Quotes4study

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

Charlie Chaplin

Intemperance is a great decayer of beauty.--_Junius._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

Suppose a man puts himself at a window to see the passers by. If I pass I cannot say that he stood there to see me, for he does not think of me in particular. Nor does any one who loves another on account of beauty really love that person, for the small-pox, which kills beauty without killing the person, will cause the loss of love. Nor does one who loves me for my judgment, my memory, love me, myself, for I may lose those qualities without losing my identity. Where then is this 'I' if it reside not in the body nor in the soul, and how love the body or the soul, except for the qualities which do not make '_me_,' since they are perishable? For it is not possible and it would be unjust to love the soul of a person in the abstract, and whatever qualities might be therein. So then we do not love a person, but only qualities. We should not then sneer at those who are honoured on account of rank and office, for we love no one save for borrowed qualities.

Blaise Pascal     The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal

If you ask why the moral inner sense is to be (under due limitations) obeyed; why the few who are steered by it move the mass in whom it is weak? I can only reply by putting another question--Why do the few in whom the sense of beauty is strong--Shakespeare, Raffaele, Beethoven, carry the less endowed multitude away? But they do, and always will. People who overlook that fact attend neither to history nor to what goes on about them.

T. H. Huxley     Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley

~Stars.~--These preachers of beauty, which light the world with their admonishing smile.--_Emerson._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

Contrast increases the splendour of beauty, but it disturbs its influence; it adds to its attractiveness, but diminishes its power.

_Ruskin._

All this time and at all times wait the words of true poems, The words of true poems do not merely please, The true poets are not followers of beauty but the august masters of beauty; The greatness of sons is the exuding of the greatness of mothers and fathers, The words of true poems are the tuft and final applause of science.

Walt Whitman ~ in ~ Song of the Answerer

For ease and speed in doing a thing do not give the work lasting solidity or exactness of beauty.

PLUTARCH. 46(?)-120(?) A. D.     _Life of Pericles._

Rara est adeo concordia form? / Atque pudiciti?=--So rare is the union of beauty with modesty.

Juvenal.

Arbiter form?=--Judge of beauty.

Unknown

The amount of beauty required launch 1 ship    = 1 Millihelen

Unknown

Flowers and fruits are always fit presents--flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of man.

_Emerson._

There is no more potent antidote to low sensuality than the adoration of beauty.

_Schlegel._

Who hath not proved how feebly words essay To fix one spark of beauty's heavenly ray? Who doth not feel, until his failing sight Faints into dimness with its own delight, His changing cheek, his sinking heart, confess The might, the majesty of loveliness?

LORD BYRON 1788-1824.     _The Bride of Abydos. Canto i. Stanza 6._

You don't love a girl because of beauty. You love her because she sings a song only you can understand.

L.J. Smith

It is given to few to add to the store of knowledge, to strike new springs of thought, or to shape new forms of beauty. But so sure as it is that men live not by bread, but by ideas, so sure is it that the future of the world lies in the hands of those who are able to carry the interpretation of nature a step further than their predecessors.

T. H. Huxley     Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley

Old as I am, for ladies' love unfit, The power of beauty I remember yet.

JOHN DRYDEN. 1631-1701.     _Cymon and Iphigenia. Line 1._

Whatever is in any way beautiful hath its source of beauty in itself, and is complete in itself; praise forms no part of it. So it is none the worse nor the better for being praised.

Marcus Aurelius

That is the best part of beauty which a picture cannot express.

_Bacon._

The fair point of the line of beauty is the line of love. Strength and weakness stand on either side of it. Love is the point in which they unite.

_Goethe._

I do not suppose that I am exceptionally endowed because I have all my life enjoyed a keen perception of the beauty offered us by nature and by art Now physical science may and probably will, some day, enable our posterity to set forth the exact physical concomitants and conditions of the strange rapture of beauty. But if ever that day arrives, the rapture will remain, just as it is now, outside and beyond the physical world; and, even in the mental world, something superadded to mere sensation. I do not wish to crow unduly over my humble cousin the orang, but in the aesthetic province, as in that of tine intellect, I am afraid he is nowhere. I doubt not he would detect a fruit amidst a wilderness of leaves where I could see nothing; but I am tolerably confident that he has never been awestruck, as I have been, by the dim religious gloom, as of a temple devoted to the earthgods, of the tropical forests which he inhabits. Yet I doubt not that our poor long-armed and short-legged friend, as he sits meditatively munching his durian fruit, has something behind that sad Socratic face of his which is utterly "beyond the bounds of physical science." Physical science may know all about his clutching the fruit and munching it and digesting it, and how the physical titillation of his palate is transmitted to some microscopic cells of the gray matter of his brain. But the feelings of sweetness and of satisfaction which, for a moment, hang out their signal lights in his melancholy eyes, are as utterly outside the bounds of physics as is the "fine frenzy" of a human rhapsodist.

T. H. Huxley     Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley

Absence makes the heart grow fonder: Isle of Beauty, fare thee well!

THOMAS HAYNES BAYLY. 1797-1839.     _Isle of Beauty._

A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

John Keats ~ (born October 31, 1795

The external world of physics has … become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we have removed the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions. … The sparsely spread nuclei of electric force become a tangible solid; their restless agitation becomes the warmth of summer; the octave of aethereal vibrations becomes a gorgeous rainbow. Nor does the alchemy stop here. In the transmuted world new significances arise which are scarcely to be traced in the world of symbols; so that it becomes a world of beauty and purpose — and, alas, suffering and evil. The frank realisation that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what it is...

Oscar Wilde

A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,-- Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1564-1616.     _The Taming of the Shrew. Act v. Sc. 2._

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (born 25 May 1803

I trust in Nature for the stable laws Of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant And Autumn garner to the end of time. I trust in God,--the right shall be the right And other than the wrong, while he endures. I trust in my own soul, that can perceive The outward and the inward,--Nature's good And God's.

ROBERT BROWNING. 1812-1890.     _A Soul's Tragedy. Act i._

Noris quam elegans formarum spectator fiem=--You shall see how nice a judge of beauty I am.

Terence.

Divitiarum et form? gloria fluxa atque fragilis; virtus clara ?ternaque habetur=--The glory of wealth and of beauty is fleeting and frail; virtue is illustrious and everlasting.

Sallust.

For when it is in the hope of making a priceless discovery that we desire to receive certain impressions from nature or from works of art, we have qualms lest our soul imbibe inferior impressions which might lead us to form a false estimate of the value of Beauty.

Marcel Proust

Poetry is something to make us wiser and better by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth which God has set in all men's souls.

_Lowell._

There is always the possibility of beauty where there is an unsealed human eye; of music where there is an unstopped human ear; and of inspiration where there is a receptive human spirit, a spirit standing before.

_C. H. Parkhurst._

Death and Light are everywhere, always, and they begin, end, strive, attend, into and upon the Dream of the Nameless that is the world, burning words within Samsaara, perhaps to create a thing of beauty.

Roger Zelazny in Lord of Light

Whatever is in any way beautiful hath its source of beauty in itself, and is complete in itself; praise forms no part of it. So it is none the worse nor the better for being praised.

MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 121-180 A. D.     _Meditations. iv. 20._

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever; / Its loveliness increases; it will never / Pass into nothingness.

_Keats._

In all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies, which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty.

_Ruskin._

That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.

Anthony Burgess (born 25 February 1917

And as there are Pascals and Mozarts, Newtons and Raffaelles, in whom the innate faculty for science or art seems to need but a touch to spring into full vigour, and through whom the human race obtains new possibilities of knowledge and new conceptions of beauty: so there have been men of moral genius, to whom we owe ideals of duty and visions of moral perfection, which ordinary mankind could never have attained: though, happily for them, they can feel the beauty of a vision, which lay beyond the reach of their dull imaginations, and count life well spent in shaping some faint image of it in the actual world.

T. H. Huxley     Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley

In whichever way we look at the matter, morality is based on feeling, not on reason; though reason alone is competent to trace out the effects of our actions and thereby dictate conduct. Justice is founded on the love of one's neighbour; and goodness is a kind of beauty. The moral law, like the laws of physical nature, rests in the long run upon instinctive intuitions, and is neither more nor less "innate" and "necessary" than they are. Some people cannot by any means be got to understand the first book of Euclid; but the truths of mathematics are no less necessary and binding on the great mass of mankind. Some there are who cannot feel the difference between the "Sonata Appassionata" and "Cherry Ripe"; or between a grave-stone-cutter's cherub and the Apollo Belvidere; but the canons of art are none the less acknowledged. While some there may be, who, devoid of sympathy, are incapable of a sense of duty; but neither does their existence affect the foundations of morality. Such pathological deviations from true manhood are merely the halt, the lame, and the blind of the world of consciousness; and the anatomist of the mind leaves them aside, as the anatomist of the body would ignore abnormal specimens.

T. H. Huxley     Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley

A thing of beauty is a joy forever; Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness.

JOHN KEATS. 1795-1821.     _Endymion. Book i._

A woman moved is like a fountain troubled, / Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty.

_Tam. of Sh._, v. 2.

The worship of beauty apart from the soul becomes an idolatry enkindling desire instead of a reverence awakening devotion.

_Ed._

By the long practice of caricature I have lost the enjoyment of beauty: I never see a face but distorted.= _Hogarth to a lady who wished to learn caricature._

Unknown

Reason is a bee, and exists only on what it makes; its usefulness takes the place of beauty.

_Joubert._

Italia! O Italia! thou who hast The fatal gift of beauty.

LORD BYRON 1788-1824.     _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Canto iv. Stanza 42._

The ornament of beauty is suspect, A crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1564-1616.     _Sonnet lxx._

The sense of beauty never furthered the performance of a single duty.

_Ruskin._

Unity and simplicity are the two true sources of beauty. Supreme beauty resides in God.

_Winckelmann._

The ideal of beauty is simplicity and repose; from which it follows that no youth can be a master.

_Goethe._

Time in a few years destroys this harmony, but this does not occur in the case of beauty depicted by the painter, because time preserves it for long; and the eye, as far as its function is concerned, receives as much pleasure from the depicted as from the living beauty; touch alone is lacking to the painted beauty,--touch, which is the elder brother of sight; which after it has attained its purpose does not prevent the reason from considering the divine beauty. And in this case the picture copied from the living beauty acts for the greater part as a substitute; and the {75} description of the poet cannot accomplish this.--the poet who is now set up as a rival to the painter, but does not perceive that time sets a division between the words in which he describes the various parts of the beauty, and that forgetfulness intervenes and divides the proportions which he cannot name without great prolixity; he cannot compose the harmonious concord which is formed of divine proportions. And on this account beauty cannot be described in the same space of time in which a painted beauty can be seen, and it is a sin against nature to attempt to transmit by the ear that which should be transmitted by the eye.

Leonardo da Vinci     Thoughts on Art and Life

Protest against Industrial Capitalism from one aspect or another is universal: so was the protest against the condition of European religion at the beginning of the sixteenth century. One man in one mood will attack Industrial Capitalism for its destruction of beauty; another for its incompetence; another for the vileness of the men who chiefly prosper under it; another for its mere confusion and noise; another for its false values; it was until recently most fiercely attacked for its impoverishment of the workers, its margin of unemployment and the rest — indeed so fiercely that it was compelled to seek palliatives for the evil. With a mass of men it was attacked from a vague but strong sense of injustice; it allowed a few rich to exploit mankind. In the midst of all these innumerable forms of a common protest and universal ill-ease there has grown up one definite body of doctrine whose adherents are called Communists and who desired the total subversion of what had been, hitherto unquestioned among civilized European men, the general doctrines of property and individual freedom. [Hilaire Belloc, Cranmer: Archbishop of Canterbury 1533 – 1556 . Philadelphia & London: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1931, p. 56.]

Belloc, Hilaire

The Poet's License! — 't is the right, Within the rule of duty, To look on all delightful things Throughout the world of beauty. To gaze with rapture at the stars That in the skies are glowing; To see the gems of perfect dye That in the woods are growing, — And more than sage astronomer, And more than learned florist, To read the glorious homilies Of Firmament and Forest.

John Godfrey Saxe

Radically wrong is the procedure of some masters who are in the habit of repeating the same themes in the same episodes, and whose types of beauty are likewise the same, for in nature they are never repeated, so that if all the beauties of equal excellence were to come to life again they would compose a larger population than that now existing in our century, and since in the present century no one person is precisely similar to another, so would it be among the beauties mentioned above.

Leonardo da Vinci     Thoughts on Art and Life

Fortune's Guide to Freshman Notetaking:

WHEN THE PROFESSOR SAYS:            YOU WRITE:

Probably the greatest quality of the poetry    John Milton -- born 1608

of John Milton, who was born in 1608, is the

combination of beauty and power.  Few have

excelled him in the use of the English language,

or for that matter, in lucidity of verse form,

'Paradise Lost' being said to be the greatest

single poem ever written."

Current historians have come to            Most of the problems that now

doubt the complete advantageousness        face the United States are

of some of Roosevelt's policies...        directly traceable to the

                        bungling and greed of President

                        Roosevelt.

... it is possible that we simply do        Professor Mitchell is a

not understand the Russian viewpoint...        communist.

Fortune Cookie

millihelen, n.:

    The amount of beauty required to launch one ship.

Fortune Cookie

A bachelor never quite gets over the idea that he is a thing of beauty</p>

and a boy for ever.

        -- Helen Rowland

Fortune Cookie

    Youth is not a time of life, it is a state of mind; it is a temper of

the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a predominance

of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over love of ease.

    Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years; people grow

old only by deserting their ideals.  Years wrinkle the skin, but to give up

enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.  Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear, and despair

-- these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit

back to dust.

    Whether seventy or sixteen, there is in every being's heart the love

of wonder, the sweet amazement at the stars and the starlike things and

thoughts, the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing childlike appetite

for what next, and the joy and the game of life.

    You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your

self-confidence, as old as your fear, as young as your hope, as old as your

despair.

    So long as your heart receives messages of beauty, cheer, courage,

grandeur and power from the earth, from man, and from the Infinite, so long

you are young.

        -- Samuel Ullman

Fortune Cookie

1 Billion dollars of budget deficit        = 1 Gramm-Rudman

6.023 x 10 to the 23rd power alligator pears    = Avocado's number

2 pints                        = 1 Cavort

Basic unit of Laryngitis            = The Hoarsepower

Shortest distance between two jokes        = A straight line

6 Curses                    = 1 Hexahex

3500 Calories                    = 1 Food Pound

1 Mole                        = 007 Secret Agents

1 Mole                        = 25 Cagey Bees

1 Dog Pound                    = 16 oz. of Alpo

1000 beers served at a Twins game        = 1 Killibrew

2.4 statute miles of surgical tubing at Yale U. = 1 I.V.League

2000 pounds of chinese soup            = 1 Won Ton

10 to the minus 6th power mouthwashes        = 1 Microscope

Speed of a tortoise breaking the sound barrier    = 1 Machturtle

8 Catfish                    = 1 Octo-puss

365 Days of drinking Lo-Cal beer.        = 1 Lite-year

16.5 feet in the Twilight Zone            = 1 Rod Serling

Force needed to accelerate 2.2lbs of cookies    = 1 Fig-newton

    to 1 meter per second

One half large intestine            = 1 Semicolon

10 to the minus 6th power Movie            = 1 Microfilm

1000 pains                    = 1 Megahertz

1 Word                        = 1 Millipicture

1 Sagan                        = Billions & Billions

1 Angstrom: measure of computer anxiety        = 1000 nail-bytes

10 to the 12th power microphones        = 1 Megaphone

10 to the 6th power Bicycles            = 2 megacycles

The amount of beauty required launch 1 ship    = 1 Millihelen

Fortune Cookie

Please stand for the National Anthem:

    Australians all, let us rejoice,

    For we are young and free.

    We've golden soil and wealth for toil

    Our home is girt by sea.

    Our land abounds in nature's gifts

    Of beauty rich and rare.

    In history's page, let every stage

    Advance Australia Fair.

    In joyful strains then let us sing,

    Advance Australia Fair.

Thank you.  You may resume your seat.

Fortune Cookie

An Animal that knows who it is, one that has a sense of his own identity, is

a discontented creature, doomed to create new problems for himself for the

duration of his stay on this planet.  Since neither the mouse nor the chimp

knows what is, he is spared all the vexing problems that follow this

discovery.  But as soon as the human animal who asked himself this question

emerged, he plunged himself and his descendants into an eternity of doubt

and brooding, speculation and truth-seeking that has goaded him through the

centuries as relentlessly as hunger or sexual longing.  The chimp that does

not know that he exists is not driven to discover his origins and is spared

the tragic necessity of contemplating his own end.  And even if the animal

experimenters succeed in teaching a chimp to count one hundred bananas or

to play chess, the chimp will develop no science and he will exhibit no

appreciation of beauty, for the greatest part of man's wisdom may be traced

back to the eternal questions of beginnings and endings, the quest to give

meaning to his existence, to life itself.

        -- Selma Fraiberg, _The Magic Years_, pg. 193

Fortune Cookie

13:3. With whose beauty, if they, being delighted, took them to be gods: let them know how much the Lord of them is more beautiful than they: for the first author of beauty made all those things.

THE BOOK OF WISDOM     OLD TESTAMENT

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

Oscar Wilde

“ When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong .”

Fuller, Buckminster.

As one gets older death seems hardly to make so wide a gap--a few years more or less, that is all--meantime we know in whose hands we all are, that life is very beautiful, but death has its beauty too.

Friedrich Max Müller     Thoughts on Life and Religion

Sahest du nie die Schonheit im Augenblicke des Leidens, / Niemals hast du die Schonheit gesehn. / Sahest du die Freude nie in einem schonen Gesichte, / Niemals hast du die Freude gesehn=--If thou hast never seen beauty in the moment of suffering, thou hast never seen beauty at all. If thou hast never seen joy in a beautiful countenance, thou hast never seen joy at all.

_Schiller._

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