"What greater delight is there than to
behold the earth apparelled with plants as with a robe of embroidered works, set with Orient pearls and garnished with the great diversitie of rare and costly jewels. But these delights are in the outward
senses. The principle delight is in the mind, singularly enriched with the knowledge
of these visible things, setting forth to us the invisible wisdom and admirable workmanship of almighty God."
- John Gerard, 1633, The Herbal
"There is no excellent beauty that
hath not some strangeness in the proportion."
- Francis Bacon
"Beauty deprived of its
proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived
of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light."
- John Ruskin
"All gardeners live in beautiful
places because they make them so."
- Joseph Joubert
"Remember, it is forbidden to
live in a town which has no garden or greenery."
- Kiddushin 4:12
"What humbugs we are, who
pretend to live for Beauty, and never see the Dawn!"
- Logan Pearsall Smith
"The great challenge for the garden
designer is not to make the garden look natural,
but to make the garden so that the people in it will feel natural."
- Lawrence Halprin
"Whatever is in any way beautiful has
its source of beauty in itself, and is complete in itself; praise forms no part of it."
- Marcus Aurelius
"Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old."
- Franz Kafka
"Beauty is the adjustment of all parts
proportionately so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole."
- Leon B. Alberti
"Beauty as we feel it is something
indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said."
- George Santayana
"Exhuberance is Beauty."
- William Blake
"Perfection is achieved, not when
there is nothing more to add,
but when there is nothing left to take away."
- Antoine de Saint Exupery
"In every man's heart there
is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty."
- Christopher Morley
"Better a pearl with
a flaw than a pebble without.
Everything has beauty, but not
everyone sees it."
- Confucius
"Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of
the woods before sunrise."
- George Washington Carver
"The poor need not only bread. The poor
also need beauty."
- Monsignor Hldebrand
"Beauty is the Mistress, the gardener
Her slave.
All beautiful things disappear, and
beauty
is the memory of ideas.
Chrysanthemums in bloom over a carpet of dry leaves - the contrasts and pathos of beauty.
A flower needs roots; beauty of society of
minds."
- Michael P. Garofalo, Pulling
Onions
"Nature is a revelation of God;
Art a revelation of man."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"The artist is the only lover; he
alone has the pure vision of beauty, and love is the vision of the soul when it is permitted to gaze upon immortal beauty."
- Isadora Duncan
"Lord of the far horizons,
Give us the eyes to see
Over the verge of the sundown
The beauty that is to be."
- Bliss Carman
"Life just seems so full of
connections. Most of the time we don't even pay attention to the depth of life. We only
see flat surfaces."
- Colin Neenan
"Beauty is excrescence,
superabundance, random ebulience,
and sheer delightful waste to be enjoyed in its own right."
- Donald Culross Peattie, An Almanac for Moderns
"There is no spot of ground, however
arid, bare or ugly,
that cannot be tamed into such a state as may give an impression of beauty and delight."
- Gertrude Jekyll
"Lord, make us mindful of the little things that grow and
blossom
in these days to make the world beautiful for us."
- W.E.B. du Bois
"Those who contemplate the
beauty of the earth find reserves
of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is a symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring.
There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature--the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter. The lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world...are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of earth, sea and sky and their amazing life."
- Rachel Carson
(1907-1964)
"Always remember the beauty of the
garden, for there is peace."
- Author Unknown
"Our hearts are drunk with a
beauty our eyes could never see."
- George W. Russell
"Not
only in grass fields with green leaf and running brook did this
constant desire find renewal. More deeply still with living human beauty; the perfection of form, the simple fact of forms, ravished and always will ravish me away. In this lies the outcome and end of all the loveliness of sunshine and green leaf, of flowers, pure water and sweet air. This is embodiment and highest expression; the scattered, uncertain, and designless loveliness of tree and sunshine brought to shape. Through this beauty I prayed deepest and longest, and down to this hour. The shape the divine idea of that shape the swelling muscle or the dreamy limb, strong sinew
or curve of bust, Aphrodite or Hercules, it is the same. That I may
have the soul-life, the soul-nature, let the divine beauty bring to me divine soul."
- Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart
“A man should hear a little
music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life,
in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful
implanted in the human soul.”
- Johann Wolfgang Goethe
"It is only necessary to behold the
least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance ... To perceive freshly, with fresh senses is to be inspired."
- Henry David Thoreau
"God is beauty."
- St. Francis of Assisi
"Beauty and folly are
generally companions."
- Baltasar Gracian
"Art consists of limitation. The
most beautiful part of every picture is the frame."
- G. K. Chesterton
"Plainness has its peculiar
temptations quite as much as beauty."
- George Eliot
"It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to
turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know of
wonder and humility."
- Rachel Carson
"Most of us have lost that sense of
unity of biosphere and humanity which would bind and reassure us all with an affirmation of beauty. Most of us do not today believe that whatever the ups and down of detail within our limited experience, the larger whole is primarily beautiful."
- Gregory Bateson
"Had the price of looking
been blindness, I would have looked."
- Ralph Ellison, Battle Royal
"Over fertilized plants may be beautiful but
are otherwise useless, like people whose energies
are devoted so completely to their appearance that there is no other development."
- William Longgood
"It is amazing how complete
is the delusion that beauty is goodness."
- Leo Tolstoy
"Is
it wholly fantastic to admit the possibility that Nature herself strove
toward what we call beauty? Face to face with any one of the
elaborate flowers which man's cultivation has had nothing to do with, it
does not seem fantastic to me. We put survival first. But when
we have a margin of safety left over, we expend it in the search for the
beautiful. Who can say that Nature does not do the same?"
- Joseph
Wood Krutch
"Lord of the far horizons,
Give us the eyes to see:
Over the verge of the sundown,
The beauty that is to be."
- Bliss Carman
"There is something in us that loves
symmetry,
selection, arrangement, as well as wildness and irregularity.
A small garden, accordingly, gives its owner a far greater
opportunity to express himself than a small lawn. The usual
lawn expresses nothing so much a vacancy of mind or an
impious waste of good material; whereas in a garden any man
may be an artist, may experiment with all the subtleties or
simplicities of line, mass, color, and composition, and taste the
god-like joys of the creator."
- H. G. Dwight, Gardens and Gardening,
Atlantic Monthly, 1912
"If you truly love Nature, you will
find beauty everywhere."
- Vincent Van Gogh
"Living Nature, not dull art
Shall plan my ways and rule my Heart."
- John Henry Cardinal Newman
"Grace pours all beauty into
the soul ... The soul means the world."
- Meister Eckhart
"Beautiful nature matters more than beautiful
people."
- Dana Bisbee
"to be, anywhere
so flagrant in desire .
The beauty of holiness
if this it be
is the only beauty
visible in this place
other than the view
and the fresh budding tree."
- William Carlos Williams
Patterson, 1946, Part II
"By plucking her petals,
You do not gather the beauty of the flower."
- Rabindrath Tagore
"The foundations of the world are to
be found, not in the cognitive experience of conscious thought, but in the aesthetic experience of everyday life."
- Alfted North Whitehead
"Remember that the most beautiful
things in the world are the most useless;
peacocks and lilies, for example."
- John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice
"The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Beauty is like summer fruits which
are easy to corrupt and cannot last."
- Frances Bacon
"I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe
turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must
somewhere rest on pure joy!"
- Louise Bogan
"What was any art but a mould in which
to imprison for a moment the shining,
elusive element which is life itself."
- Willa Cather
"It seemed to my friend that the creation of a
landscape-garden offered
to the proper muse the most magnificent of
opportunities. Here indeed
was the fairest field for the display of the
imagination, in the endless
combining of forms of novel beauty."
- Poe
"A garden, the, is a finite place, in
which a gardener (or several gardeners) has created, working with or against nature, a plot whose intention it is to provide pleasure; possibly in the form of beauty, possibly in the form of cabbages - and possibly, beautiful cabbages."
- Abby Adams, The Gardener's Gripe Book
"The ideals which have lighted me on my way and
time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth,
Goodness, and Beauty. . . . The ordinary objects of human endeavour -- property,
outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible."
- Albert Einstein
"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth
find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts."
- Rachel Carson
"My soul can find no staircase to
Heaven
unless it be through Earth's lovliness."
- Michelangelo Buonardo
"I don't like standard
beauty - there is no beauty without strangeness."
- Karl Lagerfeld
"We ordinary people must
forge our own beauty. We must set fire to the greyness of our labor with
the art of our own lives ... What is the essence of this art of living? Of
course, even this art should have beauty as its essence."
- Kenji Miyazawa
"When I am working on a problem I
never think about beauty.
I only think about how to solve the problem.
But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."
- Buckminster Fuller
"Gardens unite artificial and natural beauty, embracing
all the natural elements - water, light, air, growth - and making them elements of art. Every effort devoted to garden design becomes a mirror of the longing for happiness in harmony with nature."
- Carl F. Schroer
"The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one
of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."
- Virginia Woolf
"Remember how in that
communion only, beholding beauty with
the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images
of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a
reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become
the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may."
- Plato, Symposium
"Let me define a garden as the meeting
of raw nature and the human imagination in which both seek the fulfillment of their beauty. Every sign indicates that nature wants us and wishes for collaboration with us, just as we long for nature to be fulfilled in us. If our original state was to live in a garden, as Adam and Eve did, then a garden signals our absolute origins as well as our condition of eternity, while life outside the garden is time and temporality.
- Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life,
p. 96
"Plainness has its peculiar
temptations quite as much as beauty."
- George Eliot
"Novelty is an essential attribute of the beautiful."
- Benjamin Disraeli
"Beauty is not caused. It is."
- Emily Dickinson
"Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God."
- Jean Anouilh
"I do not wish to die--
There is such contingent beauty in life:
The open window on summer mornings
Looking out on gardens and green things growing,
The shadowy cups of roses flowering to themselves--
Images of time and eternity--
Silence in the garden and felt along the walls."
- A. L. Rowse
"If delight may provoke men's labour,
what greater delights is there then to behold the earth as apparelled with plants, as with a robe of imbroidered worke, set with orient pearles, and garnished with great diversitie of rare and costly jewels? . . . The delight is great but the use greater, and joyned often with necessitie."
- John Gerarde
"All the beings of the world
pray," said my Grandad ... "Each living thing gives its life to the beauty of all life,
and that gift is its prayer."
- Douglas Wood,
Grandad's
Prayers of the Earth
"Confronted with the vision of a
beautiful garden,
we see something beautiful about ourselves."
- Jeff Cox
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"We seem to have lost contact with the
earlier, more profound functions of art, which have always had to do with personal and collective empowerment, personal growth, communion with this world, and the search for what lies
beneath and above this world."
- Peter London, No More Second Hand Art
"Tell them dear, that if
eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for being."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Rhodora
"In the Orthodox spiritual
tradition, the ultimate moral question we ask is the following: Is what we are
doing, is what I am doing, beautiful or not?"
- Carolyn Gifford
"Because in particular moments, in the
dusk of a late May evening, when everything glows, when green seems greener than you've ever seen it before, and the roses you planted are beginning to flower, future tasks don't matter, neither do past worries - because you witness a perfect moment of soul-restoring beauty."
- Turning
Earth
"Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be
beauty.
There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail.
- Navajo Song
"A thing of beauty is a job forever."
- Milton Berle
"Beauty in the flesh will
continue to rule the world."
- Florenz Ziegfeld
"For lack of attention a thousand forms of
loveliness elude us every day."
- Evelyn Underhill
"All gardening is landscape
painting."
- Alexander Pope
"With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
With beauty above me and about me, I walk,
It is finished in beauty
It is finished in beauty."
- Navaho Night Chant, Looking Far West
"The phrase "beautiful colour'',
for example, can have a hundred meanings, depending on the occasion on which we use it. Very often the adjectives we use are those applicable to the face of a person. This is the case with "beautiful" and "ugly". Consider how we learn such words.
We do not as children discover the quality of beauty or ugliness in a face and find that
these are qualities a tree has in common with it. The words "beautiful"
and "ugly'' are bound up with the words they modify, and when applied to a face are not the same as when applied to flowers and trees. We have in the latter a similar "game".
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures
on Philosophy
The cottage garden; most for use
designed,
Yet not of beauty destitute.
- Charlotte Smith
"We ascribe beauty to that
which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end;
which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"As one grows older one should grow more expert at finding beauty
in unexpected places, in deserts and even in towns, in ordinary human faces and among wild weeds."
- C. C. Vyvyan
"The teleology of the
Universe is directed to the production of Beauty... The type of Truth required
for the final stretch of Beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation... Apart
from Beauty, Truth is neither good, nor bad... Truth matters because of beauty."
- Alfred North Whitehead
Time and the Art of Living by Robert Grudin, 1997.
Loving Kindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness by Sharon Salzberg, 2003.
Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin, 1981.
Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person by Mary C. Richards, 1989.
"It has been the office of art to
educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"You do not need to
know anything about a plant to know that it is beautiful."
- Montagu Don
"Develop interest in life as you see
it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich,
simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people.
Forget yourself."
- Henry Miller
"As every real estate agent knows, a poor
house in good surroundings will sell for a higher price than a better house in poor surroundings, and in a town they confidently ask 25
percent more rent for a flat with a view of a park that for an identical flat with no view."
- Nan Fairbrother
"Rhythm, symmetry, and a happy
combination of elegance and utility - a blend often desired in later days of hope and struggle - these have been fully
attained, and with them a delight in quiet communion with Nature, expressing as she does the sense of beauty in orderliness."
- Marie Luise Gothein, History of Garden Art, 1928
Commenting on the Egyptian tomb pictures of the home and gardens of the official Meten,
circa 1440 BCE
"Right on to the New Period vineyard arbors were the centre and chief ornament of all
gardens."
"Order is the shape upon which beauty
depends."
- Pearl S. Buck
"I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty
being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable
pancreas?"
- Jean Kerr
"Beauty always promises, but
never gives anything."
- Simone Weil
"If you would have a lovely garden,
you should live a lovely life."
- Shaker saying
"In the creation of a garden, the
architect invites the partnership of the Kingdom of Nature. In a beautiful garden the majesty of nature is ever present, but it is nature reduced to human proportions and thus transformed into the most efficient haven against the aggressiveness of contemporary life."
- Luis Barragán, Mexico
"Beauty is eternity gazing at itself
in a mirror."
- Kahlil Gibran
"It seemed to my friend that the
creation of a landscape-garden offered to the proper muse the most magnificent of opportunities. Here indeed was the fairest field for the display of the imagination, in the endless combining of forms of novel beauty."
- Edgar Allan Poe
"Garden," "park"
and "wood" are thus synonymous in
our times with the ideas of beauty, naturalness and health."
- Tornsten O. Enge
"In order to comprehend the beauty of
a Japanese garden, it is necessary to understand - or at least to learn to understand - the beauty of stone."
- Lafcadio Hearn
"For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread
the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself
as our guide."
- Thomas Mann
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that
is all ye know on Earth,
and all ye need to know."
- John Keats (1795-1821)
"Beauty is the adjustment of all parts proportionately
so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole."
- Leon B. Alberti
"Good nature will always supply the absence of beauty; but
beauty cannot supply the absence of good nature."
- Joseph Addison
"A garden is a lovesome thing, God
wot!"
- T.E. Brown, 1887
"Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and
consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises
out of sex and beauty, is intuition."
- D. H. Lawrence
"Everybody needs beauty as
well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give
strength to body and soul."
- John Muir
"Beauty is momentary in the mind -
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The Body dies; the body's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of Winter, done repenting."
- Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955, Peter Quince and the Clavier
"That which is striking and
beautiful is not always good, but that which is good is always beautiful."
- Ninon de L'Enclos
"Don't underestimate
the therapeutic value of gardening. It's the one area where we can all use our nascent creative talents to make a truly satisfying work of
art.
Every individual, with thought, patience and a large portion of help from
nature, has it in them to create their own private paradise: truly a thing of
beauty and a joy for ever."
- Geoff Hamilton, Paradise
Gardens, 1997
"We have descended into the garden and caught
three hundred slugs.
How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so
lifelike."
- Evelyn Underhill
"Beauty of whatever kind, in its
supreme development,
invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears."
- Edgar Allen Poe
"Never lose an opportunity
of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting - a
wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every
fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I cannot believe that the inscrutable
universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!"
- Louise Bogan
"I think the main culprit is modernity itself.
Modernity and beauty simply don't mix. Pragmatism and an industrial-sized busyness denigrate everything that can't squeeze out of a calculator. And the first thing to die under such circumstances is a passion for beauty. For those trying desperately to jump over moving hurdles, pursuing beauty
is just foolishness. .... We just don't have the
time for poetry; beauty isn't useful, we say, until we're in our eighties, when many finally reflect and realize
that beauty was truly essential to a good life that has now slipped by."
- Douglas Jones, Men Hate Poetry
"It seemed to my friend that the creation of a
landscape-garden offered
to the proper muse the most magnificent of
opportunities. Here indeed
was the fairest field for the display of the
imagination, in the endless
combining of forms of novel beauty."
- Poe
"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."
- Vita Sackville-West, 1892-1962
"In the end, color combinations come down to our personal preferences, which we must discover through observation and experiment."
- Montagu Don
"Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair,
offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to
stretch out over the whole of time."
- Albert Camus
"Death is the mother of beauty."
- Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning, 1915
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is
beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it
too?"
- Douglas Adams
"Ring the bells that still
can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets it."
- Leonard Cohen
"What we call yugen lies within the mind and
cannot be expressed in words. Its quality may be suggested by the sight of a gauzy cloud veiling the moon or by the autumnal mists swathing the scarlet leaves on a mountainside. If one is asked where yugen can be found in
these sights, one cannot say; a man who cannot understand this truth is
quite likely to prefer the sight of the moon shining brightly in a cloudless sky. It is quite impossible to explain
wherein lies the interest or wonder of yugen."
- Shotetsu, in Donald Keene's No: The Classical Theatre of Japan
"Real beauty is my aim."
- Mahatma Gandhi
"Though we travel the world
over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The moment one gives close attention to
anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably
magnificent world in itself."
- Henry Miller
"Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the
Verities and Realities of your Existence.
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty;
For Yesterday is but a Dream."
- Kalidasa
"Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger.
There is really nothing to be said about it.
It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all."
- W. Somerset Maugham
"The first law of a painting and of a
picture on the soil is to be a whole . . . Without principles and without discernment one never attains veritable beauty."
- Edouard André
"Beauty comes as much from the mind as
from the eye."
- Grey Livingston
"The first act of awe, when
man was struck with the beauty or wonder of Nature, was the first spiritual experience."
- Henryk Skolimowski
"It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose,
and the eyes will take care of themselves."
- Robert Louis Stevenson
Recommended Reading
The Spirit of Gardening
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