Edinburgh Beauty Quotes

This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again.

If London was an alien city, Edinburgh was another planet

If I had to pick two words to describe Edinburgh, I would tell you that it's majestic and beautiful. Really, really old, but somehow more alive than any other place I've ever been.

Perfect harmony with its environment, and perfect expression of its own inward nature are what constitute Beauty;

Beauty represents the supremest living quality of Thought.

Sandy felt warmly towards Miss Brodie at these times when she saw how she was misled in her idea of Rose. It was then that Miss Brodie looked beautiful and fragile, just as dark heavy Edinburgh itself could suddenly be changed into a floating city when the light was a special pearly white and fell upon one of the gracefully fashioned streets. In the same way Miss Brodie's masterful features became clear and sweet to Sandy when viewed in the curious light of the woman's folly, and she never felt more affection for her in her later years than when she thought upon Miss Brodie silly.

Beauty is the externalisation of Harmony, and Harmony is the co-ordinated working of all the powers of Being, both in the individual and in the relation of the individual to the Infinite from which it springs; and therefore this Harmony conducts us at once into the presence of the innermost undifferentiated Life.

Edinburgh was the first designed city in the world. The birth of the Enlightenment. The whole idea that we could plan our futures for ourselves, that we were not dependent on the whims of God, that we could conquer our animal natures, find our place in the world. That from this jumbled”—he swept his arm around at the jammed-together old houses on the up-and-down cobbled streets of the Old Town—“thrown-together world, you could have beauty, order, fresh air. The New Town is philosophy made stone.

...Pat wondered what inspiration an artist might find in the attempts of twenty-first-century architects to impose their phallic triumphs on the cityscape. Had any artist ever painted a contemporary glass block, for instance, or any other product of architectural brutalism that had laid its crude hands here and there upon the city?...If a building did not lend itself to being painted, then surely that must be because it was inherently ugly, whatever its claims to utility. And if it was ugly, then what was it doing in this delicately beautiful city?

He went on thus to call over names celebrated in Scottish song, and most of which had recently received a romantic interest from his own pen. In fact, I saw a great part of the border country spread out before me, and could trace the scenes of those poems and romances which had, in a manner, bewitched the world. I gazed about me for a time with mute surprise, I may almost say with disappointment. I beheld a mere succession of gray waving hills, line beyond line, as far as my eye could reach; monotonous in their aspect, and so destitute of trees, that one could almost see a stout fly walking along their profile; and the far-famed Tweed appeared a naked stream, flowing between bare hills, without a tree or thicket on its banks; and yet, such had been the magic web of poetry and romance thrown over the whole, that it had a greater charm for me than the richest scenery I beheld in England. I could not help giving utterance to my thoughts. Scott hummed for a moment to himself, and looked grave; he had no idea of having his muse complimented at the expense of his native hills. "It may be partiality," said he, at length; "but to my eye, these gray hills and all this wild border country have beauties peculiar to themselves. I like the very nakedness of the land; it has something bold, and stern, and solitary about it. When I have been for some time in the rich scenery about Edinburgh, which is like ornamented garden land, I begin to wish myself back again among my own honest gray hills; and if I did not see the heather at least once a year, I think I should die!

God help us you full of talk of a city called Edinburgh and me in silence so very deep we were so very much in love. And the burns and sikes and streams though shallow were deep music to us. You trout-tickler, you flower-picker, climber in willow trees, me laughing below as best I could laugh, though you never thought it ugly. Indeed the word you used was the word beautiful, pinning cowslips behind my ears, you patting and running fingers through our beckwashed hair. Lying by the marigold beds bare toes entwined, then dancing under branches before the elms ever died. But our mutual hearts never did. Bar it is 7 and your raining rage must cease under my morning moon. In my dawn shawl looking dawndown upon you in your foot-striding fellhighhighupuptopheavyrainbeatingrainrain. We have always walked together so long. In the long grass we walked and walked forever so long so very language long and I could say so once you had the slate in my lap. My tongue blank - FOREVER, word we wrote on a slate, remember when you taught me? - only my hands and eyes moving now - two daughters we could have had - but I am looking kindly and lovingly on you 'Please do it' - cool your raging fire lovelorn heart - for me. And love me - forever.

People are so soon gone; let us catch them. That man there, by the cabinet; he lives, you say, surrounded by china pots. Break one and you shatter a thousand pounds. And he loved a girl in Rome and she left him. Hence the pots, old junk found in lodging-houses or dug from the desert sands. And since beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful, and he is static, his life stagnates in a china sea. It is strange though; for once, as a young man, he sat on damp ground and drank rum with soldiers. One must be quick and add facts deftly, like toys to a tree, fixing them with a twist of the fingers. He stoops, how he stoops, even over an azalea. He stoops over the old woman even, because she wears diamonds in her ears, and, bundling about her estate in a pony carriage, directs who is to be helped, what tree felled, and who turned out tomorrow. (I have lived my life, I must tell you, all these years, and I am now past thirty, perilously, like a mountain goat, leaping from crag to crag; I do not settle long anywhere; I do not attach myself to one person in particular; but you will find that if I raise my arm, some figure at once breaks off and will come.) And that man is a judge; and that man is a millionaire, and that man, with the eyeglass, shot his governess “through the heart with an arrow when he was ten years old. Afterwards he rode through deserts with despatches, took part in revolutions and now collects materials for a history of his mother’s family, long settled in Norfolk. That little man with a blue chin has a right hand that is withered. But why? We do not know. That woman, you whisper discreetly, with the pearl pagodas hanging from her ears, was the pure flame who lit the life of one of our statesmen; now since his death she sees ghosts, tells fortunes, and has adopted a coffee-coloured youth whom she calls the Messiah.* That man with the drooping moustache, like a cavalry officer, lived a life of the utmost debauchery (it is all in some memoir) until one day he met a stranger in a train who converted him between Edinburgh and Carlisle by reading the Bible. Thus, in a few seconds, deftly, adroitly, we decipher the hieroglyphs written on other people’s faces. Here, in this room, are the abraded and battered shells cast on the shore.

Donaldson's Hospital in Edinburgh, of which great things were expected, fails to excite even a passing remark; while the High School, the fragments of the National Monument, Dugald Stewart's Monument, Surgeon's Hall, and the Institution on the Mound, continue to illuminate their respective localities with the light of truth and beauty, giving to our northern metropolis an air of refinement which no other city in the kingdom possesses.

Edinburgh often has the most beautiful skies. Pale blue or pink and when cloudless it is breathtaking. Sometimes the sky races in such a way it seems there are two skies from two different worlds entirely – rushing at each other in opposite directions, layers of cloud and dark moodiness – a hint of stars. It is dizzying!

I guess the world always looks more beautiful through scope. But if you use a microscope, you see things how they really are - up close and personal - and what you get is much scarier.

It was then that Miss Brodie looked beautiful and fragile, just as dark, heavy Edinburgh itself could suddenly be changed into a floating city when the light was a special pearly white and fell upon one of the gracefully fashioned streets. In the same way Miss Brodie's masterful features became clear and sweet to Sandy when viewed in the curious light of the woman's folly, and she never felt more affection for her in her later years than when she thought upon Miss Brodie silly.

Beauty is in most immediate touch with the very arcanum of Life; it is the brightness of glory spreading itself over the sanctuary of the Divine Spirit.

Beauty is the index to the whole nature of Being.

The Sixteen Conclusions of Reverend Kirk In the last half of the seventeenth century, a Scottish scholar gathered all the accounts he could find about the Sleagh Maith and, in 1691, wrote an amazing manuscript entitled The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies. It was the first systematic attempt to describe the methods and organization of the strange creatures that plagued the farmers of Scotland. The author, Reverend Kirk, of Aberfoyle, studied theology at St. Andrews and took his degree of professor at Edinburgh. Later he served as minister for the parishes of Balquedder and Aberfoyle and died in 1692. Kirk invented the name "the Secret Commonwealth" to describe the organization of the elves. It is impossible to quote the entire text of his treatise, but we can summarize his findings about elves and other aerial creatures in the following way: 1. They have a nature that is intermediate between man and the angels. 2. Physically, they have very light and fluid bodies, which are comparable to a condensed cloud. They are particularly visible at dusk. They can appear and vanish at will. 3. Intellectually, they are intelligent and curious. 4. They have the power to carry away anything they like. 5. They live inside the earth in caves, which they can reach through any crevice or opening where air passes. 6. When men did not inhabit most of the world, the creatures used to live there and had their own agriculture. Their civilization has left traces on the high mountains; it was flourishing at a time when the whole countryside was nothing but woods and forests. 7. At the beginning of each three-month period, they change quarters because they are unable to stay in one place. Besides, they like to travel. It is then that men have terrible encounters with them, even on the great highways. 8. Their chameleon-like bodies allow them to swim through the air with all their household. 9. They are divided into tribes. Like us, they have children, nurses, marriages, burials, etc., unless they just do this to mock our own customsor to predict terrestrial events. 10. Their houses are said to be wonderfully large and beautiful, but under most circumstances they are invisible to human eyes. Kirk compares them to enchanted islands. The houses are equipped with lamps that burn forever and fires that need no fuel. 11. They speak very little. When they do talk among themselves, their language is a kind of whistling sound. 12. Their habits and their language when they talk to humans are similar to those of local people. 13. Their philosophical system is based on the following ideas: nothing dies; all things evolve cyclically in such a way that at every cycle they are renewed and improved. Motion is the universal law. 14. They are said to have a hierarchy of leaders, but they have no visible devotion to God, no religion. 15. They have many pleasant and light books, but also serious and complex books dealing with abstract matters. 16. They can be made to appear at will before us through magic. The similarities between these observations and the story related by Facius Cardan, which antedates Kirk's manuscript by exactly two hundred years, are clear. Both Cardan and Paracelsus write, like Kirk, that a pact can be made with these creatures and that they can be made to appear and answer questions at will. Paracelsus did not care to reveal what that pact was "because of the ills that might befall those who would try it." Kirk is equally discreet on this point. And, of course, to go deeper into this matter would open the whole field of witchcraft and ceremonial magic, which is beyond my purpose in the present book.

United Kingdom must be given to Oxford. There is but one other—Edinburgh—which can lay any serious claim to rival her. Gazing upon Scotland's capital from Arthur's Seat, and dreaming visions of Scotland's wondrous past, it might seem as though the beauty and romance of the scene could not well be surpassed. But there is a certain solemnity, almost amounting to sadness, in both these

Edinburgh is a beautiful town no doubt, but in winter weather there is a waght of misery and wretchedness all about. Princes Street is very pretty & flashy & shoppy, but the grand old High Street is a most depressing place. The tall houses have an air of depressed nobility much more revolting than mere poverty, like a cast off chimney pot hat on an Irish scaffy.

When we aren’t aiming to be either precise or conclusive, it can be easy to agree on what a beautiful man-made place might look like. Attempts to name the world’s most attractive cities tend to settle on some familiar locations: Edinburgh, Paris, Rome, San Francisco. A case will occasionally be made for Siena or Sydney. Someone may bring up St Petersburg or Salamanca. Further evidence of our congruent tastes can be found in the patterns of our holiday migrations. Few people opt to spend the summer in Milton Keynes or Frankfurt. Nevertheless, our intuitions about attractive architecture have always proved of negligible use in generating satisfactory laws of beauty. We might expect that it would, by now, have grown as easy to reproduce a city with the appeal of Bath as it is to manufacture consistent quantities of blueberry jam. If humans were at some point adept at creating a masterwork of urban design, it should have come within the grasp of all succeeding generations to contrive an equally successful environment at will. There ought to be no need to pay homage to a city as to a rare creature; its virtues should be readily fitted to the development of any new piece of meadow or scrubland. There should be no need to focus our energies on preservation and restoration, disciplines which thrive on our fears of our own ineptitude. We should not have to feel alarmed by the waters that lap threateningly against Venice’s shoreline. We should have the confidence to surrender the aristocratic palaces to the sea, knowing that we could at any point create new edifices that would rival the old stones in beauty.

There Bath spread herself before us, like a beautiful dowager giving a reception. Bath, like Edinburgh, has the rare trick of surprising you all over again. You know very well it is like that, yet somehow your memory must have diminished the wonder of it, for there it is, taking your breath away again. There is a further mystery about Bath – which Edinburgh does not share – for I have never been able to imagine who lives in those rows and rows of houses really intended for Sheridan and Jane Austen characters. They all seem to be occupied; life is busy behind those perfect façades; but who are the people, where do they come from, what do they do? As our stay there, on this journey, only lasted for about two minutes, I did nothing to settle this question, though my mind played with it again as we rolled away from these Palladian heights.