Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

What beauty is, I know not, though it adheres to many things.

Beauty is that little something that fills the whole world, and is contained neither in a single straight nose, a long eyelash, nor a blue mountain. Some see it in a leg of mutton, others in a compound fracture; and to expect others to accept one's own definition of it is as absurd as to expect all humanity to use the same toilet-brush.

Beauty is one of the rare things which does not lead to doubt of God.

If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?

The good is the beautiful.

What one person might see as violent, someone else may see as beautiful. Maybe even art.

Cruelty is not a literary value.

Kant described beauty as a feeling of ungraspability: this is why the beauty experience is beyond concept.

For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.

The good is always beautiful, the beautiful is good!

Beauty has never been an important topic in the writings of the major psychologists. In fact, for Jung, aesthetics is a weak, early stage of development. He follows the Germanic view that ethics is more important than aesthetics, and he draws a stark contrast between the two. Freud may have written about literature a bit, but an aesthetic sensitivity is not part of his psychology.

Beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty: so that "good" means that which simply pleases the appetite; while the "beautiful" is something pleasant to apprehend.

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is taste. Others have the same love in such success that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is art.

Virtue is relative at best, there's nothing worse than a sunset when your driving due West.

There’s a real question as to what beauty is and why it’s important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they’re not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

For he who would proceed aright... should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms... out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another, and that beauty in every form is one and the same.

You want beauty,' said Hercules Poirot. 'Beauty at any price. For me, it is truth. I want always truth.

Beautiful is greater than Good, for it includes the Good.

I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.

...for the object of education is to teach us to love beauty.

We find things beautiful because we recognize them and contrariwise we find things beautiful because their novelty surprises us.

Ethics and aesthetics are one.

I had seen faces in photographs I might have found beautiful had I known even vaguely in what beauty was supposed to consist. And my father's face, on his death-bolster, had seemed to hint at some form of aesthetics relevant to man. But the faces of the living, all grimace and flush, can they be described as objects?

It is only framed in space that beauty blooms; only in space are events, and objects and people unique and significant and therefore beautiful.