Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

It makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful shirts before.

Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it. The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.

I try to figure out - intellectually, philosophically, psychologically - what the experience of beauty is.

There's a sadness to the human condition that I think music is good for. It gives a counterpoint to the visual beauty, and adds depth to pictures that they wouldn't have if the music wasn't there.

I'm more apt to cry at something beautiful than at something sad.

Your hope is the most beautiful and the saddest in the world.

The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.

Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?

Do you think I’m pretty?” I heard myself ask. Something I couldn’t name flashed across his face. “No. I don’t think you’re pretty. I think you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.

It's a sad and beautiful world.

The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.

Beautiful jewelry, a beautiful room - that's what museums are - a beautiful painting, a beautiful face, it makes you feel good to look at, and that's a beautiful thing.

All truths, not merely ideas, but truthful faces, truthful pictures or songs, are highly beautiful.

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?

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

Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.

Alas, the very name of picture produces a sadness of heart I cannot describe.

I asked her, "Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" She looked at her watch and said, "I'm optimistic." "Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each others as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon." "Why do beautiful songs make you sad?" "Because they aren't true." "Never?" "Nothing is beautiful and true." She smiled, but in a way that wasn't just happy, and said, "You sound just like Dad.

Beauty and sadness always go together. Nature thought beauty too rich to go forth Upon the earth without a meet alloy.

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

Sunset is the saddest light there is.

When you're happy you enjoy the music, but when you're sad you understand the lyrics.

The beautiful is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible.

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

The soul that beholds beauty becomes beautiful.