#beauty

To an even moderately sophisticated and well-read person it should come as no surprise that any religion at all has its hidden as well as its obvious beauties and is capable of profound and impressive interpretations. What is deeply objectionable about most of these interpretations is that they allow the believer to say Yes while evading any No. ↗

— Walter Kaufmann

#religion #theology #beauty

Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain, and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as creeks will. The creeks are all the world with all its simulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home. ↗

— Anne Dillard

#pilgrim-at-tinker-creek #beauty

I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion,' he resumed presently. 'They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster. ↗

— Saki

#beauty

When I was a child, Mama had the best voice of all the members of the church. She had loved to sing. Her words had soared like an angel's over the swells of the organ. In fact, I now suspected, her entire theology had been taken from the hymnal. ↗

— Siri Mitchell

#hymns #music #religion #singing #beauty

Long hair will make thee look dreafully to thine enemies, and manly to thy friends: it is, in peace, an ornament; in war, a strong helmet; it... deadens the leaden thump of a bullet: in winter, it is a warm nightcap; in summer, a cooling fan of feathers. ↗

— Thomas Dekker

#hair #humor #beauty

You ask me why I don't speak Not a word at will But write so much worth well over a mill' Well I value words like I value kisses A sober one, a closer one penetrates the heart Darling it's how it mends it ↗

— Criss Jami

#beauty #hearts #kissing #love #lyrics

It's hard to imagine a place like that really exists. People have been judging me my whole life. ↗

— Kami Garcia

#beautiful-darkness #eathan-wate #john #kami-garcia #lena

It wasn’t because you weren’t beautiful, talented, funny, creative or had everything in common. It was because some men like plain, old, boring, vanilla ice cream. It’s predictable and a safe choice. Confident and adventurous men prefer the complexity and layers of a sundae, even the ones sprinkled with a little bit of nuts on top. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#humor #men #relationships #sarcasim #beauty

Alas ! How few of Nature's faces are left alone to gladden us with their beauty ! The cares, and sorrows, and the hungerings, of the world, change them as they change hearts; and it is only when those passions sleep, and have lost their hold for ever, that the troubled clouds pass off, and leave Heaven's surface clear. It is a common thing for the countenances of the dead, even in that fixed and rigid state, to subside into the long-forgotten expression of sleeping infancy, and settle into the very look of early life; so calm, so peaceful, do they grow again, that those who knew them in their happy childhood, kneel by the coffin's side in awe, and see the Angel even upon earth. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#beauty

Female knowledge of objectification usually stops at a necessary but superficial understanding: beauty is rewarded and lack of beauty is punished. The punishments are understood as personal misfortune; they are not seem as systematic, institutional, or historical. Women do not understand that they are also punished through sexual use for being beautiful; and women do not understand the lengths to which men go to protect themselves and their society from contamination by ugly women who do not induce a lustful desire to punish, violate, or destroy, though men manage to punish, violate, or destroy these women anyway. ↗

— Andrea Dworkin

#sexual-objectification #beauty