Love Beyond Beauty Quotes & Sayings

Someone sent me a letter that had one of the best quotes I've ever read. It said "What is to give light must endure burning." It's by a writer named Viktor Frankl. I've been turning that quote over and over in my head. The truth of it is absolutely awe-inspiring. In the end, I believe it's why we all suffer. It's the meaning we all look for behind the tragedies in our lives. The pain deepens us, burns away our impurities and petty selfishness. It makes us capable of empathy and sympathy. It makes us capable of love. The pain is the fire that allows us to rise from the ashes of what we were, and more fully realize what we can become. When you can step back and see the beauty of the process, it's amazing beyond words. — Damien Echols

Do you hear it?" Samuel asked, his eyes penetrating.
"I don't hear it ... but I know it's there." I struggled to express something that I'd never put into words. "Sometimes I think if I could just SEE without my eyes, the way I FEEL without my hands, I would be able to HEAR the music. I don't use my hands to feel love or joy or heartache - but I still feel them all the same. My eyes let me see incredibly beautiful things, but sometimes I think that what I SEE gets in the way of what's ... what's just beyond the beauty. Almost like the beauty I can SEE is just a very lovely curtain, distracting me from what's on the other side ... and if I just knew how to push that curtain aside, there the music would be." I threw up my hands in frustration. "I can't really explain it. — Amy Harmon

The beautiful dream of young love that ventures only on half-measures, that desires and dares not ask, promises and does not give.

He was homeless in the noble sense of those who, like the Vikings and pirates of beauty, have collected in their intellectual raids all that is most precious in many great cities. He was close to all the arts in the manner of a dilettante, but stronger than his love for them was his sublime disdain to serve them.

Destiny does not always need the powerful prelude of a sudden violent blow to shake a heart beyond recovery.

Memory is always a bond and every loving memory is a bond twice over. — Stefan Zweig

Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter; dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty, beyond waht can be valued, rich or rare; no less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor; as much as child e'er loved, or father found; a love that makes breath poor, and speech unable; beyond all manner of so much I love you. — William Shakespeare

To be rooted in love is to look beyond surface appearances to see the inner beauty in others often disfigured by sin. — Michael Card

Fear is an unavoidable element of the mortal condition. Creation in all its ravishing beauty, with its infinite baroque embellishments and subtle charms, with all the wonders that it offers from both the Maker and the made, with all its velvet mystery and with all the joy we receive from those we love here, so enchants us lack we lack the imagination, less than the faith, to envision an even more dazzling world beyond, and therefore even if we believe, we cling tenaciously to this existence, to sweet familiarity, fearful that all conceivable paradises will prove wanting by comparison. — Dean Koontz

I thought of you and how you love this beauty,
And walking up the long beach all alone
I heard the waves breaking in measured thunder
As you and I once heard their monotone.
Around me were the echoing dunes, beyond me
The cold and sparkling silver of the sea
We two will pass through death and ages lengthen
Before you hear that sound again with me. — Sara Teasdale

Beyond the River of the Blessed, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Avalon. Our swords were shattered in our hands and we hung our shields on the oak tree. The silver towers were fallen, into a sea of blood. How many miles to Avalon? None, I say, and all. The silver towers are fallen.
... waters,where the stars shone like bonfires at night and the green of day was always the green of spring. Youth, love, beauty-I knew them in Avalon. Proud steeds, bright metal, soft lips, dark ale. Honor ... — Roger Zelazny

The clue to everything a man should love and fear in her was there right from the start in the ironic smile that primed and swelled the archery of her full lips. There was pride in that smile and confidence in the set of her fine nose. Without understanding why I knew beyond question that a lot of people would mistake her pride for arrogance and confuse her confidence with impassivity. I didn't make that mistake. My eyes were lost swimming floating free in the shimmering lagoon of her steady even stare. Her eyes were large and spectacularly green. It was the green that trees are in vivid dreams. It was the green that the sea would be if the sea were perfect. — Gregory David Roberts

Every poet will forever try to write the greatest poem ever written, I have found that this kind of poem can be written with "One" word. And that word consists of a beauty beyond any measure to man and one of the most beauty creations to grace the presents of man. That one word poem is ... ... .. "YOU — Michael Jones

It takes mystical insight to see the beauty and innocence in each other, even when that is not what we are showing to the world. That is why God is needed in intimate relationships, to move us beyond the perceptions that can so often poison love. — Marianne Williamson

Believers should be wary of overzealous attempts to prescribe "biblical sex," when sex - like beauty and like God - remains shaded with mystery. Paul likened it to the mystery of Christ's love for the Church, the writer of Proverbs to the inscrutable way of an eagle in the sky. If Christians have learned anything from our rocky two-thousand-year theological history, it's that we make the most beautiful things ugly when we try to systematize mystery. Even the writers of Scripture knew that some things were simply beyond their grasp. — Rachel Held Evans

It was that quality that led me into aviation in the first place - it was a love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of man - where immortality is touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane; where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same instant. — Charles Lindbergh

I was exceedingly affected, says he, upon the occasion. But was ashamed to be surprised by her into such a fit of unmanly weakness-so ashamed that I was resolved to subdue it at the instant, and guard against the like for the future. Yet, at that moment, I more than half regretted that I could not permit her to enjoy a triumph which she so well deserved to glory in-her youth, her beauty, her artless innocence, and her manner, equally beyond comparison or description. But her indifference, Belford!-That she could resolve to sacrifice me to the malice of my enemies; and carry on the design in so clandestine a manner-yet love her, as I do, to frenzy!-revere her, as I do, to adoration!-These were the recollections with which I fortified my recreant heart against her-Yet, after all, if she persevere, she must conquer!-Coward, as she has made me, that never was a coward before! — Samuel Richardson

What really shapes and conditions and makes us is somebody only a few of us ever have the courage to face: and that is the child you once were, long before formal education ever got its claws into you - that impatient, all-demanding child who wants love and power and can't get enough of either and who goes on raging and weeping in your spirit till at last your eyes are closed and all the fools say, 'Doesn't he look peaceful?' It is those pent-up, craving children who make all the wars and all the horrors and all the art and all the beauty and discovery in life, because they are trying to achieve what lay beyond their grasp before they were five years old. — Robertson Davies

And as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion. Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.And - I would argue as well - all love. Or, perhaps more accurately, this middle zone illustrates the fundamental discrepancy of love. Viewed close: a freckled hand against a black coat, an origami frog tipped over on its side. Step away, and the illusion snaps in again: life-more-than-life, never-dying — Donna Tartt

To die is to love. The beauty of love is not in past remembrances or in the images of tomorrow. Love has no past and no future; what has, is memory, which is not love. Love with its passion is just beyond the range of society, which is you. Die, and it is there. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Tell me, now, fairy as you are, - can't you give me a charm, or a philter, or something of that sort, to make me a handsome man?"
It would be past the power of magic, sir;" and, in thought, I added,"a loving eye is all the charm needed: to such you are handsome enough; or rather, your sternness has a power beyond beauty." Mr. Rochester had sometimes read my unspoken thoughts with an acumen to me incomprehensible: in the presnt instance he took no notice of my abrupt vocal response; but he smiled at me with a certain smile he had of his own, and which he used but on rare occasions. He seemed to think too good for common purpose: it was the real sunshine of feeling-he shed it over me now. — Charlotte Bronte

Let us go beyond the boundaries of right and wrong. Let us vanish in the beauty of love. — Debasish Mridha

It was the upward-reaching and fathomlessly hungering, heart-breaking love for the beauty of the world at its most beautiful, and, beyond that, for that beauty east of the sun and west of the moon which is past the reach of all but our most desperate desiring and is finally the beauty of Beauty itself, of Being itself and what lies at the heart of Being. — Frederick Buechner

There are times ... when we are in the midst of life-moments of confrontation with birth or death, or moments of beauty when nature or love is fully revealed, or moments of terrible loneliness-times when a holy and awesome awareness comes upon us. It may come as deep inner stillness or as a rush of overflowing emotion. It may seem to come from beyond us, without any provocation, or from within us, evoked by music or by a sleeping child. If we open our hearts at such moments, creation reveals itself to us in all it's unity and fullness. And when we return from such a moment of awareness, our hearts long to find some way to capture it in words forever, so that we can remain faithful to it's higher truth.
... When my people search for a name to give to the truth we feel at those moments, we call it God, and when we capture that understanding in timeless poetry, we call it praying. — Mary Doria Russell

And I thought, I am in love. For the first time I am in love. And loved. Someone loves me. And I love them. And within me things clicked and whirled like the insides of some gigantic clock, cog against wheel, spring against spiral, tick against tock, and I knew that nothing would ever be the same again. I had shown someone what I really was. I had shown someone my truth, my secret. Out there, beyond the walls of the Castle, there was a boy who had seen inside my chrysalis. And I would never be safe again. — Philip Ridley

There's a beauty to forgiveness, especially forgiveness that goes beyond rationality. Unconditional love is an illogical notion, but such a great & powerful one — A. J. Jacobs

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs. — Pablo Picasso

There is a beauty in paradox when it comes to talking about things of ultimate concern. Paradox works against our tendency to stay superficial in our faith, or to rest on easy answers or categorical thinking. It breaks apart our categories by showing the inadequacy of them and by pointing to a reality larger than us, the reality of gloria, of light, of beyond-the-beyond. I like to call it paradoxology - the glory of paradox, paradox-doxology - which takes us somewhere we wouldn't be capable of going if we thought we had everything all wrapped up, if we thought we had attained full comprehension. The commitment to embracing the paradox and resisting the impulse to categorize people (ourselves included) is one of the ways we follow Jesus into that larger mysterious reality of light and love. — Nanette Sawyer

And this then, that I am feeling now, is the hell that comes with love, the hell and the damnation and the agony beyond all enduring, because after the beauty and the loveliness comes the sorrow and the pain. — Daphne Du Maurier

Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies, all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression to silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery. — George Eliot

You thought I would not weesh to marry him? Or per'aps you hoped?" said Fleur, her nostrils flaring. "What do I care how he looks? I am good-looking enough for both of us, I theenk! All these scars show is zat my husband is brave! And I shall do zat!" she added fiercely, pushing Mrs. Weasley aside and snatching the ointment from her. — J.K. Rowling

He told her over and over how beautiful she was but, to her, his beauty was beyond any words she would ever be able to speak. — Kathleen Valentine

Spirituality exists wherever we struggle with the issue of how our lives fit into the greater cosmic scheme of things. This is true even when our questions never give way to specific answers or give rise to specific practices such as prayer or meditation. We encounter spiritual issues every time we wonder where the universe comes from, why we are here, or what happens when we die. We also become spiritual when we become moved by values such as beauty, love, or creativity that seem to reveal a meaning or power beyond our visible world. An idea or practice is "spiritual" when it reveals our personal desire to establish a felt-relationship with the deepest meanings or powers governing life. — Robert C. Fuller

I'm not concerned with paid assassins ... mindless, soulless animals who excel at nothing else. But you, Erik ... you love all the beauty in this world ... you are a genius in so many different fields. Why do you set yourself beyond the pale of humanity by such a despicable crime?"
He took off the mask and turned slowly to let me see.
"This face which has denied me all human rights also frees me of all obligation to the human race," he said quietly. "My mother hated me, my village drove me from my home, I was exhibited like an animal in a cage until a knife showed me the only way to be free. The pleasures of love will always be forbidden to me ... but I am young, Nadir. I have all the desires of any normal man. — Susan Kay

To the degree that each part of our life will support and complement every other and all are ordered to our ultimate goal, our lives will be beautiful. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the essential attributes of beauty is due proportion, which means that all parts are in harmony with each other. Another attribute of beauty is integrity, which means that the overall purpose of the thing is in harmony with what it is meant to be, which for the Christian is the love of God. The final attribute is clarity - it must be radiant and perceptible by others. When people see a life well lived, they are drawn by its beauty and then beyond to the source to which it points, and to which that life is ordered: God. — David Clayton

Sometimes, when you're feeling you're lowest, the real you is summoned~And you understand, maybe for the first time ever, how grand you are, because you discover that vulnerable doesn't mean powerless, scared doesn't mean lacking in beauty, and uncertainty doesn't mean that you're lost~These realizations alone will set you on a journey that you will take you far beyond what you used to think of as extraordinary.~There is always a bright side, The Universe — Mike Dooley

No one gets found in love. Everyone gets lost in it, Because love is overwhelming. Its beyond your control. You have to relinquish control to be in love. And that's a good thing. There's a beauty to being lost in something bigger than you. — Andrew Kaufman

But in his years among the drow, Drizzt Do'Urden had learned to look beyond physical beauty and physical attraction. Drizzt did not separate the physical from the emotional. He was a superb fighter because he fought with his heart and would no sooner battle merely for the sake of battle than he would mate for the sake of the physical act. — R.A. Salvatore

Away

There is no sorrow
Time heals never;
No loss, betrayal,
Beyond repair.
Balm for the soul, then,
Though grave shall sever
Lover from loved
And all they share.
See the sweet sun shines
The shower is over;
Flowers preen their beauty,
The day how fair!
Brood not too closely
On love, on duty;
Friends long forgotten
May wait you where
Life with death
Brings all to an issue;
None will long mourn for you,
Pray for you, miss you,
Your place left vacant,
You not there. — Walter De La Mare

Love creates a communion with life. Love expands us, connects us, sweetens us, ennobles us.
Love springs up in tender concern, it blossoms into caring action. It makes beauty out of all we touch. In any moment we can step beyond our small self and embrace each other as beloved parts of a whole. — Jack Kornfield

Within a moment of silence, all is known that needs to be known. Within a moment of breath, all of life surrounds you...from the stars, the sun, the trees and all of humanity. Within a moment of a smile, love embraces the universe and beyond. It only takes a moment of being open to the wisdom, the beauty and the Grace. ~jh — Jennifer Hillman

My dearest dearest dear Albert sat on a footstool by my side and his excessive love and affection gave me feelings of heavenly love and happiness I never could have hoped to have felt before! He clasped me in his arms and we kissed each other again and again! His beauty ... his sweetness and gentleness - really how can I ever be thankful enough to have such a husband! to be called names of tenderness, I have never yet heard used to me before - was bliss beyond belief! Oh! This was the happiest day of my life! May God help me to do my duty as I ought and be worthy of such blessings. — Queen Victoria

We can live tough lives, but the human spirit is stronger, seemingly, than anything. There is redemption, hope, and love. All different forms of heartbreak, but beyond all that there is hope, there is love. There is beauty and bliss. — Hugh Jackman

Beyond the pain, life continues to be sweet. The basics are still there. Beauty, food and friendship, reservoirs of love and understanding. Later, possibly not yet, you are going to need others who will encourage you to make new beginnings. Welcome them. They will help you move on, to cherish happy memories and confront the painful ones with more than bitterness and anger. — Rosamunde Pilcher

When a man is able to be alone he is also able to love. And his love has a totally different quality, a different beauty, a different fragrance to it. It is something divine, it is something of the beyond. It is deeply fulfilling. It brings great contentment. — Rajneesh

Man's books are but man's alphabet, Beyond and on his lessons lie The lessons of the violet, The large gold letters of the sky; The love of beauty, blossomed soil, The large content, the tranquil toil: The toil that nature ever taught, The patient toil, the constant stir, The toil of seas where shores are wrought, The toil of Christ, the carpenter; The toil of God incessantly By palm-set land or frozen sea. — Joaquin Miller

TRAVEL Loving you, flesh to flesh, I often thought Of travelling penniless to some mud throne Where a master might instruct me how to plot My life away from pain, to love alone In the bruiseless embrace of stone and lake. Lost in the fields of your hair I was never lost Enough to lose a way I had to take; Breathless beside your body I could not exhaust The will that forbid me contract, vow, Or promise, and often while you slept I looked in awe beyond your beauty. Now I know why many men have stopped and wept Halfway between the loves they leave and seek, And wondered if travel leads them anywhere - Horizons keep the soft line of your cheek, The windy sky's a locket for your hair. — Leonard Cohen

All the things that truly matter, beauty, love, creativity, joy and inner peace arise from beyond the mind. — Eckhart Tolle

If, for whatever cruel twist of fate, the God of the Bible exists, I want no part of him. I, along with what I hope is the vast majority of humanity, am better than him. I know more than he ever taught. I see beyond horizons that he could never reach. I love more genuinely than He. I help more than He. I understand myself better than He ever could. I see planets, stars, solar systems, galaxies just on the edge of humanity's perception. I can even sometimes catch a small glimpse of our universe, and all the wonder and beauty it holds. Your god is too small for me. — Atheist Republic

We lump together all things that are beyond the capacity of all of us collectively to understand-and one name we give to all those things together is God. Therefore, God is the creative force, the sustaining power, that which motivates toward constant change, the overall intelligence which governs the universe by physical and spiritual law, truth, love, goodness, kindness, beauty, the ever-present, all-pervading essence or spirit, which binds everything in the universe together and gives to everything in the universe.. — Peace Pilgrim

What I saw there explained everything
the reason he had stayed away, why he had come to say good-bye. I can only describe what I saw by its effect on me. Every woman should be looked at in such a way, at least once her life. With a longing that cannot be contained
with love that goes beyond mere feeling because it transforms and-like the verse of the poem he had read
it dissolves, as an offering, a gift. I felt my face flush and waves of knowing suffused every pore, every cell of my being. I was loved. And in that love, I felt beauty
my own, unrealized until that moment, suddenly rising to consciousness in a way that made everything in me come alive to the beauty all around me. Nothing more needed to be said. — Nafisa Haji

Don't settle ... wait for the one who treats you like an investment; not a test drive. Someone who inspires you to be at your best ... One who looks beyond your outer beauty and falls in love with your soul. — Steve Maraboli

Then he clambered into the boat. Oh, and the beauty of the subjection of his loins, white and dimly luminous as he climbed over the side of the boat, his back rounded and soft -ah this was too much for her, too final a vision. She knew it and it was fatal. The terrible hopelessness of fate, and of beauty, such beauty!
He was not like a man to her, he was an incarnation, a great phase of life. She saw him press the water out of his face, and look at the bandage on his hand. And she knew it was all no good, and she would never go beyond him, he was the final approximation of life to her. — D.H. Lawrence

Beyond love, beyond unrequited love, perhaps even beyond any other passion known to humanity, deep, deep in the depths of the turgid, clinging, swamplike pit of despair that lies dormant within every soul, lurks JEALOUSY. Jealousy, that most demeaning and debilitating of emotions. Jealousy, which can double the strength of the love upon which it is based, but whilst doubling it, warp and pervert it, untill it is no longer recognizable as the thing of beauty it once was. Jealous love is no more like true love than Mr Hyde was like Dr Jekyll or a stagnant swamp is like a freshwater lake. — Ben Elton

Sometimes you walk past a pretty girl on the street there's something beyond beauty in her face, something warm and smart and inviting, and in the three seconds you have to look at her, you actually fall in love, and in those moments, you can actually know the taste of her kiss, the feel of her skin against yours, the sound of her laugh, how she'll look at you and make you whole. And then she's gone, and in the five seconds afterwards, you mourn her loss with more sadness than you'll ever admit to. — Jonathan Tropper

When there is a total understanding of need, the outward and the inner, then desire is not a torture. Then it has a quite different meaning, a significance far beyond the content of thought and it goes beyond feeling, with its emotions, myths and illusions. With the total understanding of need, not the mere quantity or the quality of it, desire then is a flame and not a torture. Without this flame life itself is lost. It is this flame that burns away the pettiness of its object, the frontiers, the fences that have been imposed upon it. Then call it by whatever name you will, love, death, beauty. Then it is there without an end. — Allan W. Anderson

Parasitism is the only practice of the church; with its ideal of anaemia, its holiness, draining all blood, all love, all hope for life; the beyond as the will to negate every reality; the cross as the mark of recognition for the most subterranean conspiracy that ever existed-against health, beauty, whatever has turned out well, courage, spirit, graciousness of the soul, against life itself. — Friedrich Nietzsche

If in the moonlight from the silent bough
Suddenly with precision speak your name
The nightingale, be not assured that now
His wing is limed and his wild virtue tame.
Beauty beyond all feathers that have flown
Is free; you shall not hood her to your wrist,
Nor sting her eyes, nor have her for your own
In any fashion; beauty billed and kissed
Is not your turtle; tread her like a dove -
She loves you not; she never heard of love. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Song of the Winged Ones is a song of celebration, written as though the singer were standing on the Dragon Isle watching the dragons flying in the sun. The words are full of wonder at the beauty of the creatures; and there is a curious pause in the middle of one of the stanzas near the end, where the singer waits a full four measures in silence for those who listen to hear the music of distant dragon wings. It seldom fails to bring echoes of something beyond the silence, and is almost never performed because many bards fear it.
I love it. — Elizabeth Kerner

[The humanities] invite - they compel - us to confront the truth about ourselves and help us to inhabit with greater understanding the disjointed condition of longing and defeat that defines the human condition. Achilles' reflections on honor and memory and the fleeting beauty of youth; Shakespeare's defense of love against the powers of "sluttish time" Kant's struggle to put our knowledge of certain things on an unchallengeable foundation so as to place the knowledge of others forever beyond reach; Caravaggio's painting of the sacrifice of Isaac, which depicts a confusion of loves that defeats all understanding; and so on endlessly through the armory of humanistic works: the subject is always the same. The subject is always man, whose nature it is to yearn to be more than he is. — Charles Murray

I'm still unsure as to what draws people together, that is, beyond the really ugly things: money, beauty, family, desperation. But I suppose that if someone can make you feel like you are seeing a new world, or just an old one of the first time, you might decide that you love to be around them. — Dana Vachon

Adversity is a school that you need not apply to be enrolled. It has no respect for age, wealth, education, race, power, fame or beauty. It is a school among schools and every human being passes through the school in one format or the other. It is also possible to attend the post graduate department without your consent. You can never attend the school and be the same again. It will change you and purge you of all the things you think that you know. It will bring you to a leveling far beyond all your imaginations. You may also be required to repeat a class with different course or instructors. — FRESH IN THE SCHOOL OF ADVERSITY By M M Kirschbaum

But there's the beauty of life beyond the bubble. It's possible for someone to see your wicked bits and still love you. — Kristin Chenoweth

The love of minds should last beyond lives. — Don DeLillo

Once more, the joyful character of the eucharistic gathering must be stressed. For the medieval emphasis on the cross, while not a wrong one, is certainly one-sided. The liturgy is, before everything else, the joyous gathering of those who are to meet the risen Lord and to enter with him into the bridal chamber. And it is this joy of expectation and this expectation of joy that are expressed in singing and ritual, in vestments and in censing, in that whole 'beauty' of the liturgy which has so often been denounced as unnecessary and even sinful.
Unnecessary it is indeed, for we are beyond the categories of the 'necessary.' Beauty is never 'necessary,' 'functional' or 'useful.' And when, expecting someone whom we love, we put a beautiful tablecloth on the table and decorate it with candles and flowers, we do all this not out of necessity, but out of love. And the Church is love, expectation and joy. — Alexander Schmemann