landscape

When there is mist on the mountains, it is beautiful, and when there is no mist, it is also beautiful. All four seasons are beautiful. You are beautiful, and your friends are beautiful. There is nothing to stop you from being in touch with life in the present moment. The question is, Do you have eyes that can see the sunset, feet that can touch the earth? Don't think that happiness will be possible only when conditions around you become perfect. Happiness lies in your own heart.

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching

I wish you could see what I see out the window- the earth pink and yellow cliffs to the north- the full pale moon about to go down in an early morning lavender sky... pink and purple hills in front and the scrubby fine dull green cedars- and a feeling of much space- It is a very beautiful world.

Georgia O'Keefe

He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

It was a beautiful morning, light touching the farthest edges of the plains. Clara noticed the beauty and thought it strange that she could still respond to it, tired as she was and with two people dying in her house. But she loved the fine light of the prairie mornings; it had resurrected her spirits time after time through the years, when it seemed that dirt and cold and death would crush her. Just to see the light spreading like that, far on toward Wyoming, was her joy.

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

Monet [paints] that aspect of the world that can't be domesticated by vision- what Emerson called the "flash and sparkle" of it, in this case a million dappled reflections rocking and melting in the waves. It is a kind of beauty more chaotic and aflame than our tidying minds typically let us see. Usually, we are looking around for useful information and dampening or ignoring a riot of irrelevant stimuli that threatens to drown it out. Monet's picture brings to mind one of those rarer moments where every particle of what we apprehend matters- the breeze matters, the chirping of birds matters, the nonsense a child babbles matters- and you can adore the wholeness, or even the holiness, of that moment.

Patrick Bringley: All the Beauty in the World

How beautiful and perfect are the animals! How perfect is my soul! How perfect the earth, and the minutest thing upon it! What is called good is perfect, and what is called sin is just as perfect; The vegetables and minerals are all perfect.. and the imponderable fluids are perfect; Slowly and surely they have passed on to this, and slowly and surely they will yet pass on.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass