Advertising keeps Gaia free! Interested in sponsoring us?
Truth is to be found in ugliness as well as beauty, in feeling as well as thought, and in sadness as well as happiness. (Vienna Art Exhibition)
God works in mysterious ways. Things may look good outwardly, but there may be evil contained inside. Let no one be deluded by pride that he himself has conceived good ideas or done good deeds. If everything were as it seemed, the Prophet would not have cried out with such illuminated and illuminating perspicacity, "Show me things as they are! You make things appear beautiful when in reality they are ugly; You make things appear ugly when in reality they are beautiful. Show us therefore each thing as it is lest we fall into a snare and be ever errant.
[Beauty is] "Perfection of rhythm, balanced perfection of rhythm. Everything in Nature is expressed by rhythmic waves of light. Every thought and action is a light-wave of thought and action. If one interprets the God within one, one's thoughts and actions must be balanced rhythmic waves. Ugliness, fears, failures and diseases arise from unbalanced thoughts and actions. Therefore think beauty always if one desire vitality of body and happiness."
A warrior doesn't know remorse for anything he has done, because to isolate one's acts as being mean, or ugly, or evil is to place an unwarranted importance on the self.
"Mr. Churchill, you're drunk!" Yes, I am; and you are ugly. But tomorrow, I shall be sober.
Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
Gardening is a luxury occupation: an ornament, not a necessity, of life. . . . Fortunate gardener, who may preoccupy himself solely with beauty in these difficult and ugly days! He is one of the few people left in this distressful world to carry on the tradition of elegance and charm. A useless member of society, considered in terms of economics, he must not be denied his rightful place. He deserves to share it, however humbly, with the painter and poet.
Once you are real, you can't be ugly . . . except to those who don't understand.
Long live the weeds that overwhelm My narrow vegetable realm! The bitter rock, the barren soil That force the son of man to toil; All things unholy, marred by curse, The ugly of the universe.
Did that myth at the heart of all the fairy tales her mother had told her, that part about happily ever after, ever really work out that way? How many children around the galaxy had been given that pretty picture, had swallowed it entire, only to grow up and find that reality was not so simple, not so beautiful, not so easy? The story didn't end when the brave princess killed the wicked queen and rescued the prince. That, she was learning, was the easy part. The hard part came when the guns were cleaned and reholstered, the bodies of the villains cremated, and the day-to-day business of life reared its ugly cobra's head and grinned down at you. When your prince had doubts you couldn't answer for him, when you had doubts he could only shrug at, that, that was the hard part. That was the part the stories hadn't addressed.
The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.
Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.
One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom anpther's folly.
I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
As for garden photographers, how differently they see things. With what ease the camera seems to compose a picture of great beauty with its discriminating lens. The naked eye can't censor some ugly sight on the periphery of vision; the photographer takes the perfect shot and picks for us just what we need to see.
Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse. The true with the false and the false with the true.
What is REAL? asked the Rabbit one day. Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle? Real isn't how you are made, said the Skin Horse. It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with but really loves you, then you become real. Does it hurt? asked the Rabbit. Sometimes, said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. When you are Real you don't mind being hurt. Does it happen all at once like being wound up, he asked, or bit by bit? It doesn't happen all at once, said the Skin Horse. You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out, and you get loose in the joints, and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.
Upon a day Beauty and Ugliness met on the shore of a sea. And they said to one another, "Let us bathe in the sea." Then they disrobed and swam in the waters. And after a while Ugliness came back to shore and garmented himself with the garments of Beauty and walked his way. And Beauty too came out of the sea, and found not her raiment, and she was too shy to be naked, therefore she dressed herself with the raiment of Ugliness. And Beauty walked her way. And to this very day men and women mistake the one for the other. Yet some there are who have beheld the face of Beauty, and they know her notwithstanding her garments. And some there be who know the face of Ugliness, and the cloth conceals him not from their eyes.
Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.
An ugly sight, a man who is afraid.
The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
Mathematics has beauties of its own - a symmetry and proportion in its results, a lack of superfluity, an exact adaptation of means to ends, which is exceedingly remarkable and to be found only in the works of the greatest beauty. When this subject is properly . . . presented, the mental emotion should be that of enjoyment of beauty, not that of repulsion from the ugly and the unpleasant.
The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Absence of gratitude is the mark of the narrow, uneducated mind. It bespeaks a lack of knowledge and the ignorance of self-sufficiency. It expresses itself in ugly egotism and frequently in wanton mischief. We have seen our beaches, our parks, our forests littered with ugly refuse by those who evidently have no appreciation for their beauty. I have driven through thousands of acres of blackened land scourged by a fire evidently set by a careless smoker whose only concern had been the selfish pleasure gained from a cigarette.
The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colors or the words must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics.
Life is so generous a giver, but we, judging its gifts by the covering, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering and you will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love, by wisdom, with power.
Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means -one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.
Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity, and beauty as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness, and ugliness.
