Evelyn Underhill Quotes

I saw that everything famous and beautiful in the world, if we judge by the descriptions and drawings of writers and artists, always loses when we go to see it and examine it closely.

The singular point of beautiful objects, and people, is that they are experienced not as parts, or ratios between cheekbones and chin, but as wholes. The experience of beauty is a perception, but it is one that mixes up various other sensations and makes them converge in a particular way.

The beautiful is a phenomenon which is never apparent of itself, but is reflected in a thousand different works of the creator.

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.

What we hope for from the artist is help in discovering the significance of a place. In this sense we would choose in most respects for thirty minutes with Edward Hopper’s painting Sunday Morning to thirty minutes on the street that was his subject; with Hopper’s vision we see more.

One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.

I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.

I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

I believe that the very process of looking can make a thing beautiful.

The opening to reality, as it really is, is beauty.

Taste! It doesn't exist. An artist makes beautiful things without being aware of it.

Behind all forms of beauty there is an infinite unity, and this unity, this intrinsic and eternal beauty, the artist is seeking to discern and to make others discern.

Where does beauty begin? Where does it end? Where it ends is where the artist begins.

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.

Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.

It has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision.

Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call sages, and those who act upon it, we call artists.

People are like birds - from a distance, beautiful: from close up, those sharp beaks, those beady little eyes.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.

When I first heard music, I thought it should be very clean, very precise. Something that people could understand, something that was beautiful.

The soul that beholds beauty becomes beautiful.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all!

As the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful; and the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath like space and time, make all matter gay.

The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.