
“I found a new chord the other day. I was like, ‘Shit, if I had known that years ago…’ That’s what’s beautiful about the guitar. You think you know it all, but it keeps opening up new doors. I look at life as six strings and twelve frets. If I can’t figure out everything that’s in there, what chance do I have of figuring out anything else?”
Keith Richards
more infosource: Oct. 17, 2002 interview by David Fricke, in The Rolling Stone Interviews, ed. by Jann S. Wenner and Joe Levy (New York: Back Bay Books, 2007), 440.
category: beauty, creative process, discovery, guitar, music
medium: Interview
“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.”
Saul Bellow
more info“I am in love with the world. And I look right now, as we speak together, out my window in my studio and I see my trees and my beautiful, beautiful maples that are hundreds of years old, they’re beautiful. And you see I can see how beautiful they are. I can take time to see how beautiful they are. It is a blessing to get old. It is a blessing to find the time to do the things, to read the books, to listen to the music.”
Maurice Sendak
more infosource: “The Pig Wants to Party: Maurice Sendak’s Latest,” Fresh Air with Terry Gross, NPR, September 20, 2011. Transcript here.
category: aging, beauty, maple, nature, tree
medium: Interview
“She is forty-five and austerely handsome, with large eyes the color of coal and a wide, upturned mouth that often gives her a wry expression. She wears sneakers, black trousers, a wool cardigan with elbow patches—the indifferent wardrobe of someone who devotes her energy to looking rather than to being seen.”
Emily Eakin
more infosource: “Celluloid Hero: Tacita Dean’s exhilirating homage to film,” by Emily Eakin, New Yorker, October 31, 2011, 54.
category: artist, beauty, clothing, fashion, Tacita Dean
medium: Magazine profile
“We find a delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
more infosource: “Illusions,” in The Conduct of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1904), 316.
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category: beauty, child, endearment
medium: nonfiction
notes: Emerson's essay collection A Conduct of Life was first published in 1860
“‘Well, I am pretty,’ replied Charlotte. ‘There’s no denying that. Almost all spiders are rather nice-looking. I’m not as flashy as some, but I’ll do.'”
E. B. White
more infosource: Charlotte’s Web (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 37.
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category: beauty, children's story, spider
medium: Fiction
“An echo is often more beautiful than the voice it repeats.”
Oscar Wilde
more infosource: Sebastian Melmoth (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1905), 131.
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category: beauty, echo, sound, voice
medium: Nonfiction
“When I bought my farm, I did not know what a bargain I had in the bluebirds, bobolinks, & thrushes. As little did I know what sublime mornings & sunsets I was buying.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
more infosource: Emerson in His Journals, selected and edited by Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 505.
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category: beauty, bird, farm, nature
medium: Journal
“Everything has a message…Everything is the product of the mind. Everything that is ugly is the product of ugly minds. Beauty is a by-product of intellectual elegance.”
Massimo Vignelli
more infosource: “A Design Life Force,” by Ralph Gardner, The Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2011.
category: beauty, design, elegance, message, ugly
medium: newspaper article
“Being a poet, divining beauty, is like divining nature—a gift. It does not matter if one does not create. It is enough to have the poetic vision. To see the beauty hidden. As I did tonight, hearing someone whistle in the distance as I stood by an open window. I felt all kinds of moods of streets at night, of walking with loved women, of the dark blue and whiteness, and the strange, magical desertion of streets at night. I felt it all exactly in a moment, such a rush of impressions that they can hardly be seized. Algernon Blackwood: ‘To feel like a poet is not to be a poet.’ True, yet, poetry making is not necessarily the printing of words. It is a philosophical outlook, an epicureanism, a hedonism.”
John Fowles
more infosource: entry dated September 24, 1949, in The Journals: Volume One 1949–1965 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 4.
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category: beauty, philosophy, poet
medium: journal
“Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”
Patti Smith
more infosource: “National Book Award for Patti Smith,” by Julie Bosman, The New York Times, November 17, 2010.
category: beauty, book, technology
medium: newspaper story
notes: from her acceptance speech at the ceremony for the National Book Awards
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Only press on: no feeling is final.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
more infosource: From The Book of Hours in The Poetry of Rilke, trans. and ed. by Edward Snow (New York: North Point Press, 2009), 33.
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category: advice, beauty, emotion, terror
medium: poetry
notes: from Mary Karr's Twitter feed
“Beauty is worth saving. An impractical, beautiful dirt road with a shading canopy can nourish a person’s mind and spirit, and people who are fed by the lovely aspects around them enrich the life of any town.”
Susan Hand Shetterly
more infosource: “Country Road,” in Settled in the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2010), 124.
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category: beauty, country, health, Maine, mind, nature, nourishment, preservation, road, rural
medium: nonfiction
“Doing beautiful things is its own reward. If you do something that you’re proud of, that someone else understands, that is a thing of beauty that wasn’t there before—you can’t beat that.”
Raymond Joseph Teller
more infosource: “Penn and Teller Interview,” Telegraph, by Benjamin Secher, July 9, 2010.
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category: beauty, creativity, reward, satisfaction, work
medium: interview
notes: Silent half of the magic team Penn + Teller. He changed his legal name to Teller.
via: boingboing“In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable—which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.”
Marilynne Robinson
more infosource: Gilead (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 197.
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category: aesthetic, beauty, civilization, identity, language, life, ruins, secret
medium: fiction
via: The Bronze Medal

beauty