I do not understand where the ‘beauty’ and ‘harmony’ of nature are supposed to be found. Throughout the animal kingdom, animals ruthlessly prey upon each other. Most of them are either cruelly killed by other animals or slowly die of hunger. For my part, I am unable to see any very great beauty or harmony in the tapeworm. Let it not be said that this creature is sent as a punishment for our sins, for it is more prevalent among animals than among humans. I suppose what is meant by this ‘beauty’ and ‘harmony’ are such things as the beauty of the starry heavens. But one should remember that the stars every now and again explode and reduce everything in their neighborhood to a vague mist. Beauty, in any case, is subjective and exists only in the eye of the beholder. Bertrand Russell, What is an Agnostic? cited Leo Rosten’s Religions of America
She had gained a reputation for beauty, and (which is often another thing) was beautiful. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit
So much beauty for so little purpose. Creation 2009 starring Paul Bettany & Jennifer Connelly & Martha West & Freya Parks & Christopher Dunkin & Gene Goodman & Benedict Cumberbatch & Jeremy Northam & Toby Jones & Bill Paterson et al, director Jon Amiel
All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim. Christopher Morley
Yet beauty, though injurious, hath strange power,
After offence returning, to regain
Love once possessed. John Milton, Samson Agonistes 1671 l1003
For me the greatest beauty always lies in the greatest clarity. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
‘She’s beautiful,’ he murmured.
‘She’s a metre across the hips, easily,’ said Julia.
‘That is her style of beauty,’ said Winston. George Orwell, 1984
Because I am so very ugly. And they are so very beautiful. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 1994 starring Robert deNiro & Kenneth Branagh & Helena Bonham Carter & Ian Holm & Rory Jennings & Tom Hulce & John Cleese & Aidan Quinn & Richard Briers & Robert Hardy & Christina Cutall & Celia Imrie & Cherie Lunghi & Charles Wyn-Davies & Richard Bonneville et al, director Kenneth Branagh, Monster to old man
The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, they must be felt with the heart. Helen Keller
That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful. Edgar Allan Poe, Poems and Essays
To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty. Samuel Butler
I couldn’t tell where Heaven stopped and the Earth began it was so beautiful. Forrest Gump ***** 1994 starring Tom Hanks & Robin Wright & Gary Sinise & Mykelti Williamson & Sally Field & Haley Joel Osment & Peter Dobson & Dick Cavett & Sam Anderson & Geoffrey Blake & Siobhan Fallon et al, director Robert Zemeckis
No one hath seen beauty in its highest lustre who hath never seen it in distress. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
Whilst all the landscape was in neutral shade his companion's face, which was the focus of his eyes, rising above the mist stratum, seemed to have a sort of phosphorescene upon it. She looked ghostly, as if she were merely a soul at large. In reality her face, without appearing to do so, had caught the cold gleam of day from the north-east; his own face, though he did not think of it, wore the same aspect to her.
It was then, as has been said, that she impressed him most deeply. She was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman – a whole sex condensed into one typical form. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on the face of the earth. To a young man with the least fire in him that little upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. ibid.
And he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it had been a snake’s. She had stretched one arm so high above her coiled-up cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above the sunburn; her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung heavy over their pupils. The brimfulness of her nature breathed from her. It was a moment when a woman’s soul is more incarnate than at any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh; and sex takes the outside place in the presentation.
Then those eyes flashed brightly through their filmy heaviness, before the remainder of her face was well awake. ibid.
To find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet. Thomas Hardy, cited Florence Hardy
Blanche: Physical beauty is passing. A transitory possession. But beauty of the mind and richness of the spirit and tenderness of the heart – and I have all of those things – aren’t taken away, but grow! Increase with the years! Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
The childishness of her expression, together with the delicate beauty of her figure, made up her special charm, and that he fully realized. But what always struck him in her as something unlooked for, was the expression of her eyes, soft, serene, and truthful, and above all, her smile, which always transported Levin to an enchanted world, where he felt himself softened and tender, as he remembered himself in some days of his early childhood. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Levin on Kitty ch9
Modern Art and beauty: what is beauty? People think art must be beautiful, that beauty is art’s main purpose. But modern art people strangely don’t think that. Matthew Collings, What is Modern Art? III: Lovely Lovely, Channel 4 1999
This is the leader of the beauty cult: Henri Matisse who’ll never be annoying, just nice. ibid.
Ezra Pound: ‘Modern art isn’t about destroying the loveliness of the past but about reinventing it to make it fit the present.’ ibid.
Formalism was an idea about beauty, that it was beauty reduced to colour and flatness … But then suddenly a cold wind blew on flatness. ibid.
Finally dying of a heroin overdose in 1988 aged only 27. People think [Jean-Michel] Basquiat is either only superficial or amazingly soulful … Basquiat’s colour is very strong and incredibly subtly orchestrated. ibid.
Here’s a beautiful artwork: nice, isn’t it? Keep thinking of that. Now think of something completely different that is still beautiful. Why is beauty still happening if nothing else is? Beauty – this vague word describes a very real effect, the rush of pleasure we get from beauty … I think there are laws by which beauty, this indefinable word, can be defined. It’s true I made them up but I believe in them. Matthew Collings, What is Beauty? BBC 2009
The Millau Viaduct in Southern France … A kind of minimalism is there in art from a thousand years ago … Simplicity: the soul getting refreshed from everything suddenly getting a bit uncluttered and calmed down … A beautiful Renaissance altarpiece by Piero della Francesco … Transformation: in a form that makes sense … The Surroundings: Not the art but the stuff that surrounds it is where the beauty is … Surprise: art jolts you out of old ways of seeing things … Pattern: organising visual experience so it looks nice … Selection: an artist’s selects something, not something else … Spontaneity: Don’t be how everyone else wants you to be. ibid.
I’m about to enter an alien world. To me equations have always been incomprehensible hieroglyphs. What do they describe? Are they just a mathematical game? Matthew Collings, Beautiful Equations, BBC 2010
Scientists talk of beautiful equations. ibid.
Einstein: ‘What guides him is mathematical beauty.’ ibid.
Newton’s equation allowed us to understand why moons and planets move around the solar system. ibid.
Time runs at different rates depending how fast you’re moving. ibid.
Dirac: here was a scientist [who] insisted science went through a filter of beauty. ibid.
The natural world is beautiful but complex. The sky is dense with colour. Shapes form and disappear. But this seemingly infinite complexity is just a shadow of something deeper – the underlying laws of Nature. The world is beautiful to look at but it’s even more beautiful to understand. Forces of Nature with Brian Cox I: The Universe in a Snowflake, BBC 2016
Those laws themselves are beautiful and universal. ibid.
All animals with brains are bilaterally symmetrical. ibid.