đź’ˇ on beauty
Murdoch saw beauty as a technology. A practice, a technique, for altering the world or the experience of the world.
Tacit | Stripe Press
stripe.pressIt seems to me there are two predominant types of beauty. A beauty that is solipsistic, oriented around glamor and draws us inward in an ever turning gyre — and a beauty that lies outside of us, that makes us more generous and open. The kind we see in a plant or a sky or a work of art or music, or perhaps inside the very kernel of the human soul.
The second type is what inspires us to live, a type of beauty we can never betray.
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Perhaps developing a taste for difficult beauty, or the ability to tolerate mental discomfort is one of the most important human skills to have. To consume novel things, to accept boredom and sadness, to be patient, to override the aversion of being changed. To live our normal lives and see it as both banal and sublime, and godly and mundane, and find the immense beauty somewhere in the crevices.
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True resonance arises from the feeling that what you are seeing is real, that it was forged through a complicated interconnectedness and friction with the world. Ironically, the apex of absolute beauty or symmetry or pleasantness lacks real intimacy. It’s flat. You could look at a doll and feel nothing but the uncanny. But look at a face you love for all its quirks and think it inimitably beautiful.
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I don’t have an answer on how to pacify the insatiable hunger for beauty. Only a reminder that moments I felt most beautiful were never about the pristine makeup, or the perfect figure or outfit. Rather, the aliveness or electricity I felt within, as if I were pursuing my true techne, or craft, upon the earth. And every time I found someone truly beautiful to behold, it was because their soul shone lightly on the surface of their being.
Of all psychology’s sins, the most mortal is its neglect of beauty. There is, after all, something quite beautiful about a life. But you would not think so from reading psychology books.
James Hillman • The Soul's Code


The devil’s oldest strategy is, of course, promising godlike creation without godlike effort.
What we've gained in productivity, we've lost in soul and spirit.
In their place, we rediscover artistic principles rooted in tangibility, natural forms, the unicity of objects, and the texture and materiality of the physical world.
We impose... See more
Antoine Valot • Design Nouveau
What makes something beautiful? — Schiller & Architecture
youtube.comBeauty: The appearance of freedom. Form determining matter (not matter determining form).