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One would think that the mere shortness of life would be a reminder that to destroy beauty is to destroy one’s own self too.

— Edgar Pangborn A Mirror for Observers (1954)

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Beauty

More quotes by Edgar Pangborn

I learned some years back that human nature is volatile stuff in a world full of lighted matches.

A Mirror for Observers (1954)

If you’re interested in ethics, you could do worse than think in terms of geological time.

A Mirror for Observers (1954)

One who can define kindness only as the absence of cruelty has surely not begun to understand the nature of either.

Good Neighbors and Other Strangers (1972)

I notice men themselves have never invented a god capable of understanding them.

A Mirror for Observers (1954)

In politics, wishful thinking just gives the wolves a license to howl.

A Mirror for Observers (1954)

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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: Edgar Pangborn (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.