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Drowned idols swirl like seeds in chaos' wine.
Look, Job! Caught Beauty, held to light, now apes
A good, now evil, thing — the shifting sign
And spectrum of archaic, psychic shapes.

— Philip José Farmer

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Beauty

More quotes by Philip José Farmer

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

Prometheus, I have no Titan's might,
Yet I, too, must each dusk renew my heart,
For daytime's vulture talons tear apart
The tender alcoves built by love at night.

Let's give this entity which you call soul another name. Soul has too many incorrect meanings for humans, too many verbal reverberations, too many contrary definitions.

The Magic Labyrinth (1980)

Of course, I’m only indulging in mankind’s vice of trying to make a symbol out of coincidence.

The Fabulous Riverboat (1971)

A miracle: a chance distribution of events, occurring one time in a billion.

The Fabulous Riverboat (1971)

All Philip José Farmer quotes →

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Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.

Democritus Freeman (1948)

True beauty dwells in deep retreats,
Whose veil is unremoved
Till heart with heart in concord beats,
And the lover is beloved.

William Wordsworth

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.

William Shakespeare The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Philip José Farmer (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.