beauty is not a luxury

Following this, the author identifies four properties of beauty: first, beauty is sacred, it belongs to the realm of divinity, of goodness, of our quest for perfection; second, beauty is unprecedented, in the sense that it is a novel experience for the subject; thirdly, beauty is life-saving; and finally, beauty incites deliberation.

Thomas Moore writes in Care of the Soul :

“This assumption that beauty is an accessory, and dispensable, shows that we don’t understand the importance of giving the soul what it needs. The soul is nurtured by beauty.”1