Kenji Miyazawa: “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…The way we create is this: Using our emotions and intuitions, we affirm real life all the time, while all the time heightening and deepening our experience of it..”
Monsignor Hildebrand: “The poor need not only bread. The poor also need beauty.”
Mahatma Gandhi: “Real beauty is my aim.”
Carolyn Gifford, orthodox theologian: “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.”
Clement of Alexandria: “The Baptized ‘in whom dwells the Word, possesses the beautiful form of the Word; he is assimilated to God and he is beautiful himself. “
Alfred North Whitehead: “The theology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty…The type of Truth required for the final stretch of Beauty is a discover and not a recapitulation. Apart from Beauty, Truth is neither good, nor bad…Truth matters because of Beauty.”
Matthew Fox: “One reason beauty is so glibly dismissed (by theologians as part of an ethic) is that harmony and cosmos are so little dealt with. Beauty alerts us to our cosmic connections–but not if we so live in our heads that only our heads constitute the cosmos. Kenji Miyazawa advises one to “discover the galaxy within yourself and remain aware of it.” if one wants to be an artist of life.
St. Francis of Assisi :“God is beauty.”
Meister Eckhart: “Grace pours all beauty into the soul….The soul means the world.”
Bancroft: “Beauty is but the sensible image of the Infinite–Like truth and justice it lives within us; like virtue and the moral law it is a companion of the soul.”
Bovee: “To cultivate a sense of the beautiful is one of the most effectual ways of cultivating an appreciation of the divine goodness.”
Emerson: “Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; your beauty is God’s handwriting–a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in ever fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a coup of blessing….All beauty warms the heart, is a sign of health, prosperity and the favor of God. What delights, what emancipates, not what scares and pains us, is wise and good in speech and in the arts. For, truly, the heart at the center of the universe with every throb hurls the flood of happiness into every artery, vein, and veinlet, so that the whole system is inundated with the tides of joy.”
Magritte:“ Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.”
Francis Bacon: “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”
Basho:
This snowy morning
That black crow
I hate so much…
But he’s beautiful!
The conclusion of the Navajo Night Chant:
“The world before me is restored in beauty.
The world behind me is reported in beauty.
The world below me is restored in beauty.
The world above me is restored in beauty.
All tings around me are restored in beauty.
My voice is restored in beauty.
It is finished in beauty.
It is finished in beauty.
It is finished in beauty.
It is finished in beauty.
