Beauty Quotes

“Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty

“beauty is an ultimate value—something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

“We appreciate beautiful things not for their utility only, but also for what they are in themselves—or more plausibly, for how they appear in themselves.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

“Nobody who is alert to beauty, therefore, is without the concept of redemption—of a final transcendence of mortal disorder into a ‘kingdom of ends’. In an age of declining faith art bears enduring witness to the spiritual hunger and immortal longings of our species. Hence aesthetic education matters more today than at any previous period in history.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

“As soon as another person becomes important to us, so that we feel in our lives the gravitational pull of his existence, we are to a certain extent astonished by his individuality. From time to time we pause in his presence, and allow the incomprehensible fact of his being in the world to dawn on us. And if we love him and trust him, and feel the comfort of his companionship, then our sentiment, in these moments, is like the sentiment of beauty—a pure endorsement of the other, whose soul shines in his face and gestures as beauty shines in a work of art.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty

“wanting it for its beauty is not wanting to inspect it: it is wanting to contemplate it—and that is something more than a search for information or an expression of appetite. Here is a want without a goal: a desire that cannot be fulfilled since there is nothing that would count as its fulfilment.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

“Art moves us because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful in part because it means something. It can be meaningful without being beautiful; but to be beautiful it must be meaningful.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

“People who are always in praise and pursuit of the beautiful are an embarrassment, like people who make a constant display of their religious faith.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

“Realism...is a kind of disappointed tribute to the ideal.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty

“Beauty is not the source of disinterested pleasure, but simply the object of a universal interest: the interest that we have in beauty, and in the pleasure that beauty brings.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

“But what can you do with another person's beauty? The satisfied lover is as little able to possess the beauty of his beloved as the one who hopelessly observes it from afar.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty

“Like the pleasure of friendship, the pleasure in beauty is curious: it aims to understand its object, and to value what it finds.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty

“The ascent of the soul through love, which Plato describes in the Phaedrus, is symbolized in the figure of Aphrodite Urania, and this was the Venus painted by Botticelli, who was incidentally an ardent Platonist, and member of the Platonist circle around Pico della Mirandola. Botticelli’s Venus is not erotic: she is a vision of heavenly beauty, a visitation from other and higher spheres, and a call to transcendence. Indeed, she is self-evidently both the ancestor and the descendant of the Virgins of Fra Filippo Lippi: the ancestor in her pre-Christian meaning, the descendant in absorbing all that had been achieved through the artistic representation of the Virgin Mary as the symbol of untainted flesh. The post-Renaissance rehabilitation of sexual desire laid the foundations for a genuinely erotic art, an art that would display the human being as both subject and object of desire, but also as a free individual whose desire is a favour consciously bestowed. But this rehabilitation of sex leads us to raise what has become one of the most important questions confronting art and the criticism of art in our time: that of the difference, if there is one, between erotic art and pornography. Art can be erotic and also beautiful, like a Titian Venus. But it cannot be beautiful and also pornographic—so we believe, at least. And it is important to see why. In distinguishing the erotic and the pornographic we are really distinguishing two kinds of interest: interest in the embodied person and interest in the body—and, in the sense that I intend, these interests are incompatible. (See the discussion in Chapter 2.) Normal desire is an inter-personal emotion. Its aim is a free and mutual surrender, which is also a uniting of two individuals, of you and me—through our bodies, certainly, but not merely as our bodies. Normal desire is a person to person response, one that seeks the selfhood that it gives. Objects can be substituted for each other, subjects not. Subjects, as Kant persuasively argued, are free individuals; their non-substitutability belongs to what they essentially are. Pornography, like slavery, is a denial of the human subject, a way of negating the moral demand that free beings must treat each other as ends in themselves.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

“Kant also believed that natural beauty is a ‘symbol’ of morality, and suggested that people who take a real interest in natural beauty thereby show that they possess the germ of a morally good disposition—of a ‘good will’. His argument for this opinion is elusive: but it is an opinion that he shared with other eighteenth-century writers, including Samuel Johnson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And it is an opinion to which we are instinctively drawn, hard though it is to mount an a priori argument in its favour.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

“Our word ‘poetry’ comes from Greek poiēsis, the skill of making things;”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

“Our need for beauty is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people. It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition, as free individuals, seeking our place in a shared and public world. We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves. The experience of beauty guides us along this second path: it tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions
as a place fit for the lives of beings like us.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty

“The old morality, which told us that selling the body is incompatible with giving the self, touched on a truth. Sexual feeling is not a sensation that can be turned on and off at will: it is a tribute from one self to another and—at its height— an incandescent revelation of what you are. To treat it as a commodity, that can be bought and sold like any other, is to damage both present self and future other. The condemnation of prostitution was not just puritan bigotry; it was a recognition of a profound truth, which is that you and your body are not two things but one, and by selling the body you harden the soul. And that which is true of prostitution is true of pornography too. It is not a tribute to human beauty but a desecration of it.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty

“Moreover, since it is in the nature of tastes to differ, how can a standard erected by one person’s taste be used to cast judgement on another’s? How, for example, can we pretend that one type of music is superior or inferior to another when comparative judgements merely reflect the taste of the one who makes them?”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

“Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane: it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring chilling.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty

“The moral motive comes from setting all my interests aside, and addressing the question before me by appealing to reason alone—and that means appealing to considerations that any rational being would be equally able to accept. From that posture of disinterested enquiry we are led inexorably, Kant thought, to the categorical imperative, which tells us to act only on that maxim which we can will as a law for all rational beings.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

“This is how Kant explains the moral motive. When I ask myself not what I want to do, but what I ought to do, then I stand back from myself, and put myself in the position of an impartial judge.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

“Art, as we have known it, stands on the threshold of the transcendental. It points beyond this world of accidental and disconnected things to another realm, in which human life is endowed with an emotional logic that makes suffering noble and love worthwhile. Nobody who is alert to beauty, therefore, is without the concept of redemption – of a final transcendence of mortal disorder into a ‘kingdom of ends.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty

“One cure for the pain of desecration is the move towards total PROFANATION: in other words, to wipe out all vestiges of sanctity from the once worshipped object, to make it merely a thing OF the world, and not just a thing IN the world, something that is nothing over and above the substitutes that can at any time replace it. That is what we see in the spreading addiction to pornography - a profanation that removes the sexual bond entirely from the realm of intrinsic values. It involves wiping out one area in which the idea of the beautiful had taken root, so as to protect ourselves from the possibility of loving it and therefore losing it.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty

“The pursuit of absolute or ideal beauty may distract us from the more urgent business of getting things right. It is well and good for philosophers, poets and theologians to point towards beauty in its highest form. But for most of us it is far more important to achieve order in the things surrounding us, and to ensure that the eyes, the ears and the sense of fittingness are not repeatedly offended.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

“I propose that, rather than emphasize the ‘immediate’, ‘sensory’, ‘intuitive’ character of the experience of beauty, we consider instead the way in which an object comes before us, in the experience of beauty.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

“Kitsch deprives feeling of its cost, and therefore of its reality; desecration augments the cost of feeling, and so frightens us away from it. The remedy for both states of mind is suggested by the thing that they each deny, which is sacrifice. Konstanze and Belmonte in Mozart’s opera are ready to sacrifice themselves for each other, and this readiness is the proof of their love: all the beauties of the opera arise from the constant presentation of this proof. The deaths that occur in real tragedies are bearable to us because we see them under the aspect of sacrifice. The tragic hero is both self-sacrificed and a sacrificial victim; and the awe that we feel at his death is in some way redemptive, a proof that his life was worthwhile. Love and affection between people is real only to the extent that it prepares the way for sacrifice—whether the petits soins that bind Marcel to Saint Loup, or the proof offered by Alcestis, who dies for her husband. Sacrifice is the core of virtue, the origin of meaning and the true theme of high art.

Sacrifice can be avoided, and kitsch is the great lie that we can both avoid it and retain its comforts. Sacrifice can also be made meaningless by desecration. But, when sacrifice is present and respected, life redeems itself; it becomes an object of contemplation, something that ‘bears looking at’, and which attracts our admiration and our love. This connection between sacrifice and love is presented in the rituals and stories of religion. It is also the recurring theme of art. When, in the carnage of the Great War, poets tried to make sense of the destruction that lay all around, it was in full consciousness that kitsch merely compounded the fault. Their effort was not to deny the horror, but to find a way of seeing it in sacrificial terms. From this effort were born the war poems of Wilfred Owen and, much later, the War Requiem of Benjamin Britten.

So there, if we can find our way to it, is the remedy. It is a remedy that cannot be achieved through art alone. In the words of Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’: ‘you must change your life’. Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter; and we live that way because we have lost the habit of sacrifice and are striving always to avoid it. The false art of our time, mired in kitsch and desecration, is one sign of this.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty

“Those ‘higher’ forms of beauty which are exemplified by art . . . For people who don’t know these works of art the world is a different—and maybe less interesting—place . . . It is what art, and only art, can give.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty

“Art, as we have known it, stands on the threshold of the transcendental. It points beyond this world of accidental and disconnected things to another realm, in which human life is endowed with an emotional logic that makes suffering noble and love worthwhile. Nobody who is alert to beauty, therefore, is without the concept of redemption—of a final transcendence of mortal disorder into a ‘kingdom of ends’. (p. 156)”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty

“Such questions point us to the peculiarity of sacred things, that they do not admit of substitutes. There are not degrees of profanation, but a single and unified thing that profanation is, which is putting a substitute in place of that for which there are no substitutes—the ‘I am that I am’ that is uniquely itself, and which must be worshipped for the thing that it is and not as a means to an end that could be achieved in some other way or through some rival deity. Idolatry is the paradigm profanation, since it admits into the realm of worship the idea of a currency. You can trade in idols, swap them around, try out new versions, see which one responds best to prayer, and which one strikes the best bargains. And all this is a profanation, since it involves trading that which cannot be traded without ceasing to be, which is the sacred object itself.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty

“Metaphors make connections with are not contained in the fabric of reality but created by our own associative powers. The important question about a metaphor is not what property it stands for, but what experience it suggests.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty