The full moon rises behind the western span, dressed in the amazing Bay Lights. The bay itself is suddenly silver, painted by the Goddess Herself and the breath is sucked out of us. Beauty should be divine.

not a wooden bamboo tube of cascading smooth pebbles nor midnight storm falling into the tick-tock clack of a bamboo grove

Beauty begins with the natural world. Whether it’s the fiords of Norway or the thick jungles in the far north of my country of birth, Australia, the heart is engaged before the head has had time to define what exactly it’s looking at – the dredging and earth moving of the last Ice Age or what happens when heavy rains and intense heat get together. 

Sometime, sooner or later you’ll have to make this journey. You might think that you have no clue where to begin, but you do know, you’ve always known the place. You might have read about it in Pausanias, who traversed the whole of Greece, mountains, plains, and seas to find it—what he called the Oracle of Trophonius.

Beauty is that which we adore in ourselves but find it somewhat difficult to find in others.

The power in a writer’s force is one which brings compassion and a change of vision and action to the receiver. So beauty is more than an aesthetic which pleases, but a dynamic in which a poet or writer, musician or visual or conceptual artist attempts to open the receiver’s vision so an act of mercy or courage will result

Beauty is magic. Beauty is the daydream we get lost in.

“I walk with beauty before me. I walk with beauty behind me. I walk with beauty below me. I walk with beauty around me. My words will be beautiful.”

It is left to each of us to determine what strangeness might be in a work of art.

I want to make music for things that have no anthems. I want to conjure warm stories from cold ashes. Gathering wreckage into a balanced, harmonious form is not a betrayal of the truth, but rather a resurrection as true as any fall.

I’ve come to discover beauty in the everyday. In that lumpy heirloom tomato, the fresh shiny ebony paint on the stair rail, the gleam of slanted sunlight ricocheting off a silver vase – beauty valuable in its tiny moments, deflecting, sometimes, the ugliness we endure these days in our wide world. It has to be enough.

The purpose of life is to create beauty, and the forms that beauty can take are infinite.

What I see as beautiful is the gifts of this season. Today’s ripe Oregon strawberries, the smell of one of my pink rosebushes and then the mock orange that bloomed for the first time this year. The promise in my garden of ripe tomatoes and pea pods in the weeks ahead.

Beauty is refusing to be beaten: dwarfed by decades but dressed like a teen with summer slipped over a bright bikini, blonde hair, outrageously large sunglasses. She went up an elevator in a shopping mall while a young couple came down, looked down, noticed, sniggered, whispered about this youthful soul refusing to age appropriately.

I think the mind creates its world. It houses the keys to form. The museum is not an actual place but a context of memory, association, and intense focus. Beauty is the spirit level that reminds us we are alive.

The process of making beauty is, to me, getting the conscious, ego-clamoring mind out of the way, and letting the experience speak for itself, or becoming the conduit for what generous work the subconscious has done.

A moment of surprise, the unexpected suddenly thrust into view, disrupting whatever anxious reverie or immediate concerns had been preoccupying me

Beauty changes you, if only for a subtle moment. It strengthens the pulse, gathers and releases breath, expands the heart, glows in the mind. Unless you shut it out, beauty engages you in a relationship…

Rather than being observed or judged, beauty must be discovered and absorbed through the lens of amazement (…) The world is sacramental beauty and all within it wear a crown.