Beauty, Lovliness, Grace, Style, Elegance: Quotations, Sayings, Wisdom, Poetry, Aphorisms, Virtues

"What greater delight is there than to behold the earth apparelled with plants as with a robe of embroidered works, set with Orient pearls and garnished with the great diversitie of rare and costly jewels. But these delights are in the outward senses. The principle delight is in the mind, singularly enriched with the knowledge of these visible things, setting forth to us the invisible wisdom and admirable workmanship of almighty God."
- John Gerard, 1633, The Herbal

"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion."
- Francis Bacon

"Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light."
- John Ruskin

"All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so."
- Joseph Joubert

"Remember, it is forbidden to live in a town which has no garden or greenery."
- Kiddushin 4:12

"What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for Beauty, and never see the Dawn!"
- Logan Pearsall Smith

"The great challenge for the garden designer is not to make the garden look natural, but to make the garden so that the people in it will feel natural."
- Lawrence Halprin

"Whatever is in any way beautiful has its source of beauty in itself, and is complete in itself; praise forms no part of it."
- Marcus Aurelius

"Beauty is the adjustment of all parts proportionately so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole."
- Leon B. Alberti

"Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said."
- George Santayana

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
- Antoine de Saint Exupery

"In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty."
- Christopher Morley

"Better a pearl with a flaw than a pebble without.
Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it."
- Confucius

"Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise."
- George Washington Carver

"The poor need not only bread. The poor also need beauty."
- Monsignor Hldebrand

"Beauty is the Mistress, the gardener Her slave.
All beautiful things disappear, and beauty is the memory of ideas.
Chrysanthemums in bloom over a carpet of dry leaves - the contrasts and pathos of beauty.
A flower needs roots; beauty of society of minds."
- Michael P. Garofalo, Pulling Onions

"Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of man."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"The artist is the only lover; he alone has the pure vision of beauty, and love is the vision of the soul when it is permitted to gaze upon immortal beauty."
- Isadora Duncan

"Lord of the far horizons,
Give us the eyes to see
Over the verge of the sundown
The beauty that is to be."
- Bliss Carman

"Life just seems so full of connections. Most of the time we don't even pay attention to the depth of life. We only see flat surfaces."
- Colin Neenan

"Beauty is excrescence, superabundance, random ebulience, and sheer delightful waste to be enjoyed in its own right."
- Donald Culross Peattie, An Almanac for Moderns

"There is no spot of ground, however arid, bare or ugly, that cannot be tamed into such a state as may give an impression of beauty and delight."
- Gertrude Jekyll

"Lord, make us mindful of the little things that grow and blossom in these days to make the world beautiful for us."
- W.E.B. du Bois

"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is a symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature--the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter. The lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world...are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of earth, sea and sky and their amazing life."
- Rachel Carson (1907-1964)

"Elegance means appreciating things as they are. There is a sense of delight and of fearlessness. You are not fearful of dark corners. If there are any dark, mysterious corners, black and confusing, you override them with your glory, your sense of beauty, your sense of cleanness, your feeling of being regal. Because you can override fearlessness in this way, tantra, or the highest stage in Tibetan Buddhist practice, is known as the king of all the stages on the path. You take an attitude of having perfectly complete and very rich basic sanity."
- Elegance, Ocean of Dharma, Shambhala Publications

“Fall in love
with the energy
of the mornings

trace your fingers
along the lull
of the afternoons

take the spirit
of the evenings
in your arms
kiss it deeply

and then
make love
to the tranquility
of the nights.”
- Sanober Khan

"Always remember the beauty of the garden, for there is peace."
- Author Unknown

"Our hearts are drunk with a beauty our eyes could never see."
- George W. Russell

"Not only in grass fields with green leaf and running brook did this constant desire find renewal. More deeply still with living human beauty; the perfection of form, the simple fact of forms, ravished and always will ravish me away. In this lies the outcome and end of all the loveliness of sunshine and green leaf, of flowers, pure water and sweet air. This is embodiment and highest expression; the scattered, uncertain, and designless loveliness of tree and sunshine brought to shape. Through this beauty I prayed deepest and longest, and down to this hour. The shape the divine idea of that shape the swelling muscle or the dreamy limb, strong sinew or curve of bust, Aphrodite or Hercules, it is the same. That I may have the soul-life, the soul-nature, let the divine beauty bring to me divine soul."
- Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart

“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful implanted in the human soul.”
- Johann Wolfgang Goethe

"It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance ... To perceive freshly, with fresh senses is to be inspired."
- Henry David Thoreau

"Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame."
- G. K. Chesterton

"Plainness has its peculiar temptations quite as much as beauty."
- George Eliot

"It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know of wonder and humility."
- Rachel Carson

"Most of us have lost that sense of unity of biosphere and humanity which would bind and reassure us all with an affirmation of beauty. Most of us do not today believe that whatever the ups and down of detail within our limited experience, the larger whole is primarily beautiful."
- Gregory Bateson

"Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked."
- Ralph Ellison, Battle Royal

"Over fertilized plants may be beautiful but are otherwise useless, like people whose energies are devoted so completely to their appearance that there is no other development."
- William Longgood

"It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness."
- Leo Tolstoy

"Is it wholly fantastic to admit the possibility that Nature herself strove toward what we call beauty? Face to face with any one of the elaborate flowers which man's cultivation has had nothing to do with, it does not seem fantastic to me. We put survival first. But when we have a margin of safety left over, we expend it in the search for the beautiful. Who can say that Nature does not do the same?"
- Joseph Wood Krutch

"Lord of the far horizons,
Give us the eyes to see:
Over the verge of the sundown,
The beauty that is to be."
- Bliss Carman

"There is something in us that loves symmetry, selection, arrangement, as well as wildness and irregularity.
A small garden, accordingly, gives its owner a far greater opportunity to express himself than a small lawn. The usual lawn expresses nothing so much a vacancy of mind or an impious waste of good material; whereas in a garden any man may be an artist, may experiment with all the subtleties or simplicities of line, mass, color, and composition, and taste the god-like joys of the creator."
- H. G. Dwight, Gardens and Gardening, Atlantic Monthly, 1912

"If you truly love Nature, you will find beauty everywhere."
- Vincent Van Gogh

"Living Nature, not dull art
Shall plan my ways and rule my Heart."
- John Henry Cardinal Newman

"Grace pours all beauty into the soul ... The soul means the world."
- Meister Eckhart

"By plucking her petals,
You do not gather the beauty of the flower."
- Rabindrath Tagore

"The foundations of the world are to be found, not in the cognitive experience of conscious thought, but in the aesthetic experience of everyday life."
- Alfted North Whitehead

"Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for example."
- John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice

"The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Beauty is like summer fruits which are easy to corrupt and cannot last."
- Frances Bacon

"I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!"
- Louise Bogan

"What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself."
- Willa Cather

"It seemed to my friend that the creation of a landscape-garden offered to the proper muse the most magnificent of opportunities. Here indeed was the fairest field for the display of the imagination, in the endless combining of forms of novel beauty."
- Poe

"A garden, the, is a finite place, in which a gardener (or several gardeners) has created, working with or against nature, a plot whose intention it is to provide pleasure; possibly in the form of beauty, possibly in the form of cabbages - and possibly, beautiful cabbages."
- Abby Adams, The Gardener's Gripe Book

"The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. . . . The ordinary objects of human endeavour -- property, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible."
- Albert Einstein

Writing and Being: Embracing Your Life Through Creative Journaling

Keeping a Nature Journal: Discover a Whole New Way of Seeing the World Around You

Journal to the Self: Twenty-Two Paths to Personal Growth

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Visual Journaling: Going Deeper than Words

Nature Journaling: Learning to Observe and Connect with the World Around You

Writing Down Your Soul: How to Activate and Listen to the Extraordinary Voice Within

Mixed-Media Nature Journals: New Techniques for Exploring Nature, Life, and Memories

Creative Wildfire: An Introduction to Art Journaling - Basics and Beyond

Inner Journeying Through Art-Journaling: Learning to See And Record Your Life As a Work of Art

"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts."
- Rachel Carson

"My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth's lovliness."
- Michelangelo Buonardo

"I don't like standard beauty - there is no beauty without strangeness."
- Karl Lagerfeld

"We ordinary people must forge our own beauty. We must set fire to the greyness of our labor with the art of our own lives ... What is the essence of this art of living? Of course, even this art should have beauty as its essence."
- Kenji Miyazawa

"When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."
- Buckminster Fuller

"Gardens unite artificial and natural beauty, embracing all the natural elements - water, light, air, growth - and making them elements of art. Every effort devoted to garden design becomes a mirror of the longing for happiness in harmony with nature."
- Carl F. Schroer

"The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."
- Virginia Woolf

"Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may."
- Plato, Symposium

"Let me define a garden as the meeting of raw nature and the human imagination in which both seek the fulfillment of their beauty. Every sign indicates that nature wants us and wishes for collaboration with us, just as we long for nature to be fulfilled in us. If our original state was to live in a garden, as Adam and Eve did, then a garden signals our absolute origins as well as our condition of eternity, while life outside the garden is time and temporality.
- Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, p. 96

"Plainness has its peculiar temptations quite as much as beauty."
- George Eliot

"Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God."
- Jean Anouilh

"I do not wish to die--
There is such contingent beauty in life:
The open window on summer mornings
Looking out on gardens and green things growing,
The shadowy cups of roses flowering to themselves--
Images of time and eternity--
Silence in the garden and felt along the walls."
- A. L. Rowse

"If delight may provoke men's labour, what greater delights is there then to behold the earth as apparelled with plants, as with a robe of imbroidered worke, set with orient pearles, and garnished with great diversitie of rare and costly jewels? . . . The delight is great but the use greater, and joyned often with necessitie."
- John Gerarde

"All the beings of the world pray," said my Grandad ... "Each living thing gives its life to the beauty of all life,
and that gift is its prayer."
- Douglas Wood, Grandad's Prayers of the Earth

"Confronted with the vision of a beautiful garden, we see something beautiful about ourselves."
- Jeff Cox

"We seem to have lost contact with the earlier, more profound functions of art, which have always had to do with personal and collective empowerment, personal growth, communion with this world, and the search for what lies
beneath and above this world."
- Peter London, No More Second Hand Art

"Tell them dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for being."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Rhodora

"May the road rise up to meet you,
may the wind be ever at your back,
may the sun shine warm upon your face,
may the rain fall softly on your fields,
and may Beauty hold you in the palm of Her hand."
- Modification of an Irish Blessing

"In the Orthodox spiritual tradition, the ultimate moral question we ask is the following: Is what we are doing, is what I am doing, beautiful or not?"
- Carolyn Gifford

"Because in particular moments, in the dusk of a late May evening, when everything glows, when green seems greener than you've ever seen it before, and the roses you planted are beginning to flower, future tasks don't matter, neither do past worries - because you witness a perfect moment of soul-restoring beauty."
- Lisa, Turning Earth

"Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail.
- Navajo Song

"For lack of attention a thousand forms of loveliness elude us every day."
- Evelyn Underhill

"With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
With beauty above me and about me, I walk,
It is finished in beauty
It is finished in beauty."
- Navaho Night Chant, Looking Far West

"The phrase "beautiful colour'', for example, can have a hundred meanings, depending on the occasion on which we use it. Very often the adjectives we use are those applicable to the face of a person. This is the case with "beautiful" and "ugly". Consider how we learn such words. We do not as children discover the quality of beauty or ugliness in a face and find that these are qualities a tree has in common with it. The words "beautiful" and "ugly'' are bound up with the words they modify, and when applied to a face are not the same as when applied to flowers and trees. We have in the latter a similar "game".
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures on Philosophy

The cottage garden; most for use designed,
Yet not of beauty destitute.
- Charlotte Smith

"We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"As one grows older one should grow more expert at finding beauty in unexpected places, in deserts and even in towns, in ordinary human faces and among wild weeds."
- C. C. Vyvyan

"The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty... The type of Truth required for the final stretch of Beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation... Apart from Beauty, Truth is neither good, nor bad... Truth matters because of beauty."
- Alfred North Whitehead

"It has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"You do not need to know anything about a plant to know that it is beautiful."
- Montagu Don

"Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself."
- Henry Miller

"As every real estate agent knows, a poor house in good surroundings will sell for a higher price than a better house in poor surroundings, and in a town they confidently ask 25 percent more rent for a flat with a view of a park that for an identical flat with no view."
- Nan Fairbrother

"Rhythm, symmetry, and a happy combination of elegance and utility - a blend often desired in later days of hope and struggle - these have been fully attained, and with them a delight in quiet communion with Nature, expressing as she does the sense of beauty in orderliness."
- Marie Luise Gothein, History of Garden Art, 1928
Commenting on the Egyptian tomb pictures of the home and gardens of the official Meten, circa 1440 BCE
"Right on to the New Period vineyard arbors were the centre and chief ornament of all gardens."

"I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?"
- Jean Kerr

"If you would have a lovely garden, you should live a lovely life."
- Shaker saying

"In the creation of a garden, the architect invites the partnership of the Kingdom of Nature. In a beautiful garden the majesty of nature is ever present, but it is nature reduced to human proportions and thus transformed into the most efficient haven against the aggressiveness of contemporary life."
- Luis Barragán, Mexico

"Garden," "park" and "wood" are thus synonymous in our times with the ideas of beauty, naturalness and health."
- Tornsten O. Enge

"In order to comprehend the beauty of a Japanese garden, it is necessary to understand - or at least to learn to understand - the beauty of stone."
- Lafcadio Hearn

"For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide."
- Thomas Mann

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know."
- John Keats (1795-1821)

"Beauty is the adjustment of all parts proportionately so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole."
- Leon B. Alberti

"Good nature will always supply the absence of beauty; but beauty cannot supply the absence of good nature."
- Joseph Addison

"Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition."
- D. H. Lawrence

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul."
- John Muir

"Beauty is momentary in the mind -
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The Body dies; the body's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of Winter, done repenting."
- Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955, Peter Quince and the Clavier

"That which is striking and beautiful is not always good, but that which is good is always beautiful."
- Ninon de L'Enclos

"Don't underestimate the therapeutic value of gardening. It's the one area where we can all use our nascent creative talents to make a truly satisfying work of art. Every individual, with thought, patience and a large portion of help from nature, has it in them to create their own private paradise: truly a thing of beauty and a joy for ever."
- Geoff Hamilton, Paradise Gardens, 1997

"We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs. How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so lifelike."
- Evelyn Underhill

"Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears."
- Edgar Allen Poe

"Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting - a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!"
- Louise Bogan

"I think the main culprit is modernity itself. Modernity and beauty simply don't mix. Pragmatism and an industrial-sized busyness denigrate everything that can't squeeze out of a calculator. And the first thing to die under such circumstances is a passion for beauty. For those trying desperately to jump over moving hurdles, pursuing beauty
is just foolishness. .... We just don't have the time for poetry; beauty isn't useful, we say, until we're in our eighties, when many finally reflect and realize that beauty was truly essential to a good life that has now slipped by."
- Douglas Jones, Men Hate Poetry

"Gardening is a luxury occupation: an ornament, not a necessity, of life.... Fortunate gardener, who may preoccupy himself solely with beauty in these difficult and ugly days! He is one of the few people left in this distressful world to carry on the tradition of elegance and charm. A useless member of society, considered in terms of economics, he must not be denied his rightful place. He deserves to share it, however humbly, with the painter and poet."
- Vita Sackville-West, 1892-1962

"In the end, color combinations come down to our personal preferences, which we must discover through observation and experiment."
- Montagu Don

"Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time."
- Albert Camus

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
- Douglas Adams

"Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets it."
- Leonard Cohen

"What we call yugen lies within the mind and cannot be expressed in words. Its quality may be suggested by the sight of a gauzy cloud veiling the moon or by the autumnal mists swathing the scarlet leaves on a mountainside. If one is asked where yugen can be found in these sights, one cannot say; a man who cannot understand this truth is
quite likely to prefer the sight of the moon shining brightly in a cloudless sky. It is quite impossible to explain wherein lies the interest or wonder of yugen."
- Shotetsu, in Donald Keene's No: The Classical Theatre of Japan

"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself."
- Henry Miller

"Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the
Verities and Realities of your Existence.
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty;
For Yesterday is but a Dream."
- Kalidasa

"Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all."
- W. Somerset Maugham

"The first law of a painting and of a picture on the soil is to be a whole . . . Without principles and without discernment one never attains veritable beauty."
- Edouard André

"The first act of awe, when man was struck with the beauty or wonder of Nature, was the first spiritual experience."
- Henryk Skolimowski

"It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves."
- Robert Louis Stevenson

The Art of Happiness. By Epicurus. Translation and commentary by George K. Strodach. Penguin Classics, 2012.

The Birth of Hedonism: The Cyrenaic Philosophers and Pleasure as a Way of Life. By Kurt Lampe. Princeton University Press, 2014.

The Conquest of Happiness By Bertrand Russell. Introduction by Daniel Dennett. Liveright, 1930, 2013.

Epicurean and Hedonistic Philosophy: Bibliography, Resources, Quotations, Information

Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity By Catherine Wilson. Oxford University Press, 2008.

Epicureanism: A Very Short Introduction By Catherine Wilson. Oxford University Press, 2016.

The Five Senses and Pleasure

Nicomachean Ethics By Aristotle. Translated by Christopher Rowe. Commentary and notes by Sarah Broadie. Oxford University Press, 2002.

Research by
Michael P. Garofalo, M.S.

This webpage was last modified and updated on June 3, 2016.

This webpage was first distributed online on January 3, 2003.

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Beauty
Loveliness, Proportion, Art, Grace, Style, Elegance, Natural Beauty

Quotations, Sayings, Aphorisms, Quips, Quotes, Wisdom, Poetry

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Green Way Research, Red Bluff, California

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