Quote of the Day (William Butler Yeats, on ‘The Innocent and the Beautiful’)

“The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time.”—Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet-playwright William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz,” originally published in 1927, reprinted in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, edited by Richard Finneran (1989)

Quote of the Day (John Green, on Seeing ‘The Beauty of the World As Young People Do’)

“We need to put down our armor of cynicism and irony and thinking that we know about everything that matters. We need to try to grapple with the beauty of the world as young people do: in an open, vulnerable way. It’s cheesy as all get out, but… when you’re lying down with your friends under a big sky at night and you’re looking at the stars and you’re conscious of how large the universe is, that’s a borderline sacred experience. If you lose that in adulthood, you’ve lost something really important.”— Young-adult novelist, vlogger, philanthropist, and philanthropist John Green quoted by David Marchese, “The Interview: John Green Knows That No One Really Loves You on the Internet,” The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Nov. 30, 2025

(The image of John Green that accompanies this post, which was taken on Nov. 19, 2024, comes from “Let's Talk about Money” on YouTube.)

Quote of the Day (Joseph Addison, on Beauty)

“There is nothing that makes its way more directly to the Soul than Beauty, which immediately diffuses a secret satisfaction and complacency through the imagination, and gives a finishing to any thing that is Great or Uncommon.” —English essayist and playwright Joseph Addison (1672-1719), Spectator 412, June 23, 1712

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Mary Oliver, on ‘The Piece of God That Is Inside Each of Us’)

“Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful 
is the piece of God that is inside each of us.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019), “Franz Marc's Blue Horses,” in Blue Horses: Poems (2014)

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on ‘Beauty Visible to Us in the Landscape’)

“Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them; for there is no power to see in the eye itself, any more than in any other jelly. We do not realize how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. The greater part of the phenomena of Nature are for this reason concealed from us all our lives. The gardener sees only the gardener's garden. Here, too, as in political economy, the supply answers to the demand. Nature does not cast pearls before swine. There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate,—not a grain more.”—American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), “Autumnal Tints,” The Atlantic, October 1862

I took the image accompanying this post in late October 2008.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Gerard Manley Hopkins, on Beauty From God)

“Glory be to God for dappled things—
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
       For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
       And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
 
“All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
      Praise Him.”—English Jesuit and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), “Pied Beauty”

Quote of the Day (Toni Morrison, on Beauty as ‘What We Were Born For’)

“I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. I don’t think it’s a privilege or an indulgence, it’s not even a quest. I think it’s almost like knowledge, which is to say, it’s what we were born for.”—American novelist and Nobel Literature laureate Toni Morrison (1931-2019), interviewed by Claudia Brodsky Lacour, The Paris Review Podcast, Episode 13: “Before the Light,” Podcast Season 2, Oct. 23, 2019

The image accompanying this post of Toni Morrison was taken on Mar. 28, 2013 at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. 

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Thomas Aquinas, on Goodness and Beauty)

“The beautiful is the same as the good, and they differ in aspect only. For since good is what all seek, the notion of good is that which calms the desire; while the notion of the beautiful is that which calms the desire, by being seen or known. Consequently those senses chiefly regard the beautiful, which are the most cognitive, viz. sight and hearing, as ministering to reason; for we speak of beautiful sights and beautiful sounds. But in reference to the other objects of the other senses, we do not use the expression ‘beautiful,’ for we do not speak of beautiful tastes, and beautiful odors. Thus it is evident that beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty: so that ‘good’ means that which simply pleases the appetite; while the ‘beautiful’ is something pleasant to apprehend.”— St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) [Angelic] Doctor of the Church, Summa Theologiae (1485)

Quote of the Day (Leo Tolstoy, on Smiles and Beauty)

“It seems to me that what we call beauty in a face lies in the smile: if the smile heightens the charm of the face, the face is a beautiful one; if it does not alter it, the face is ordinary, and if it is spoilt by a smile, it is ugly.” ― Russian novelist Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (1856)

I had a really hard time coming up with an image associated with Leo Tolstoy that would epitomize what he was talking about in this quote.

The problem was this: no Tolstoy character, I believe, embodies beauty quite like the title character of Anna Karenina, and especially in the early pages of that novel, which gives a sense of her vivacity with this: “Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light all around her.”

When she has her fateful meeting with the man who becomes her lover, Count Vronsky, the animation in that smile comes to the fore, even as it is at war with the social and moral restraints that eventually doom her:

“In that brief glance Vronsky had time to notice the restrained animation that played over her face and fluttered between her shining eyes and the barely noticeable smile that curved her red lips. It was as if a surplus of something so overflowed her being that it expressed itself beyond her will, now in the brightness of her glance, now in her smile.”

But I came up blank in my online search for an image that would capture the startling illumination of Anna. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the images I saw of the actresses who have played her (including Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh, Jacqueline Bisset, and Keira Knightley) emphasized pensiveness and depression—not a surprise, when you consider the guilt, ostracism and suicide that Anna ultimately endured because of her affair with Vronsky.

So I had to venture far afield to find someone who shows how a smile “heightens the charm of a face”: 1930s Hollywood—or, to be exact, in the case of the photo accompanying this post, the actress Irene Dunne.

This weekend, in reading reviews about the new documentary about the personal and creative partnership of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, it struck me that Ethan Hawke was partly motivated in creating this tribute because younger viewers already had little sense of what this couple meant.

I’m afraid that’s even more the case with Dunne, whose heyday occurred in the 1930s and 1940s, before the use of color became commonplace in film. Consequently, at least a couple of generations of movie fans will not even bother to sample the classic films in which she appeared.

What a pity. As I discussed in this prior post, Dunne was a versatile actress as adept in musicals as in dark dramas.

But she glowed especially in the screwball comedy genre, in films like The Awful Truth, My Favorite Wife and Theodora Goes Wild, where her smile could be marvelously adaptable: loving, understanding, or just radiant with unbounded joy. She was well worth the winning in these films for the likes of onscreen partners Cary Grant and Melvyn Douglas.

Particularly in his later years, when he became increasingly consumed with his spiritual quest and his own marriage deteriorated, Tolstoy himself was given very little to smiling.

But, in his youth and early middle age, he understood concretely that a smile made all the difference in beauty—marring a face when twisted by forces of destruction and evil, but heightening it if filled with inner grace.

Irene Dunne epitomized grace. If you ever meet someone with a similar life force, don’t take for granted how much your life has been enriched by that encounter. The memory of a smile can linger a lifetime.

Quote of the Day (Ralph Waldo Emerson, on Beauty)

“Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, — there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.”— American philosopher, essayist, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), “The Poet,” in Essays: Second Series (1844)

Quote of the Day (Virginia Woolf, on ‘The Beauty of the World’)

“The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.” —English novelist-essayist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), A Room of One’s Own (1929)

Quote of the Day (Mindy Kaling, on Her Most Inspirational Beauty Icon)

“Who is the beauty icon that inspires you the most? Is it Sophia Loren? Audrey Hepburn? Mine is Nosferatu, because that vampire taught me my number-one and number-two favorite beauty tricks of all time: avoid the sun at all costs and always try to appear shrouded in shadows.”—Actress-writer Mindy Kaling, Why Not Me? (2015)

Well, different strokes for different folks, I suppose. But you must admit that this “fashion icon’s” nails are super high maintenance, don’t you think?

(The image accompanying this post is from the 1979 remake of Nosferatu the Vampyre, starring Klaus Kinski as the title character.)

Quote of the Day (Albert Camus, on Beauty)

“Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.”—French novelist-playwright-essayist and Nobel Literature laureate Albert Camus (1913-1960), The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, translated by Justin O'Brien (1942)

Quote of the Day (Eve Babitz, on Teen Daughters of the Hollywood Elite)

“When they reach the age of 15 and their beauty arrives, it's very exciting—like coming into an inheritance. And, as with inheritances, it's fun to be around when they first come into the money and watch how they spend it and on what.” —Memoirist-artist Eve Babitz, on daughters of the Hollywood elite, in Eve’s Hollywood (1974)

Quote of the Day (Jean Kerr, on Beauty ‘Nonsense’)

“I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?” —Irish-American humorist-playwright Jean Kerr (1922-2003), The Snake Has All the Lines (1960)