Robin McKinley Quotes

Beauty, whether moral or natural, is felt, more properly than perceived.

Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect's task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.

Beauty is one in the universe, and, whatever form it assumes, it always arouses a religious feeling in the hearts of mankind.

The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.

I knew it was beautiful, but knowing something is beautiful and caring about it are two very different things, and I didn't care.

When we see something beautiful it calls up raw, naked emotion and that's an embarrassing situation to be in.

Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.

When we view elevated ideas of Nature, the result of that view is admiration, which is always the cause of pleasure.

It was the sort of beauty you feel so deeply it becomes contagious and somehow makes you feel beautiful too.

Not being able to fully understand God is frustrating but it is ridiculous for us to think we have the right to limit God to something we are capable of comprehending. What a stunted, insignificant god that would be! If my mind is the size of a soda can and God is the size of all the oceans, it would be stupid for me to say He is only the small amount of water I can scoop into my little can. God is so much bigger, so far beyond our time-encased, air/food/sleep-dependent lives.

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.

When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.

Compared with the awesome might and eternal power of the ocean, no human being can fail to be reminded of their own insignificance.

I'm still afraid of things, obviously - we're human. But I like that feeling of being afraid.

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.

Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.

The feeling we experience while we look at a picture is not to be distinguished from the picture or from ourselves. the feeling, picture, and ourselves are united in one mystery.

Vision evokes emotion. There is no such thing as an emotionless vision.

Beauty is no material thing. Beauty cannot be copied. Beauty is the sensation of pleasure on the mind of the seer. No thing is beautiful. But all things await the sensitive and imaginative mind that may be aroused to pleasurable emotion at sight of them. This is beauty.

At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there, it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which return me to life more violently.

religion, like beauty, cannot be experienced in cold blood.

Sometimes, there's so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can't take it. Like my heart's going to cave in.

Look, do you see that poem?' she said suddenly, pointing.

I don't know if I could, like, see a face and know what the face of beauty looks like, but after I've seen it I know if I've felt like it was beauty.