Roger Rosenblatt Quotes

Childhood means simplicity. Look at the world with the child's eye - it is very beautiful.

That's why children look so beautiful because they are yet full of hope, full of dreams, and they have not yet known frustration.

A small child has no ambitions, he has no desires. He is so absorbed in the moment - a bird on the wing catches his eye so totally; just a butterfly, its beautiful colors, and he is enchanted; the rainbow in the sky... and he cannot conceive that there can be anything more significant, richer than this rainbow. And the night full of stars, stars beyond stars... Innocence is rich, it is full, it is pure.

The world was beautiful when looked at in this way-without any seeking, so simple, so childlike.

Suddenly I realized that I wanted everything to be as it was when I was younger. When you're young enough, you don't know that you live in a cheap lousy apartment. A cracked chair is nothing other than a chair. A dandelion growing out of a crack in the sidewalk outside your front door is a garden. You could believe that a song your parent was singing in the evening was the most tragic opera in the world. It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you.

I didn't fear old age. I was just becoming increasingly aware of the fact that the only people who said old age was beautiful were usually twenty-three years old.

You do not need to know anything about a plant to know that it is beautiful.

How beautiful the world was when one looked at it, without searching... just looked, simply and innocently.

Wasn't it beautiful when you believed in everything?

Beautiful was this world, looking at it thus, without searching, thus simply, thus childlike.

Most gladly would I give the blood-stained laurel for the first violet which March brings us, the fragrant pledge of the new-fledged year.

A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful-while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.

Beautiful things spoil nothing.

White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light.... They are too pure to have a market value;they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters are they! We never learned meanness of them.

You can remember times when you were a kid, when life looked too doggoned deliciously beautiful to be left alone. So you could feel like that again if you worked at it.

Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty.

Everything is so infinitely simple, so infinitely beautiful.

The beautiful is and remains beautiful though it arouse no emotion whatever, and though there be no one to look at it. In other words, although the beautiful exists for the gratification of an observer, it is independent of him. In this sense music, too, has no aim (object), and the mere fact that this particular art is so closely bound up with our feelings by no means justifies the assumption that its aesthetic principles depend on this union.

I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he's kind of nutty. [...] There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.

In this world, the greatest courage is to drop the mind aside. The bravest man is who can see the world without the barrier of the mind, just as it is. It is tremendously different, utterly beautiful. There is nobody who is inferior and there is nobody who is superior - there are no distinctions.

While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are attracted strongly to Nature. In their reaction to Naturemen appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world Kosmos, Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.

Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.

Every thing is pretty that is young.

In naked beauty more adorn'd, More lovely than Pandora.

I think beauty is a feeling that you get after you've had an experience. It's the way you feel about it that is beautiful.