Isn't it a tremendous enigma and, if we know the reason, almost frightening, that everything is so beautiful? In spite of all the terrible things that are going on. A great unknown has burst into my simple enjoyment of things beautiful, a faint vision of their creator, whom the innocent, created beings glorify with their beauty. Only man can be ugly. Being endowed with free will, he can seclude himself from the glorification. These days one might often think that man would manage to drown out this song of praise with his roaring cannons, with swearing and blaspheming. And yet - this dawned on me last spring - he cannot. And I will try to take the victors' side.

Beauty is the only uncreated thing you can experience apart from God. Beauty is and always is. You are absent. Why are you absent? Again your robot mind is the problem. It will not stay still and you cannot make it stay still. It is your master and it separates you from beauty and God. So to experience beauty, love, truth and peace, or God, your mind has to be stilled.

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos.

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.

Why was nature so beautiful for no reason at all?

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead — his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms — this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.