James Russell Lowell Quotes

The human soul is hungry for beauty; we seek it everywhere - in landscape, music, art, clothes, furniture, gardening, companionship, love, religion, and in ourselves. No one would desire not to be beautiful. When we experience the beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming.

The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.

In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.

Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.

Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.

It is shallow people who think beauty is frivolous or excessive. If you are bringing beauty and god, you are enriching the country. Rice feeds the body, books feed the mind, beauty feeds the soul. It is one thing I can really be proud of and stand tall in the world.

Of all the music that reached farthest into heaven, it is the beating of a loving heart.

Art is spiritual.

God comes to us in theater in the way we communicate with each other, whether it be a symphony orchestra, or a wonderful ballet, or a beautiful painting, or a play. It's a way of expressing our humanity.

If buying art is to matter to us deeply, then it has to engage with our emotions and bring something to what one might as well, and with no supernatural associations whatsoever, call our souls.

There are many kinds of truth. But truth communicated by beauty is the only pure one. The only one that touches me in the heart.

Music, for me, is the most sacred of the arts. I say that because music communicates in a way that no other art form can. All great art has a spirit that we recognize and appreciate, but music goes directly to your heart.

The sexual act - separating that from love itself - is centered solely in the body, whereas spirituality is connected to the whole self. Whether it's a female, a taste, or a sound, all these beautiful things affect our self. We are the perceivers of beauty, and that's why sex doesn't quite go far enough. You can go much further with the spiritual.

I want you to know you're in my heart... growing into a beautiful garden.

Beauty is essentially spiritual. The authentic beauty lies in the heart.

The affairs of music ought, somehow, to terminate in the love of the beautiful.

Beauty is a great gift of heaven; not for the purpose of female vanity, but a great gift for one who loves, and wishes to be beloved.

I believe women are too hard on themselves. I believe that when you love someone, she becomes beautiful to you. I believe the eyes see everything through the heart. Nothing in the world feels as good as resting them on someone you love.

Beauty of form affects the mind, but then it must be understood that it is not the mere shell that we admire; we are attracted by the idea that this shell is only a beautiful case adjusted to the shape and value of a still more beautiful pearl within. The perfection of outward loveliness is the soul shining through its crystalline covering.

But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed - because 'Thou mayest.

Oh, talk as we may of beauty as a thing to be chiselled from marble or wrought out on canvas, speculate as we may upon its colors and outlines, what is it but an intellectual abstraction, after all? The heart feels a beauty of another kind; looking through the outward environment, it discovers a deeper and more real love-liness.

For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower; Radiance and odour are not its dower; It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full, It desires what it has not, the beautiful.

O this world is beautiful because of you! To love somebody means that we're closer to God.