Goldwin Smith Quotes

Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church.

The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.

What is beauty, anyway? It's more than something pleasant looking. If it doesn't stop us in our tracks and make us unable to move for a moment, unable to put into words what's closing off the breath in our throats, then maybe it's pretty, but it probably isn't beauty.

Seeing that picture, for me, was like Chartres Cathedral.

But I feel truly wowed by the architecture and the meaning of the architecture if you get lost in it and think about the man hours in the smallest little chapel, and the love involved. God it's fantastic.

The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?

Not even the most secular among us can fail to be uplifted by Christianity's architectural legacy - the great cathedrals. These immense and glorious buildings were erected in an era of constricted horizons, both in time and in space.

We also maintain - again with perfect truth - that mystery is more than half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through the imagination.

The artistic part of us all - I think that the easiest way to appreciate this - is through architecture. Architecture is very impressive; the beauty of buildings, temples.

I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.

I like the aesthetics of the Church.

It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.

Awaken a feeling that our ancient buildings are not mere ecclesiastical toys, but sacred monuments of the nation's growth and hope.

Think about what happens when architecture becomes ruins. All you have left are some little columns on a cliff, but it's still such an overwhelming experience that you could say architecture is that which makes ruins beautiful.

I visited Notre Dame at 11 in the morning and the sun was entering through the south rose window, it was so impressive. This is when architecture can be king and give people sensations, like music.

When I went to Europe a few years ago, I felt very at home there, and I loved standing in Notre Dame and looking at all the gargoyles on the outside of that building and realizing that, as scary and frightening as they were, what I was looking at was something that was built to the glory of God.

We call beauty that which supplies us with a particular pleasure.

A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.

Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness.

When authors and critics talk of the sublime, they see not how nearly it borders on the ridiculous.

Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.

The hand that rounded Peter's dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity; Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew: The conscious stone to beauty grew.

a perfect piece of architecture kindles that aimless reverie, which bears the soul we know not whither.

No facts, however indubitably detected, no effort of reason, however magnificently maintained, can prove that Bach's music is beautiful.