Traditional Quotes and Symbols
Beauty is a crystallization of some aspect of universal joy; it is something limitless expressed by means of a limit.
Beauty is a reflection of divine bliss and, since God is Truth, the reflection of His bliss will be that mixture of happiness and truth which is to be found in all beauty.
Forms allow of a direct, 'plastic' assimilation of the truths - or of the realities - of the spirit. The geometry of the symbol is steeped in beauty, which in its turn and in its own way is also a symbol. The perfect form is that in which truth is incarnate in the rigour of the symbolical formulation and in the purity and intelligence of the style.
Beauty mirrors happiness and truth. Without the element of 'happiness' there remains only bare form - geometrical, rhythmical or other - and without the element of 'truth' there remains only a wholly subjective enjoyment or, it might be said, luxury. Beauty stands between abstract form and blind pleasure, or rather so combines them as to imbue veridical form with pleasure and veridical pleasure with form.
Beauty is a crystallization of some aspect of universal joy; it is something limitless expressed by means of a limit.
Beauty is in one sense always more than it gives, but in another sense it always gives more than it is. In the first sense the essence shows as appearance; in the second the appearance communicates the essence.
Beauty is always beyond compare; no perfect beauty is more beautiful than another perfect beauty. One may prefer this beauty to that, but this is a matter of personal affinity or of complementary relationship and not of pure aesthetics. Human beauty, for instance, can be found in each of the major races, yet normally a man prefers some type of beauty in his own race rather than in another; inversely, sometimes affinities between qualitative and universal human types show themselves to be stronger than racial affinities.
Like every other kind of beauty artistic beauty is objective, and so can be discovered by intelligence, not by "taste". Taste is indeed legitimate, but only to the same extent as individual peculiarities are legitimate, that is, just in so far as these peculiarities translate positive aspects of some human norm.
Different tastes should be derived from pure aesthetic and should be of equal validity, just as are the different ways in which the eye sees things. Myopia and blindness are certainly not different ways of seeing - they are merely defects of vision.
In beauty man ’realizes’, passively in his perception and externally in his production of it, that which he should himself 'be' after an active or inward fashion.
When man surrounds himself with the ineptitudes of an art that has gone astray how can he still 'see' what he should 'be'? He runs the risk of 'being' what he 'sees' and assimilating the errors suggested by the erroneous forms among which he lives.
Modern satanism is manifested, no doubt in a very external way but in the most directly tangible way and in the way which makes the greatest inroads, in the unintelligible ugliness of forms. 'Abstracted' people, who never 'see' things, none the less allow themselves to be influenced in their general mental outlook by the forms around them to which they sometimes, with astonishing superficiality, deny all importance, just as though traditional civilizations did not unanimously proclaim the contrary. In this connection the spiritual aesthetics of some of the great contemplatives will be recalled as evidence that, even in a world of normal forms, the sense of the beautiful may acquire a special spiritual importance.
Beauty is a crystallization of some aspect of universal joy; it is something limitless expressed by means of a limit.
Beauty is a reflection of divine bliss and, since God is Truth, the reflection of His bliss will be that mixture of happiness and truth which is to be found in all beauty.
Forms allow of a direct, 'plastic' assimilation of the truths - or of the realities - of the spirit. The geometry of the symbol is steeped in beauty, which in its turn and in its own way is also a symbol. The perfect form is that in which truth is incarnate in the rigour of the symbolical formulation and in the purity and intelligence of the style.
Beauty mirrors happiness and truth. Without the element of 'happiness' there remains only bare form - geometrical, rhythmical or other - and without the element of 'truth' there remains only a wholly subjective enjoyment or, it might be said, luxury. Beauty stands between abstract form and blind pleasure, or rather so combines them as to imbue veridical form with pleasure and veridical pleasure with form.
Beauty is a crystallization of some aspect of universal joy; it is something limitless expressed by means of a limit.
Beauty is in one sense always more than it gives, but in another sense it always gives more than it is. In the first sense the essence shows as appearance; in the second the appearance communicates the essence.
Beauty is always beyond compare; no perfect beauty is more beautiful than another perfect beauty. One may prefer this beauty to that, but this is a matter of personal affinity or of complementary relationship and not of pure aesthetics. Human beauty, for instance, can be found in each of the major races, yet normally a man prefers some type of beauty in his own race rather than in another; inversely, sometimes affinities between qualitative and universal human types show themselves to be stronger than racial affinities.
Like every other kind of beauty artistic beauty is objective, and so can be discovered by intelligence, not by "taste". Taste is indeed legitimate, but only to the same extent as individual peculiarities are legitimate, that is, just in so far as these peculiarities translate positive aspects of some human norm.
Different tastes should be derived from pure aesthetic and should be of equal validity, just as are the different ways in which the eye sees things. Myopia and blindness are certainly not different ways of seeing - they are merely defects of vision.
In beauty man ’realizes’, passively in his perception and externally in his production of it, that which he should himself 'be' after an active or inward fashion.
When man surrounds himself with the ineptitudes of an art that has gone astray how can he still 'see' what he should 'be'? He runs the risk of 'being' what he 'sees' and assimilating the errors suggested by the erroneous forms among which he lives.
Modern satanism is manifested, no doubt in a very external way but in the most directly tangible way and in the way which makes the greatest inroads, in the unintelligible ugliness of forms. 'Abstracted' people, who never 'see' things, none the less allow themselves to be influenced in their general mental outlook by the forms around them to which they sometimes, with astonishing superficiality, deny all importance, just as though traditional civilizations did not unanimously proclaim the contrary. In this connection the spiritual aesthetics of some of the great contemplatives will be recalled as evidence that, even in a world of normal forms, the sense of the beautiful may acquire a special spiritual importance.