Will To Beauty Quotes

He glanced up once, eyes bored. Please stop talking. I'm trying to eat. ~ Kate Avery Ellison

Yes, you do hate Switzerland. And," doctor Messerli paused for effect, "you love it. You love it and you hate it. What you don't feel is apathy. You're not indifferent. You're ambivalent."
Anna had thought about this before, when nights came during which she could do nothing but wander Dietlikon's sleeping streets or hike the hill behind her house to sit upon the bench where most often she went to weep. She'd considered her ambivalence many, many times, and in the end, she's diagnosed herself with a disease that she'd also invented. Switzerland syndrome. Like Stockholm syndrome. But instead of my captors, I'm attached to the room in which I'm held captive. It's the prison I'm bound to, not the warden.

Anna was absolutely right. It was the landscape. it was the geography. The fields, the streams, the lakes, the forests. And the mountains. On exceptionally clear days when the weather was right, if you walked south on Dietlikon's Bahnhofstrasse you could see the crisp outlines of snow-capped Alps against a blazing blue horizon eighty kilometers away. On these certain days it was something in the magic of the atmosphere that made them tangible and moved them close. The mutability of those particular mountains reminded Anna of herself. And it wasn't simply the natural landscape that she attached herself to emotionally. It was the cobblestone roads of Zürich's old town and the spires of this church and the towers of that one. And the trains, the trains, the goddamn ~ Jill Alexander Essbaum

She suspected that she was quite like Helena Kraft in that she was capable and ambitious and wanted to get a pat on the back from her superiors. That was not necessarily always a good thing though. With that tendency, if you operate in an unhealthy culture you risk becoming just as unhealthy yourself and - who knows, perhaps it is the will to please that leads people to crime just as often as evil or greed. ~ David Lagercrantz

The dead at Nyarubuye were, I'm afraid, beautiful. There was no getting around it. The skeleton is a beautiful thing. The randomness of the fallen forms, the strange tranquility of their rude exposure, the skull here, the arm bent in some uninterpretable gesture there--these things were beautiful, and their beauty only added to the affront of the place. I couldn't settle on any meaningful response: revulsion, alarm, sorrow, grief, shame, incomprehension, sure, but nothing truly meaningful. I just looked, and I took photographs, because I wondered whether I could really see what I was seeing while I saw it, and I wanted also an excuse to look a bit more closely. ~ Philip Gourevitch

Women have, in general, but ne object, which is their beauty; upon which, scarce any flattery is too gross for them to swallow. ~ Lord Chesterfield

I don't want to explain to somebody what pollen is. That is the secret and the beauty and the power and the potential of all this. ~ Wolfgang Laib

Trying to maintain a pleasant state and avoid an unpleasant state is actually the cause of sorrow. When you stop resisting, you see that what seems frightening is actually the absolute beauty of reality. When you see that everything is a momentary display of reality, then you stop resisting it. Resistance hurts, only every single time. Love is the state of nonresistance. ~ Adyashanti

Deep in the psychological caves of their mental platonic
darkness, there is no rainbow colour or light of reason in many areas
of their psyche, their inner mind. Instead they have married
themselves to a dragon of a creature, so terrible that even Jupiter
feared this monstrosity of pompous ignorance. Their hope of the
beauty of Cupid is just a lovemaking session in the dark room of
ignorance of both science and religion. ~ L.B. Ó Ceallaigh

For the first fourteen years for a rod they do while for the next as a pearl in the world they do shine. For the next trim beauty beginneth to swerve. For the next matrons or drudges they serve. For the next doth crave a staff for a stay. For the next a bier to fetch them away. ~ Thomas Tusser

It is the will to be grateful which constitutes gratitude. ~ Joseph Cook

A man needs no arguments to make him discern and approve what is beautiful: it strikes at first sight, and attracts without a reason. And as this beauty is found in the shape and form of corporeal things, so also is there analogous to it a beauty of another kind, an order, a symmetry, and comeliness in the moral world. And as the eye perceiveth the one, so the mind doth by a certain interior sense perceive the other, which sense, talent, or faculty, is ever quickest and purest in the noblest minds. ~ George Berkeley

To be a miracle worker you do not have to get a doctoral degree, become a minister, eat a particular food, or be able to meditate for long hours. All you need to do is to begin to see beauty in your life and those around you. ~ Alan Cohen

Beauty is more than just shining for others. You don't need to have the perfect face to be beautiful. Being ugly or beautiful is a matter of energy, and true beauty comes from the heart. ~ Kristen Stewart

What a strange power the perception of beauty is! It seems to ebb and flow like some secret tide, independent alike of health and disease, of joy or sorrow. There are times in our lives when we seem to go singing on our way, and when the beauty of the world sets itself like a quiet harmony to the song we uplift. ~ A. C. Benson

For neither does wealth bring honour to the owner, if he be a coward; of such a one the wealth belongs to another, and not to himself. Nor does beauty and strength of body, when dwelling in a base and cowardly man, appear comely, but the reverse of comely, making the possessor more conspicuous, and manifesting forth his cowardice. ~ Plato

I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again. ~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

You don't need a sad soul
to feel the beauty of a dead grave
Just stay with the pale moon
when darkness wants the night to be brave ~ Munia Khan

Beauty is the supreme mystery of this world. It is a gleam which attracts the attention and yet does nothing to sustain it. Beauty always promises, but never gives anything; it stimulates hunger but has no nourishment for the part of the soul which looks in this world for sustenance. It feeds only the part of the soul that gazes. While exciting desire, it makes clear there is nothing in it to be desired, because the one thing we want is that it should not change. If one does not seek means to evade the exquisite anguish it inflicts, then desire is gradually transformed into love; and one begins to acquire the faculty of pure and disinterested attention. ~ Simone Weil

And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach. ~ Paul Fussell

To grow unique beauty, be wild and live in the wilderness of your mind. ~ Debasish Mridha

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one's life. There is an urge to say, 'I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me. ~ Alain De Botton

As for the promotion of peace congresses we have had our meetings and assemblies, but the promotion through them of the determined and effective will to peace displaying itself in action and policy remains to be achieved. ~ Lester B. Pearson

There are truths, that are beyond us, transcendent truths, about beauty, truth, honor, etc. There are truths that man knows exist, but they cannot be seen - they are immaterial, but no less real, to us. It is only through the language of myth that we can speak of these truths. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Then I stop existing. She is talking, talking, takes off who knows where, she says it all starts over, speech, paths, butterflies and that she just loves words' inevitable slowness, she says that when in distress everything is overcome by the sound of words and that everything then becomes impossible to understand, she says things are exploding in her head and that everything must be attempted again like a backhand, a lob in mindspace, she repeats the mind is fragile but the eyes, but the eyes Melanie, she says one must not give up, that nothing is impossible if in the realm of the improbable memory realises the certitude which in us keeps an eye out for beauty on the horizon, she talks about our attachment to certain words, that they are like small slow deaths in concise reality. ~ Nicole Brossard

It's a soulful Sunday, somehow I found myself pulling out my journal and started writing a letter to Sensuality. And it goes like this: Sensuality...

You've opened me up to a world of possibilities and set me on an adventure that has never ceased to amaze me. You have led me through unfounded territories. Through the highest highs and lowest lows I've felt your current, sometimes raging like an angry sea and at times blowing as gentle as a cool summer breeze.

You've filled me with such an insatiable desire, which has been both a curse and a blessing. You've sensitized my soul, made it to feel even the most gentle touch of the lightest feather. You daily seduce me into your deep waters, waters so deep I find myself drowning, yet not losing my breath.

Sensuality... I love how you soothe me when I'm hurting. I love how you comfort and put me back together when I'm feeling broken. I love how you whisper in my ear and say 'do not despair, I'm here.' You uncover my deepest desires and set my soul on fire. You light me up and make me shine like the brightest star on a clear summer night.

There's never a dull moment with you. Just when I think there can't possibly be more, you show me again and again that there's always another level... another layer... another blessing. Your mysteries never run out. I've come know you like God's very own presence. Indeed, you are His very own favour to my soul. His divine beauty, passion and wisdom have I ~ Lebo Grand

Besides, it is a shame to let yourself grow old through neglect before seeing how you can develop the maximum beauty and strength of body; and you can have this experience if your are negligent, because these things don't normally happen by themselves. ~ Socrates

Far to our left I could see a commercial airliner on final approach to Soekarno-Hatta. Far to our right I could see the outline of tall city buildings. The imagery was hard to ignore. In the midst was an impoverished world filled with dangerous radicals. Some believed it was God's will to crash airplanes into buildings. Some recruited children to self-detonate on buses and in coffee shops. It must be incredibly difficult to hold fast to hope when you live in such a world. It's also hard to keep faith with humanity when religious ideology is used as an impetus for war. But I also believe that for every war there is a hero ... and for me, Jakarta will always be Indira's city. ~ Tucker Elliot

This book's title, Rough Beauty , conveys Anderson's conviction that the hard scrabble lives of most of the residents of Vidor, Texas, are worthy of our attention, but it also conveys that he does not seek to beautify their lives by removing the crude edges. ~ Anne Wilkes Tucker

Education is important not because it helps you to get a job, but because it opens the window of the mind through which we can see the beauty of life. ~ Debasish Mridha

She looks me up and down and nods but I can't tell if it's with approval or not.
"You like what you see?"
"On the outside. And I already know that 'Beauty and the Beast' registers high in your pop culture appreciation, so there's a chance I won't run right out the door of this gym," she says.
I can't help but tease her a little. "Yeah, but we both know you don't like to run."
"You gonna chase me if I do, Lane Myer?"
"I might."
The way she arches an eyebrow at me would make a weaker man shrivel up and die. "See to it that you don't make me want to run," she says. ~ Abby Knox

For there is no virtue, the honour and credit for which procures a man more odium than that of justice; and this, because more than any other, it acquires a man power and authority among the common people. For they only honour the valiant and admire the wise, while in addition they also love just men, and put entire trust and confidence in them. They fear the bold man, and mistrust the clever man, and moreover think them rather beholding to their natural complexion, than to any goodness of their will, for these excellences; they look upon valour as a certain natural strength of the mind, and wisdom as a constitutional acuteness; whereas a man has it in his power to be just, if he have but the will to be so, and therefore injustice is thought the most dishonourable, because it is least excusable. ~ Plutarch

Saphira: The worth is in the act. Your worth halts when you surrender the will to change and experience life. But options are before you; choose one and dedicate yourself to it. The deeds will give you new hope and purpose.
Eragon: But what can I do?
Saphira: The only true guide is your heart. Nothing less than its supreme desire can help you. ~ Christopher Paolini

Isn't it enough to be middle-aged and impeccably beautiful? Why must one be economically useful? ~ Pietros Maneos

I tremble because of the sufferings of those persecuted in different lands. I tremble thinking about the eternal destiny of their torturers. I tremble for Western Christians who don't help their persecuted brethren. In the depth of my heart, I would like to keep the beauty of my own vineyard and not be involved in such a huge fight. I would like so much to be somewhere in quietness and rest. But it is not possible ... The quietness and rest for which I long would be an escape from reality and dangerous for my soul ... The West sleeps and must be awakened to see the plight of the captive nations. ~ Richard Wurmbrand

It is impossible for me to be an Anarchist, for I do not believe in the essential goodness of man. The world, the physical world, that was once all in all to me, has at moments such as these no road through a wood, no stretch of shore, that can bring me comfort. The beauty of these things can no longer at such moments make up to me at all for the ugliness of man, his cruelty, his greed, his lying face. ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

That's how powerful you are, girl ... You pretty, but pretty alone is not what people see. You the kinda pretty, the kinda beauty, that's like a mirror. Men and women see themselves in you, only now they so beautiful that they can't bear to see you go. ~ Walter Mosley

And the truth was that in life on earth there was no such thing as happiness without pain, victory without defeat. There were joy and enchantment and beauty to be garnered on the path, but at all times, too, there were burdens to be borne. ~ Paul Gallico

As we open our hearts to others, we begin to discover the truth of our own inner beauty, inner strength and inner light. ~ Susan Jeffers

That one look is like a knife stabbing straight through my heart. A heart that only beats when I'm in close proximity to the beauty sitting in front of me, now. ~ N.E. Henderson

From twelve stories up it was easy to be fooled by the city's rain-swept beauty, by the millions of lights twinkling in the night. But all I had to do was turn my head to see the truth: a child-whore asleep in her hospital bed. It could rain forever and the city would never be clean. ~ Jack Clark

I then greet and cordially thank you all, dear friends belonging to other religious traditions; first of all the Muslims, who worship the one God, living and merciful, and call upon Him in prayer, and all of you. I really appreciate your presence: in it I see a tangible sign of the will to grow in mutual esteem and cooperation for the common good of humanity. ~ Pope Francis

I happened to see Larry King interview Billy Graham shortly after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. I had read an article the previous month about violent video games and their effects on the minds of children, desensitizing them to the act of killing. Larry King asked Billy Graham what was wrong with the world, and how such a thing as Columbine could happen. I knew, because Billy Graham was an educated man, he had read the same article I had read, and I began calculating his answer for him, that violence begets violence, and that we live in a culture desensitized to the beauty of human life and the sanctity of creation. But Billy Graham did not blame video games. Billy Graham looked Larry King in the eye and said, 'Thousands of years ago, a young couple lived in a garden called Eden, and God placed a tree in the Garden and told them not to eat from the tree ... '
And I knew in my soul he was right. ~ Donald Miller