Skip to content

Christ is a persuasion, a form of evoking desire... Such an account [of Christ] must inevitably make an appeal to beauty.

— David Bentley Hart The Beauty of the Infinite (2003)

Another quote →

Topics

Beauty

More quotes by David Bentley Hart

Beauty crosses every boundary, traverses every series, and so manifests the God who transcends every division.

The Beauty of the Infinite (2003)

Only in play, whether in sport or in art or in other “ahistorical” endeavors of that kind, can we really understand the true nature, the original peacefulness, and the final purpose of creation.

The secret irony pervading these arguments [on objections to the goodness of God] is that they would never have occurred to consciences that had not in some profound way been shaped by the moral universe of a Christian culture.

The Doors of the Sea (2005)

Unless the world is truly set apart from God and possesses a dependent but real liberty of its own analogous to the freedom of God, everything is merely a fragment of divine volition, and God is simply the totality of all that is and all that happens; there is no creation, but only an oddly pantheistic expression of God's unadulterated power.

The Doors of the Sea (2005)

"The final encounter with God, or an encounter with God that would take you beyond doubt, wouldn't have the character of a metaphysical proof."

All David Bentley Hart quotes →

You may also like

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