Up: [[Savour]] Related: [[Appreciation of Beauty]]; [[Quotes - Beauty]] Created: 2025-06-05 Beauty doesn’t mean pretty or sweet. It’s a word that is dismissed now, seen as old-fashioned or saccharine. The ancient Greeks obsessed over it, talked about it all of the time. They defined two kinds: 1) all the parts add up to a harmonious whole. No part could be added or removed without destroying the harmony of the whole. 2) the work allowed the Ideal Form of life to shine through. Plato’s focus. For both kinds, the Greek word for beauty, kalon, was the same word for goodness. Beauty is uplifting. > [!Orbit] [[David Whyte]] in *The Heart Aroused* > Human beings have an intuitive capacity and knowledge…that somewhere at the centre of life is something ineffably and unalterably right and good , and that this ‘rightness’ can be discovered through artistic and spiritual explorations that have been honoured by all the great perennial religious traditions. (p. 293) Beauty needs quiet and patience both to make it and to experience it. The artist has touched a transcendent quality. We feel it and are silenced by it. *Beauty expresses silence,* says painter Ian Roberts in his book *Creative Authenticity*. It’s the depth of the artist’s feeling that we respond to. Subject matter becomes important mostly to the artist; needing subject matter that will engage the depth of feeling. A work’s resonance and truth are what endows it with beauty.