of sea or land? Female of sex it seems, That so bedeck’d, ornate, and gay, Comes this way sailing Like a stately ship Of Tarsus, bound for th’ isles Of Javan or Gadire, With all her bravery on, and tackle trim, Sails fill’d, and streamers waving, Courted by all the winds that hold them play; An amber scent of odorous perfume Her harbinger?

It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night

 

To see the earth as we now see it, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night—brothers who see now they are truly brothers.

 

Let you hold in mind, girls, that your beauty must pass

 

Oh better than the minting / Of a gold-crowned king / Is the safe-kept memory / Of a lovely thing.

Florence she found perfectly sweet, Naples a dream, but very whiffy. In Rome one had simply to sit still and feel.

Look for a lovely thing and you will find it, / It is not far— / It never will be far.

Beauty more than bitterness / Makes the heart break.

Death has made His darkness beautiful with thee.

 

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I E. M.

Beauty holds more worth than gold.

 

As for everything else, so for mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained.

Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful? E. M.

 

Nothing can be pleasing which is not also becoming.

For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.