Know Yourself, Be Yourself

"That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful." ~Edgar Allan Poe 


"Understood in its metaphysical sense, Beauty is one of the manifestations of the Absolute Being. Emanating from the harmonious rays of the Divine plan, it crosses the intellectual plane to shine once again across the natural plane, where it darkens into matter." 
~Jean Delville


 
Our hands imbibe like roots, so I place them on what is beautiful in this world. And I fold them in prayer, and they draw from the heavens, light.  
~St. Francis of Assisi


 "A photograph is a secret about a secret. 
 The more it tells you the less you know." 
~Diane Arbus

“Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.”

—Vasily Kandinsky 

"That which is profound never lends itself to logical explanation: it involves endless mystery." — Soetsu Yanagi

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
― Aristotle

“Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”
― Leonard Bernstein

 

“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”
― Mark Twain

 

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”
― May Sarton