HOW BEAUTY CREATES A HUNGER FOR TRUTH

'The beautiful, almost without any effort of its own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction - to locate what is true.'

Elaine Scarry in Karen Swallow Prior, You Have a Calling, p.118.

GOOD TEACHING

'...the best teacher is the one who wants you to find meaning in the things that have given him pleasure, too, so that the appreciation of their beauty will outlive him. In this way - because it arises from an acceptance of the inevitability of death - good teaching is like good parenting.'

Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic, p.215.

BEAUTY IS GOD'S HANDWRITING

'Never lose an oppurtnity of seeing anything beautiful. Beauty is God's hand-writing - a wayside sacrament: welcome it in every fair face, every fair sky, every fair flower, and thank Him for it, the fountain of all loveliness, and drink it in, simply and eaernestly, with all your eyes; it is a charmed draught, a cup of blessing.'

Charles Kingsley in Seth Lewis, The Language of Rivers and Stars, p.155.

BEAUTY UNITES

'...beauty is not the product of communities. It creates communities. Communities of desire, if you wish.'

Dave Hickey in Claire Dederer in Monsters, p.244.

BEAUTY HAPPENS

'We don't make decisions about beauty. Beauty happens to us.'

Claire Dederer, Monsters, p.244.

WHY BEAUTY MATTER TO US

'The human will to embody beauty is, I suspect, underrated. But it lives in us as a consequence and expression of our iconic nature. He in whose image we are made is Beauty. Beauty is naturally the end towards which we strive.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.59.

HOW BEAUTY SUSTAINS

'Art literally feeds us through beauty in the hardest, darkest hours. Christians can have a foretaste of what is to come by celebrating through making and through the exegetical work of culture. Through this wine of New Creation we can be given the eyes to see vistas of the New, ears to hear the footsteps of the New, even through the works of non-Christians in the wider culture.'

Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith, p.34

THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS

'Beauty is our sensory access to holiness. God reveals himself, that is, in creation and in Christ, in ways we can see and hear and touch and taste, in place and person. Beauty is the term we apply to these hints of transcendence, these perceptions that there is more going on here than we can account for.'

Eugene H Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, p.80.

WHAT BEAUTY DOES

'Beauty. It arrives through a sustained and adorational attentiveness to what is there: a rock, a flower, a face, a rustle in the trees, a storm crashing through the mountains. When our senses dull and our attention wavers, writers and singers and artists grab us by the ears and say, "Look, listen, feel. Embrace and respond to Life within and around you!"'

Eugene H Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, p.79.

BEAUTY GREETS US

'Beauty presents itself to us. We do not look for beauty as if it were a static thing waiting to be found. Beauty encounters us. It is the beautiful that initiates, that moves, that captures our attention. We do not make the first step. Beauty, in some sense, seeks us. We may put ourselves in places that leave us open to beauty, but it is the beautiful that acts on us.'

Gregory E Ganssle, Our Deepest Desires, p.74.

BEAUTY & TRUTH

'We often hear it said that all truth is God's truth. By the same token, we might also say that all beauty is God's beauty...'

Alastair Gordon, Why Art Matters, p.78.

GOD IS BEAUTY

'God is Beauty, who made all the beauties that pierce our hearts, from the burning autumn moon in rags of black cloud to the laughter of the woman you love. He does not want you to reject beauty. The beauties God has made can remind your intellect of, and prepare your heart to encounter, their Creator. He is beauty's climax and crescendo.'

Eve Tushnet, Tenderness, p.169.

THE POWER OF PLACE

'We should cleanse our eyes in scenery - use it like lotion.'
Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature, p.388.

THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS

'Holiness is the most beautiful, lovely thing. Men are apt to drink in strange notions of holiness from their childhood as if it were a melancholy, morose, and unpleasant thing: but there is nothing in it but what is sweet and ravishingly lovely. 'Tis the highest beauty and amiableness, vastly above all beauties; 'tis a divine beauty, makes the soul heavenly and far purer than anything here on earth - this world is like mire and filth and defilement compared to that soul which is sanctified - 'tis of a sweet, lovely, delightful, serene, calm, and still nature.'

Jonathan Edwards in Dane Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life, p.144.

SIN IS FALSE BEAUTY

'Sin is false beauty. It is ugliness masquerading as loveliness.'
Dane Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life, p.144.

HOW SCIENCE STRUGGLES TO EXPLAIN BEAUTY

'The great power of evolution, through natural and sexual selection alike, is that so much order can be created without the process needing to go anywhere at all. This is why it explains so much and so little at once - and why at the end it really is not all that satisfying, because it says little about the precise nature of the beauty that surrounds us. Perhaps the most important things are those about which the least can be said. Was science never meant to capture wonder?'

David Rothenberg, Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science and Evolution, p.45.

INSTINCTIVE RECOGNITION OF BEAUTY

'He did not say to himself that it was beautiful. He felt, he recognized, the beauty of it in his flesh...'
Wendell Berry, How It Went: Thirteen more stories of the Port William Membership, p.27.

THE LANTERN OUT OF DOORS

'Sometimes a lantern moves along the night,
That interests our eyes. And who goes there?
I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where,
With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?

Men go by me whom either beauty bright
In mould or mind or what not else makes rare:
They rain against our much-thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.

Death or distance soon consumes them: wind
What most I may eye after, be in at the end
I cannot, and out of sight is out of mind.

Christ minds: Christ’s interest, what to avow or amend
There, éyes them, heart wánts, care haúnts, foot, fóllows kínd,
Their ránsom, théir rescue, ánd first, fást, last friénd.'

Gerard Manley Hopkins 

BEAUTY

'I remembered what a farmer once said to me about a particularly fine horse: 'I could have stood and looked at that horse for ever.' In that pasture with it's trees in the evening sunlight, I felt I could have stood and watched that horse for ever, the zest and heavy grace of his movements.'

Adrian Bell, The Men and the Fields, p.113.

ULTIMATE JOY

'Ultimate joy comes not from a lover or a landscape or a home, but through them...They point to what is "higher up" and "further back."'

Cornelius Plantinga in Dane C Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life, p.77.