Beauty

Imperfection is beauty. Madness is genius. It is better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

Do not waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears.

It is the wounded oyster that mends its shell with pearl.

Truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

Love beauty; it is the shadow of God on the universe.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been kindness, beauty and truth.

A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.

Yet even in reaching for the beautiful there is beauty, and also in suffering whatever it is that one suffers en route.

What shall we say about those spectators, then, who can see a plurality of beautiful things, but not beauty itself, and who are incapable of following if someone else tries to lead them to it, and who can see many moral actions, but not morality itself, and so on? That they only ever entertain beliefs, and do not know any of the things they believe?

There can be no fairer spectacle than that of a man, who combines the possession of moral beauty in his soul with the outward beauty of form, corresponding and harmonizing with the former, because the same great pattern enters both.

The true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and, at last, knows what the essence of beauty is.

The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.

The helpful is beautiful; only the harmful is ugly.

Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is god, just, and beautiful, of which it is the invisible, but never less, dazzling, passionate, and eternal form.

Love is of the beautiful, and therefore has not the beautiful. And the beautiful is the good, and therefore, in wanting and desiring the beautiful, love also wants and desires the good

Beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.

But of the heaven which is above the heavens, what earthly poet ever did or ever will sing worthily?

Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly.