“The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.” — Albert Einstein
Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
— Franz Kafka
Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite.
— Francis Bacon
Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Beauty without expression is boring.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Truth raises against itself barriers that it cannot surmount; but beauty, like a bird, flies over them all.
— Rabindranath Tagore
Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm.
— Oscar Wilde
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for instance.
— John Ruskin
Of life’s two chief prizes, beauty and truth, I found the first in a loving heart and the second in a diligent mind.
— Kahlil Gibran
Exuberance is beauty.
—William Blake
The beauty of truth and the beauty of stone are two different things. One opens the door to the immeasurable, the other to the imprisonment of man; one to freedom and the other to the bondage of thought.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
What finally is beauty? Certainly nothing that can be calculated or measured. It is always something imponderable, something that lies between things.
— Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.
— David Hume
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My mom used to say I had an inner beauty until she saw some X-rays. Great work team!
I bet your mom made an anatomically correct Halloween costume for you after she saw the x-rays. Thanks George.
I love how the two halves of each postcard match each other! You guys rock!
~David
Glad you noticed that, David. The visual match, or “visual dialog,” as Leduc calls it, is the poetry that goes from the eye to the heart without passing through the intellect. Same road love takes. And beauty. And truth. The verbal poetry goes the long way around. So I keep it short. 🙂 Thanks, David.
I agree!
Great minds. Merci, LuAnne.
I recently read a memoir titled Truth and Beauty. I have been pondering the idea of truth and is there such a thing – I mean objective truth. Or maybe it is memory I am pondering instead of truth. Those two are pretty much woven together. I suppose if I believe the premise that we make up our own reality, then we’d be able to make up our own beauty as well.
Great post – lively and thought provoking as ever.
Perhaps beauty and truth are metaphors of direct glimpses we get, like insights or epiphanies, into what Kant called the noumenal aspect of realty, apart from our sensual perception of the phenomenal aspect and the words with which poets gild the ineffable lily. 🙂
That’s poetic!
Thank you for that observation, LuAnne. You know, a philosophical expression (words) describing an unknowable something, namely a noumenon–and thus inexpressible literally in words–must be metaphorically (if not mathematically, musically or visually) expressed. If the words are perceived as poetic by a poet of your intimate relationship with noumenal nature, that might be a glimpse of its truth or beauty, if not both.
“Truth is beautiful, to be sure, but so are lies.” Ralph Waldo Emerson (a transcendentalist, you know, a la Kant, and Anais Nin. 🙂