Beauty lies at the heart of the tea ceremony. Each object used must be beautiful. Special cups are made for this ceremony. Even to look on these cups is to be brought into a wider, calmer realm of the self.
The tea master Okakura KaKuzo has said that beauty evokes harmony and the mystery of mutual charity... . All that we call beautiful is a kind of vessel, like love, that holds what we know.
Who can afford to live without beauty?
Beauty fills us with passion;
it graces us with joy and lights up our existence.
A landscape, a piece of music, a film, a dance –
suddenly all dreariness is gone,
we are left bewitched and dazzled.
If we get lost in dark despair,
beauty takes us back to Center.
A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.
BEAUTY: bountiful blessings of the Beloved ...
praise, humility, gratitude,
our response.
Beauty is before me
And beauty is behind me
Above and below me hovers the beautiful
I am surrounded by it
I am immersed in it
In my youth I am aware of it
And in old age I shall walk quietly
The beautiful trail.
Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty
and respect for strength – in search of my
mother's garden, I found my own.
Seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans, however briefly, to the beauty that is an essential part of their innermost being, their true nature. The first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant events in the evolution of human consciousness. The feelings of joy and love are intrinsically connected to that recognition. Without our fully realizing it, flowers would become for us an expression in form of that which is most high, most sacred, and ultimately formless within ourselves.
Beauty is a celebration of is-ness... Beauty is felt in the now, with no if-only's or should-be's or someday-it-might-be's.
To the medieval thinker beauty was not a value independent of others, but rather the radiance of truth, the splendor of ontological perfection, and that quality of things which reflects their origin in God. Light and luminous objects, no less than musical consonance, conveyed an insight into the perfection of the cosmos, and a divination of the Creator.
Perhaps it seems surprising that physicists seek beauty, but in fact they have no choice. As yet there has not been an exception to the rule that the demonstrable solution to any problem will turn out to be an aesthetic solution.