#grandeur

Had you but seen it, I promise you, your high-minded principles would have melted like candle wax. Never would you have wished such beauty away. ↗

— Jennifer Donnelly

#class-struggle #excess #french-revolution #grandeur #louis-xiv

Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hard-wired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon? It doesn't. It's programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other - deform each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway. ↗

— Peter Watts

#geometry #nature #nature-s-grandeur #nature

Among these temples there is one which far surpasses all the rest, whose grandeur of architectural details no human tongue is able to describe; for within its precincts, surrounded by a lofty wall, there is room enough for a town of five hundred families. ↗

— Hernando Cortes

#among #architectural #describe #details #enough

Stars wide of belt often cultivated a gentlemanly grandeur, a groomed refinement that filtered through their fingertips - the dainty fidgets of Hardy's plump digits, Orson Welles performing magic tricks with nimble dexterity, Jackie Gleason lofting a teacup to his lips as if he were Lady Bracknell - or through a fine set of twinkle-toes. ↗

— James Wolcott

#cultivated #dainty #filtered #fine #fingertips

Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur. ↗

— Matthew Arnold

#baldness #bare #full #grandeur #mountain

Any ideal system is its own worst enemy, and as soon as you start to implement these visions of grandeur, they just fall apart and turn into a complete tyranny. ↗

— Ben Nicholson

#apart #complete #enemy #fall #grandeur

The Dark Side of the Moon is a fine album with a textural and conceptual richness that not only invites, but demands involvement. There is a certain grandeur. ↗

— Alan Parsons

#certain #conceptual #dark #dark side #demands

Grandeur and beauty are so very opposite, that you often diminish the one as you increase the other. Variety is most akin to the latter, simplicity to the former. ↗

— William Shenstone

#beauty #diminish #former #grandeur #increase

A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness. ↗

— Jean Genet

#darkness #dream #dreaming #grandeur #long

You sea! I resign myself to you also- I guess what you mean, I behold from the beach your crooked fingers, I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me. We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land, Cushion me soft, rock me billowy drowse, Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you. ↗

— Walt Whitman

#identity #nature-s-grandeur #sea #nature