Dr. Mardy's Quotes of the Week ("Beauty")

March 24—30, 2024 | THIS WEEK: “Beauty”

Opening Line of the Week

It’s hard to imagine a more provocative way to open a book on the nature and importance of beauty in human life. Etcoff—a professor at Harvard Medical School and a clinical psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital—completed the first paragraph of her book in an equally impressive way:

“Asked why people desire physical beauty, Aristotle said, ‘No one that is not blind could ask that question.’ Beauty ensnares hearts, captures minds, and stirs up emotional wildfires. From Plato to pinups, images of human beauty have catered to a limitless desire to see and imagine an ideal human form.”

For nearly 2,000 memorable opening lines from every genre of world literature, go to www.GreatOpeningLines.com.

This Week’s Puzzler

On March 28, 1957, this man died at age 66 in Roslyn Heights, New York. After graduating at the top of his class from Haverford College in 1910, he spent three years at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship before returning to the United States to embark on a career as a journalist, critic, poet, novelist, and playwright. 

In a long and distinguished career, he wrote more than 100 books, including Kitty Foyle (1939), one of the first novels to explore the topic of unwanted pregnancy and abortion. In 1924, he co-founded the Saturday Review of Literature. He was an editor of the 1937 and 1948 editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. He also served for many years as a Book-of-the-Month Club judge. A great Sherlock Holmes fan, he founded “The Baker Street Irregulars,” the most famous of the fictional detectives many fan clubs. He also wrote the introduction to The Complete Sherlock Holmes series, and edited the engaging Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: A Textbook of Friendship (1944). 

This week’s Mystery Man penned memorable observations on countless topics, but in a 1928 essay, he offered one of his very best: 

Who is this person?

What Role Has Beauty Played in Your Life?

Franz X. Winterhalter’s 1843 portrait of Princess Leonilla

The American Heritage Dictionary defines beauty this way:

“A quality or combination of qualities that gives pleasure to the mind or senses and is often associated with properties such as harmony of form or color, proportion, authenticity, and originality.”

When people think about the subject of beauty, their minds tend to gravitate toward the human form—as depicted in the portrait above or as represented below in Michelangelo’s David.

While we will be mainly discussing the human form this week, the words beauty and beautiful can be applied to all of life’s most memorable or treasured scenes: dramatic sunsets, awesome mountain vistas, glorious flower arrangements, towering cathedrals, fluttering hummingbirds, majestic bridges and other architectural marvels, magnificent animals like horses or exotic ones like peacocks, a solitary surfer inside a towering wave, and countless other examples.

Bertrand Russell famously applied the term to his profession, writing, “Mathematics rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.” In a 2006 New York Times essay, David Foster Wallace applied it to the sporting world, writing, “Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty.” The term can also be applied to words, as we see routinely with poems, literary passages, great feats of oratory, and, of course, quotations.

The quotation in this week’s Puzzler is not only about beauty, it is also crafted in a beautiful way. When I first came upon it a few decades ago, it immediately touched a nerve in my own heart. As most of you know, I’ve been a quotation lover for many decades, and, every now and then, a particularly beautiful quotation overwhelms me. And that is exactly what happened when I first read the words in every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.

At the time, I had already selected what I regarded as the single best thing ever said on the topic of beauty:

After coming upon the Puzzler quotation, though, I immediately replaced the Addison quotation with my new find. That’s the way it works with lists of “the single best” things. Something is the best until it isn’t.

From the beginning of recorded history, great thinkers have marveled at the pivotal role beauty plays in human affairs. Aristotle famously wrote, “Beauty is a gift of God.” And Plato, Aristotle’s teacher for more than twenty years, offered two remarkable observations on the subject:

In the ancient world, beauty played such an influential role in human affairs that it was regarded as one of the world’s most important virtues, right up there with truth, justice, and goodness. As a result, the formal study of beauty was regarded as a branch of philosophy, and given the name aesthetics.

In the classical view, beauty was regarded as an objective quality that resulted from the presence of certain essential features, including symmetry, harmony, a sense of proportion, and an adherence to specific aesthetic principles. This led ancient thinkers to regard beauty as universal and timeless. It is this belief that inspired John Keats to write:

This view prevailed for a few thousand years, but in the 18th century, as the world’s vast heterogeneity became more and more apparent, a “subjective” view of beauty emerged. Instead of regarding beauty as an objective fact, thinkers all around the world began to describe it as a matter of personal taste or something that reflected the varying standards of different cultures. The philosopher David Hume was one of the first to express this view, writing in a 1739 essay “On the Standard of Taste”:

“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”

Hume’s thought is believed to have inspired the proverbial saying beauty is in the eye of the beholder, first offered by Margaret Wolfe Hungerford in her 1878 novel Molly Bawn. The underlying idea—now almost universally expressed—also found its way into one of my all-time favorite song lyrics, a perfect example of chiasmus from the 1957 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Cinderella”:

In human beings, beauty is often regarded as a precious gift bestowed on especially fortunate people. About it, Aristotle famously wrote. “Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference.” But if beauty is a gift, it is a fleeting one, as so many have noted over the years:

“If you go through life trading on your good looks, there’ll come a time when no one wants to trade.” — Lynne Alpern & Esther Blumenfeld

“It has been said that a pretty face is a passport. But it’s not, it’s a visa, and it runs out fast.” — Julie Burchill

“The problem with beauty is that it’s like being born rich and getting poorer.” —Joan Collins

And, to add one more wrinkle to the theme, if beauty is a gift, it is one that often comes at a dear price:

“There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.” — Pat Conroy

“Outstanding beauty, like outstanding gifts of any kind, tends to get in the way of normal emotional development, and thus of that particular success in life we call happiness.” — Milton Sapirstein

This week, take a few moments to reflect on the role that beauty—especially the beauty of the human face or form—has played in your life. As you do, let your thinking be stimulated by this week’s compilation of quotations:

• There are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep. — Edward Abbey

• Beauty that dies the soonest has the longest life. Because it cannot keep itself for a day, we keep it forever. Because it can have existence only in memory, we give it immortality there. — Bertha Damon

• Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. — Kahlil Gibran

• Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old. — Franz Kafka

• The ideal has many names, and beauty is but one of them. — W. Somerset Maugham

• If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. — William Morris,

• Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike. John Muir,

• Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. — Edgar Allan Poe

• I am waylaid by beauty. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

• If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life. — Frank Lloyd Wright

For source information on these quotations, and many others on the topic of BEAUTY, go here.

Cartoon of the Week:

Answer to This Week’s Puzzler:

Christopher Morley (1890-1957)

Dr. Mardy’s Observation of the Week:

Thanks for joining me again this week. See you next Sunday morning, when the theme will be “Sarcasm.”

Mardy Grothe

Websites: www.drmardy.com and www.GreatOpeningLines.com

Regarding My Lifelong Love of Quotations: A Personal Note