Beauty

When contemplating the property beauty, as with knowledge, it turns out to be very difficult to provide an uncontentious analysis. Because of its many different conceptions and dimensions, the full value of beauty is surprisingly hard to capture. To that end, below is a list of quotations to help sketch a definition of the property beauty.

“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”
– Confucius

“The voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

“Beauty awakens the soul to act.”
– Dante Alighieri

“Beauty is not caused. It is.”
– Emily Dickinson

“Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.”
– Khalil Gibran

“Whatever the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth whether it existed before or not.”
– John Keats

“There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.”
– Edgar Allan Poe

“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”
– David Hume

“Beauty is a form of Genius – is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.”
– Oscar Wilde

“Beauty, to me, is about being comfortable in your own skin. That, or a kick-ass red lipstick.”
– Gwyneth Paltrow

“Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.”
– Anne Frank

See more: Approximations

Dante’s Divine Comedy‏

The Divina Comedia (Divine Comedy) is an epic poem written by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. The poem describes Dante’s trip through the afterlife with his companion Virgil. The poem is split in three parts: Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise, or Heaven).

“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

Since it is not exactly funny, it is in no modern sense of the word a comedy. A comedia at the time simply meant the story would end well.

The journey lasts for three days, covering Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday; during the so-called holy week when – or so Christians believe – for some reason Christ journeyed through hell and back to heaven. A journey which according to Christians took three days.

“The more a thing is perfect, the more if feels pleasure and pain.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

One of the things that makes the Divine Comedy special is the fact that god, as a character, is the most distant shell that surrounds the geocentric universe. However, once Dante travels almost to that outside point, he converges from an outside sphere to a god who is at the very centre of that sphere.

“In the midst of my days I shall go to the gates of the nether region”.
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

Another curiosity is Dante and his companion Virgil’s meeting with the devil; at the end of their journey through The Inferno, Virgil and Dante encounter Satan at find him feasting on the bodies of Brutus, Cassius, Judas.

“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in great moral crises maintain their neutrality.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy