Beauty

“Having tasted beauty at the heart of the world, we hunger for more.” These are words of the Nobel physicist Frank Wilczek in his book,

A Beautiful Question

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Krista Tippett • Beauty as a Compass for Truth

Beauty has its purposes, which, all our lives and at every season, it is our opportunity, and our joy, to divine.

Mary Oliver • Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

Beauty is an achieved state of both deep attention and self-forgetting: the self-forgetting of seeing, hearing, smelling or touching that erases our separation, our distance, our fear of the other.

David Whyte • Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

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

Catherine Shannon • The Elegance of Refusal

But if something makes you feel alive, you'll notice its beauty. The aliveness opens your aperture. Suddenly the light is different, the texture matters, the mundane becomes compelling.

So beauty is downstream of aliveness. It's what you perceive when you're present. But presence isn't guaranteed by beauty.

We’re more interested in beauty as an emergent property. We want new ways of understanding beauty, and we’re increasingly rooting them in our ethics. We want to encourage the beauty found in the aliveness, or the kindness, or the gentleness of what we do as landscape makers. How things look, in this view, is slightly less important.

Brian Sholis • The Frontier Interview—Terremoto

beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.

Donna Tartt • The Goldfinch: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

First, beauty evokes a longing for fullness and creation, even in the form of duplication. We want to tell others about beautiful paintings we have seen, beautiful songs we have heard, even beautiful arguments we have read. The desire to spread the beauty one beholds acts as a force not only for beauty but also for truth. "[T]he beautiful person or... See more

Todd Gitlin • Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just

Even, and perhaps especially, in the bleakest times, we can still discover and awaken beauty; these are precisely the times when we need it most.