Incomplete But Beautiful Quotes

True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally complete the incomplete.

When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions - such as merit, such as past, present, and future - our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.

I'll tell you a secret about storytelling. Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty... were not perfect in the beginning. It's only a happy ending on the last page, right? If the princess had everything from the beginning, there wouldn't be a story. Anyone who is imperfect or incomplete can become the main character in the story.

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch; to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with. . . . The Scotch catechism says that man’s chief end is ‘to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.

Maybe there is something devastating about the incompleteness of it. But maybe, just knowing that the other person is there . . .” His throat bobs. “There might be pleasure in that, too. The satisfaction of knowing that something beautiful exists.” His lips open and close a few times, as though he can only find the right words by shaping them first to himself. “Maybe some things transcend reciprocity. Maybe not everything is about having.

Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world ... That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian: to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God's new world, which he has thrown open before us.

I will never be at ease while watching the sunset, knowing our stories will never end with the same words. All sunsets have their own story, it is just that ours will always fall incomplete.

You can live without me." "I don't want to." I feared a love like this - that made us incomplete without each other. It was beautiful but treacherous, like snow that looked white and pure and lovely from the safety of your window, but when you stepped out to touch the softness, the cold first stole your breath, and then your will to move, until you could just lay down in it and let the numbness take you. yet I didn't want to be without him either, so I didn't chide him for the statement.

The Taoist and Zen conception of perfection... the dynamic nature of their philosophy laid more stress upon the process through which perfection was sought than upon perfection itself. True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally completed the incomplete. The virility of life and art lay in its possibilities for growth.

We delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.

As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It's as close as we get to God in this life, and reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go.

Loving you is no more a beautiful memory, but now just a pain, I cry and weep every time I walk down the memory lane, Your love always completed me in every sense as a whole, But now it’s just emptiness and sorrow in my heart that drains, Of all the people in the world, you choose me to be hurt, Of all the hearts in the world, you choose mine to break… Why did you leave me I ask myself every morning and dawn? Why my love was incomplete tell me why you were gone? A silence surrounds my heart and fills it again with despair, Oh this pain is just too much, and the damage beyond repair, Please come back baby, just come back and bring that old smile, Or just come to see me every once in a while, So my heart no more bleeds, and no more my soul aches, So I can be peaceful after my death, in my ashes and burnt flakes…

Considering what Adam went through to appreciate Eve to the utmost, I wondered how beautiful it is that you and I were created to need each other. The romantic need is just the beginning, because we need our families and we need our friends. In this way, we are made in God’s image. Certainly God does not need people in the way you and I do, but He feels a joy at being loved, and He feels a joy at delivering love. It is a stinking thought to realize that, in paradise, a human is incomplete without a host of other people. We are relational indeed. And the Bible, with all its understanding of the relational needs of humans, was becoming more meaningful to me as I turned the pages. God made me, He knows me, He understands me, and He wants community.

I feared a love like this—that made us incomplete without each other. It was beautiful but treacherous, like snow that looked white and pure and lovely from the safety of your window, but when you stepped out to touch the softness, the cold first stole your breath, and then your will to move, until you could just lay down in it and let the numbness take you.

Wabi sabi is an intuitive response to beauty that reflects the true nature of life. Wabi sabi is an acceptance and appreciation of the impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete nature of everything.

Carnal love in all its forms, from the highest — true marriage or platonic love — to the most base, down to debauchery, has the beauty of the world for its object. Love that gives itself to the spectacle of the heavens, the plains, the sea, the mountains or the silence of nature senses this love in a thousand faint sounds, breaths of wind and the warmth of the sun. Every human being feels it vaguely for at least a moment. It is an incomplete love, sorrowful, because it gives itself to something incapable of response, which is matter. People desire to transfer this love onto a being that is like it, capable of responding to love, of saying ‘yes,’ of yielding to it. The feeling of beauty sometimes linked to the appearance of a human being makes this transfer possible at least in an illusory way. But it is the beauty of the world — the universal beauty — toward which our desire leads. This kind of transfer is expressed in all literature that encompasses love, from the most ancient and most used metaphors and similes of poetry to the subtle analysis of Proust. The desire to love the beauty of the world in a human being is essentially the desire for the Incarnation. If we think it is something else, we are mistaken. The Incarnation alone can satisfy it.

Instead of searching for beauty in perfection, we should look for it in things that are flawed, incomplete.

The puzzle's an incomplete circus, the pieces touching each other in all these ways, and there's a hitch in our back from where you've hunched, but you've done it. You've put this thing together. Seams like veins pump blood through this cobbled-together catastrophe, this broken, beautiful mess.

three things concur in creating beauty: first of all integrity or perfection, and for this reason we consider ugly all incomplete things; then proper proportion or consonance; and finally clarity and light, and in fact we call beautiful those things of definite color.

Only things that are imperfect, incomplete, and ephemeral can truly be beautiful, because only those things resemble the natural world.

But even in its perfection, it was her, for better or for worse. Reckless, incomplete, and inappropriate.

Life is incomplete without understanding the language of the beauty of the flowers, rocks, fine mountain lines, autumn leaves, clouds, stars and galaxies in the deep sky, music of the early birds, sunshine into the trees, and movements of the butterflies. The extravaganza of nature ignites the light that you have inside.

Here is something you have to understand about stories: They point you in the right direction but they can't take you all the way there. Stories are crescent moons; they glimmer in the night sky, but they are most exquisite in their incomplete state. Because people crave the beauty of not-knowing, the excitement of suggestion, and the sweet tragedy of mystery.

For three things concur in creating beauty: first of all integrity or perfection, and for this reason we consider ugly all incomplete things; then proper proportion or consonance; and finally clarity and light, and in fact we call beautiful those things of definite color. - William

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the joy is not complete until it is expressed. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are. The delight is incomplete until it is expressed.

True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally completed the incomplete.

The fact is that the beautiful, humanly speaking, is merely form considered in its simplest aspect, in its most perfect symmetry, in its most entire harmony with our make-up. Thus the ensemble that it offers us is always complete, but restricted like ourselves. What we call the ugly, on the contrary, is a detail of a great whole which eludes us, and which is in harmony, not with man but with all creation. That is why it constantly presents itself to us in new but incomplete aspects.

I'll keep looking- till that watery reflection of mine in your eye, rolls down as a tear. I'll keep looking till we finally look away like our lives never met. Let's cheat destiny as if we never knew each other. Let's do this last thing together.

And not only narrativity but the quality of the writing is of the first importance to me. Rightly or not, I believe a dull, inept style signals poverty or incompleteness of thought. I see the accuracy, scope, and quality of Darwin’s intellect directly expressed in the clarity, strength, and vitality of his writing — the beauty of it.

They call it love," said Vernon. "I don't know what they mean by it. What do you mean [by love]?" "I don't exactly know," said Temple slowly. "I suppose it's wanting to be with a person, and thinking about nothing else. And thinking they're the most beautiful and all that. And going over everything that they've ever said to you, and wanting— Well, I suppose if it's really love you want to marry them.

The point is this. The arts are not the pretty but irrelevant bits around the border of reality. They are the highways into the center of a reality which cannot be glimpsed, let alone grasped, any other way. The present world is good, but broken and in any case incomplete; art of all kinds enables us to understand that paradox in its many dimensions. But the present world is also designed for something which has not yet happened. It is like a violin waiting to be played: beautiful to look at, graceful to hold-and yet if you'd never heard one in the hands of a musician, you wouldn't believe the new dimensions of beauty yet to be revealed. Perhaps art can show something of that, can glimpse the future possibilities pregnant within the present time.

It is also about loss, about the perishability of dreams once they are transformed into hard reality. It is the longing, its immateriality, that makes the dream pure. What we in Iran had in common with Fitzgerald was this dream that became our obsession and took over our reality, this terrible, beautiful dream, impossible in its actualization, for which any amount of violence might be justified or forgiven. This was what we had in common, although we were not aware of it then. Dreams, Mr Nyazi, are perfect ideals, complete in themselves. How can you impose them on a constantly changing, imperfect, incomplete reality? You would become a Humbert, destroying the object of your dream; or a Gatsby, destroying yourself. When I left the class that day, I did not tell them what I myself was just beginning to discover: how similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby's. He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of a dream?

As the blood poured from his tattered heart into the open air and his brain suffocated, all those incomplete thoughts of Wittgenstein decayed with the dying neurons. Neural connections in the gray matter storing memories and ideas in their ordered configurations fired across the gaps, last gaps of mental life. Thoughts on Truth and Will were erased as flesh sloshed soft and limp against alabaster, no more than rotting human fruit.

All are architects of Fate, Working in these walls of Time; Some with massive deeds and great, Some with ornaments of rhyme. Nothing useless is, or low; Each thing in its place is best; And what seems but idle show Strengthens and supports the rest. For the structure that we raise, Time is with materials filled; Our todays and yesterdays Are the blocks with which we build. Truly shape and fashion these; Leave no yawning gaps between; Think not, because no man sees, Such things will remain unseen. In the elder days of Art, Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part; For the gods see everywhere. Let us do our work as well, Both the unseen and the seen; Make the house where gods may dwell Beautiful, entire, and clean. Else our lives are incomplete, Standing in these walls of Time, Broken stairways, where the feet Stumble, as they seek to climb. Build today, then, strong and sure, With a firm and ample base; And ascending and secure Shall tomorrow find its place. Thus alone can we attain To those turrets, where the eye Sees the world as one vast plain, And one boundless reach of sky.

Some stories are incomplete but they are beautiful...

But even in its imperfection, it was her, for better or for worse. Reckless, incomplete, and inappropriate. But here all the same.

right now, I am a rough draft; I am here to be revisited and revised. hard as I try, I am not the girl poets speak of. I am not made up of ocean tides and my heart is not a crystal drum; it will always be a weapon more than anything. I am an incomplete masterpiece, full of crossed-out words and changes. no one ever calls the first draft beautiful, and I will never be the final piece.

The love we feel for the splendor of the heavens, the plains, the sea, and the mountains, for the silence of nature which is borne in upon us by thousands of tiny sounds, for the breath of the winds or the warmth of the sun, this love of which every human being has at least an inkling, is an incomplete, painful love, because it is felt for things incapable of responding, that is to say for matter. Men want to turn this same love toward a being who is like themselves and capable of answering to their love, of saying yes, of surrendering... The longing to love the beauty of the world in a human being is essentially the longing for the Incarnation.

The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand. The fact is that the beautiful, humanly speaking, is merely form considered in its simplest aspect, in its most perfect symmetry, in its most entire harmony with our make-up. Thus the ensemble that it offers us is always complete, but restricted like ourselves. What we call the ugly, on the contrary, is a detail of a great whole which eludes us, and which is in harmony, not with man but with all creation. That is why it constantly presents itself to us in new but incomplete aspects...

Because a new love affair always gives hope, the irrational mortal loneliness is always crowned, that thing I saw (that horror of a snake emptiness) when I took the deep iodine deathbreath on the Big Sur beach is now justified and hosannah'd and raised up like a sacred urn to Heaven in the mere fact of the taking off of clothes and clashing wits and bodies in the inexpressibly nervously sad delight of love- don't let no old fogies tell you otherwise, and on top of that nobody in the world even ever dares to write the true story of lovem it's awful, we're stuck with a 50% incomplete literature and drama- lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow- the secret underground truth of mad desire hiding under fenders under buried junkyards throughout the world, never mentioned in newspapers, written about haltingly and like corn by authors and painted tongue in cheek by artists, agh, just listen to Tristan und Isolde by Wagner and think of him in a Bavarian field with his beloved naked beauty under fall leaves.

Children come to us full of the what is, not what isn’t. When we see our own reality for all it isn’t, we teach our children to operate from lack. When we see our children for all they are yet to become, barely recognizing all they already are, we teach them they are incomplete. For our children to see a look of disappointment in our eyes sows in them seeds of anxiety, self-doubt, hesitation, and inauthenticity. They then begin to believe they should be more beautiful, competent, smart, or talented. In this way, we strip them of their enthusiasm for expressing themselves as they are right now.

You must learn not to look upon the world as a lost and decaying thing but as a something perfect and glorious which is going on to a most beautiful completeness; and you must learn to see men and women not as lost and accursed things, but as perfect beings advancing to become complete. There are no “bad” or “evil” people. An engine which is on the rails pulling a heavy train is perfect after its kind, and it is good. The power of steam which drives it is good. Let a broken rail throw the engine into the ditch, and it does not become bad or evil by being so displaced; it is a perfectly good engine, but off the track. The power of steam which drives it into the ditch and wrecks it is not evil, but a perfectly good power. So that which is misplaced or applied in an incomplete or partial way is not evil. There are no evil people; there are perfectly good people who are off the track, but they do not need condemnation or punishment; they only need to get upon the rails again. That which is undeveloped

Seul celui qui a achevé en esprit l'inachevé peut découvrir la véritable beauté. La vigueur de la vie et de l'art réside dans leurs possibilités de croissance.

Some beautiful chapters in this book called life, always remain incomplete.

the beauty of nature appears only as a reflectin of the beauty,that belongs to spirit, as an imperfect incomplete mode [of beauty], a mode which in its substance is contained in the spirit itself" *hegel

The most important relationship in the world is the bond that you share with your own self. Are you comfortable being you or you’re always trying to be someone else? Are you able to live up to your own expectations or often end up feeling inadequate and incomplete? Are you being true to yourself and your dreams or you’re trying to live someone else’s definition of success? Those are some vital questions you’d have to answer to determine how you feel about yourself and your life. We often see the world as a reflection of who we are. When you’re cool and tranquil on the inside, you will echo the same peace in all your relationships. When you’re all messed up inside, your actions and reactions too will resonate your inner chaos. To have beautiful and worthy relationships, begin by having an honest and fulfilling relationship with yourself.

Maybe there is something devastating about the incompleteness of it. But maybe, just knowing that the other person is there . . .” His throat bobs. “There might be pleasure in that, too. The satisfaction of knowing that something beautiful exists.

It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I imagined it. It just wasn’t mine. I felt as if I was living out someone else’s romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass.

The God who made the stars, the seas, the mountains and its peaks, the universe and its galaxies felt this world would be incomplete without you and without me. Do you see how you are a puzzle piece in the whole—how without you here, there would be a hole? Your body is not just a clay tent that you live in, it’s a piece of the universe you have been given. You are not a small star, you are a reflection of the entire cosmos. Can you hear the big bang in your heart? Eighty times a minute God knocks on the doors of your chest, to remind you that He has never left, and that He is closer to you than the jugular vein in your neck (50:16). Every moment is divinely blessed, for this very moment God is blowing the breath of life through eight billion different human chests. You are not just star dust and dirt, you are a reflection of God’s beauty on Earth. You are not this mortal body that death will one day take. You are an everlasting spirit held in the mortal embrace of clay. You are not a human being meant to be spiritual, you are a spiritual being living this human being miracle.” ARU BARZAK, POET

Love is one, and love is changeless. For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected–not in itself, but in the object. As it was love that first created humanity, so even human love, in proportion to its divinity, will go on creating the beautiful for its own outpouring. There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and love is ever climbing towards the consummation when such shall be the universe, imperishable, divine. Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire.

Those eyes show me glimpses of a beautiful soul. She feels so familiar, so intimate, I've waited an eternity to discover that mine was incomplete; without hers, completely lost in that gaze, so lost without the drowning stare of those ocean eyes, I've found purpose in sinking, in falling.

We are addicted to fulfilment, to the eradication of all emptiness. . . . swallowed the cultural myth that says, “if you are well-adjusted, and if you are living your life properly, you will feel fulfilled, satisfied, content, and serene.” If you are not satisfied and fulfilled, there is something wrong with you. . . . . . The myth of fulfilment makes us miss the most beautiful aspect of our human souls: our emptiness, our incompleteness, our radical yearning for love. We were never meant to be completely fulfilled; we were meant to taste it, to long for it, and to grow toward it. In this way we participate in love becoming life, life becoming love. To miss our emptiness is, finally, to miss our hope. Emptiness, yearning, incompleteness: these unpleasant words hold a hope for incomprehensible beauty. It is precisely in these seemingly abhorrent qualities of ourselves – qualities that we spend most of our time trying to fix or deny – that the very thing we most long for can be found: hope for the human spirit, freedom for love. This is a secret known by those who have had the courage to face their own emptiness. The secret of being in love, of falling in love with life as it is meant to be, is to befriend our yearning instead of avoiding it, to live into our longing rather than trying to resolve it, to enter the spaciousness of our emptiness instead of trying to fill it up. It has taken me a long time to learn this secret, and I continue to forget it many times each day.

Looking at this picture, I am struck by how beautiful my parents were together. James and Angela. I know what it cost them to build a life, to have me. A white woman and a black man in the early ’80s, neither of their families being particularly thrilled with the arrangement. We moved around a lot before my father died, trying to find a neighborhood where my parents felt at ease, at home. My mother didn’t feel welcome in Baldwin Hills. My father didn’t feel comfortable in Brentwood. I was in school before I met another person who looked like me. Her name was Yael. Her father was Dominican, and her mother was from Israel. She liked to play soccer. I liked to play dress-up. We could rarely agree on anything. But I liked that when someone asked her if she was Jewish, she said, “I’m half Jewish.” No one else I knew was half something. For so long, I felt like two halves. And then my father died, and I felt like I was one-half my mother and one-half lost. A half that I feel so torn from, so incomplete without. But looking at this picture now, the three of us together in 1986, me in overalls, my father in a polo, my mother in a denim jacket, we look like we belong together. I don’t look like I am half of one thing and half of another but rather one whole thing, theirs. Loved.

The kiss is the greatest of gifts, uniquely human. A kiss before midnight. A kiss before dying. The Judas kiss. The kiss of the devil. A big wet smacker beneath the mistletoe. More can be said with a kiss than a book full of words. We kiss to say I love you. We kiss the rings of the self-important. The feet of the conquerors. The rich dark earth when we reach the promised land. We kiss babies' cheeks to soak up their innocence. We kiss the foreheads of loved ones as they begin a journey. We kiss beautiful strangers in far away places because on hot July nights with the music of the sea and the stars above your head your lips are incomplete until they are joined in a kiss.

Now we can see what makes mathematics unique. Only in mathematics is there no significant correction-only extension. Once the Greeks had developed the deductive method, they were correct in what they did, correct for all time. Euclid was incomplete and his work has been extended enormously, but it has not had to be corrected. His theorems are, every one of them, valid to this day. Ptolemy may have developed an erroneous picture of the planetary system, but the system of trigonometry he worked out to help him with his calculations remains correct forever. Each great mathematician adds to what came previously, but nothing needs to be uprooted. Consequently, when we read a book like A History of Mathematics, we get the picture of a mounting structure, ever taller and broader and more beautiful and magnificent and with a foundation, moreover, that is as untainted and as functional now as it was when Thales worked out the first geometrical theorems nearly 26 centuries ago. Nothing pertaining to humanity becomes us so well as mathematics. There, and only there, do we touch the human mind at its peak.

Scientific thinking explores and redraws the world, gradually offering us better and better images of it, teaching us to think in ever more effective ways. Science is a continual exploration of ways of thinking. Its strength is its visionary capacity to demolish preconceived ideas, to reveal new regions of reality, and to construct new and more effective images of the world. This adventure rests upon the entirety of past knowledge, but at its heart is change. The world is boundless and iridescent; we want to go and see it. We are immersed in its mystery and in its beauty, and over the horizon there is unexplored territory. The incompleteness and the uncertainty of our knowledge, our precariousness, suspended over the abyss of the immensity of what we don't know, does not render life meaningless: it makes it interesting and precious.

I like to ensure that I have music and art all around me. My personal favorite is old maps. What I love about old maps is that they are both beautiful and imperfect. These imperfections represent that some of the most talented in history were still very wrong (early cartography was very difficult). As the majority of my work is analysis and advisory, I find it a valuable reminder that my knowledge is limited. No matter how much data or insight I have, I can never fully “map out” any business. Yet, despite the incompleteness of these early cartographers, so much was learned of the world. So much done and accomplished. Therefore, these maps, or art pieces, serve as something to inspire both humility and achievement. This simple environmental factor helps my productivity and the overall quality of my work. Again, it’s like adding positive dice to my hand that are rolled each day.

Beauty is a blind alley. It is a mountain peak which once reached leads nowhere. That is why in the end we find more to entrance us in El Greco than in Titian, in the incomplete achievement of Shakespeare than in the consummate success of Racine. Too much has been written about beauty. That is why I have written a little more. Beauty is that which satisfies the aesthetic instinct. But who wants to be satisfied? It is only to the dullard that enough is as good as a feast. Let us face it : beauty is a bit of a bore.

The adumbration of beauty contained in one detail was linked with the subsequent adumbration of beauty, and so it was that the various adumbrations of a beauty which did not exist had become the underlying motif of the Golden Temple. Such adumbrations were signs of nothingness. Nothingness was the very structure of this beauty. Therefore, from the incompletion of the various details of this beauty there arose automatically an adumbration of nothingness, and this delicate building, wrought of the most slender timber, was trembling in anticipation of nothingness, like a jeweled necklace tremoling in the wind.

For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected—not in itself, but in the object. As it was love that first created humanity, so even human love, in proportion to its divinity, will go on creating the beautiful for its own outpouring. There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and love is ever climbing towards the consummation when such shall be the universe, imperishable, divine.

And as we walked into the house, I smiled contentedly, realizing that the stress of the previous twenty-four hours had all but disappeared from view. And I knew it, even then: Marlboro Man, not only that night but in the months to come, would prove to be my savior, my distraction, my escape in the midst of troubles, my strength in the face of upheaval, my beauty in times of terrible, heartbreaking ugliness. He held my heart entirely in his hands, this cowboy, and for the first time in my life, despite everything I’d ever believed about independence and feminism and emotional autonomy, I knew I’d be utterly incomplete without him. Talk about a terrifying moment.

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consumption. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch; to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with (the perfect hearer died a year ago).

I have always felt that putting emotions into words was an exercise in futility, they're often more complex than words can manage and it seems often impossible. And like an injustice to the emotions, like I will never have explained them well enough and it will just feel incomplete and wrong. Also I'm pretty sure you made me do this before heh. All of that said, I shall do my best to manage this. You are incredibly passionate. Straightforward. Funny. I feel like such a god damn idiot spouting random adjectives but I don't know what else to do. O.O You are those things though and I love them. You see the world in a way I feel I can understand at least somewhat, a way many don't. You embrace things others try to stifle. You aren't ashamed of being yourself and yourself is wonderful. Kind and compassionate. You sure helped me and I think I helped you too, we connected on some issues even if our issues weren't the same. We... ugh, I can't do it, I can't distill something as complex, intricate, beautiful, amazing as YOU into mere words. But you are who you are and you stole my heart and I don't mind. I like it. I love you. Can't go wrong with someone that loves music and wants to have lotr snuggle fests! I'm here darlingness. I just kept trying and trying to find the right words. It's difficult. NOT because I have anything less than the utmost massive lovelberry tree gem pie for you. It's just... emotions, y'know? They're hard to explain. o.o

Another element of his design philosophy is one he adopted from the ancient Japanese theory wabi-sabi, which is an “acceptance of the world as an intransient entity,” or in layman’s terms, it’s finding beauty in all that is imperfect, incomplete, and impermanent within nature. From wabi comes wa: the goal of total unity or harmony which is the ideal realization of the maxim “less is more,” humble by choice, not materialistic and peaceful. All our lives—as was Carolyn’s—should aim to be wabi-sabi, an acceptance of our imperfections which ultimately leads to perfection. Mr. Yamamoto compares the thought to reading a book—if you are a good interpreter, you can read between the spaces and lines, understanding more than the words themselves.

There's nothing in this courtyard, after all, that wasn't here in 1977; maybe it's not this year but that one, and everything that follows is still to come ... For if the evidence points to anything, it's that there is no one unitary City. Or if there is, it's the sum of thousands of variations, all jockeying for the same spot. This may be wishful thinking; still, I can't help imagining that the points of contact between this place and my own lost city healed incompletely, left the scars I'm feeling for when I send my head up the fire escapes and toward the blue square of freedom beyond. And you out there: Aren't you somehow right here with me? I mean, who doesn't still dream of a world other than this one? Who among us--if it means letting go of the insanity, the mystery, the totally useless beauty of the million once-possible New Yorks--is ready even now to give up hope?

A Book of Glass On the table, a book of glass. In the book only a few pages with no words But scratched in a diamond-point pencil to pieces in diagonal Spirals, light triangles; and a French curve fractures lines to elisions. The last pages are simplest. They can be read backwards and thoroughly. Each page bends a bit like ludicrous plastic. He who wrote it was very ambitious, fed up, and finished. He had been teaching the insides and outsides of things To children, teaching the art of Rembrandt to them. His two wives were beautiful and Death begins As a beggar beside them. What is an abstract persona? A painter visits but he prefers to look at perfume in vials. And I see a book in glass—the words go off In wild loops without words. I should Wake and render them! In bed, Mother says each child Will receive the book of etchings, but the book will be incomplete, after all. But I will make the book of glass.

My own theological views are those of an agnostic—one who doesn’t know. I do not know whether there is a Divine designer or not. As an agnostic, what impresses me first of all is the woeful limits of our human knowledge. I respect the power of reason, but I also respect those aspects of religious faith that are compassionate and consoling. Many people could not live their lives without the consolation of faith. The virtues of religion should not be dismissed lightly. The Christian testament has a beautiful phrase for our limited human understanding: “For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”13 Believers trust the biblical promise that all our questions will be answered when we meet God face-to-face in eternity. That promise is the heart of religious faith. For an agnostic, that promise is a reminder that our knowledge in this life is incomplete. We are well into the twenty-first century, and we marvel at the spectacular achievements of science. But science still does not know how the universe was created or how life began. The Book of Proverbs contains a warning that speaks to us in our uncertain state: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”14 Those who believe they are changing the world, or saving the planet, or transforming the human race, are intoxicated with self-aggrandizing pride. As secular “redeemers,” a haughty spirit is their second nature. Consequently, they are deaf to this biblical wisdom. The secularists are confident that the nonexistence of God is a self-evident fact. It infuriates them that religionists (or “irrationalists,” as Bill Maher calls them) resist what they think is obviously, indisputably true. Believing they know a truth that cannot be known, and that others resist, they are prepared to use any means necessary to silence their opponents and achieve their goals.

I seemed to hear a voice of lamentation out of the Golden Age. It told me that we are imperfect, incomplete, and no more like a beautiful woven web, but like a bundle of cords knotted together and flung into a comer. It said that the world was once all perfect and kindly, and that still the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth. The faeries and the more innocent of the spirits dwelt within it, and lamented over our fallen world in the lamentation of the wind-tossed reeds, in the song of the birds, in the moan of the waves, and in the sweet cry of the fiddle. It said that with us the beautiful are not clever and the clever are not beautiful, and that the best of our moments are marred by a little vulgarity, or by a pin-prick out of sad recollection, and that the fiddle must ever lament about it all. It said that if only they who live in the Golden Age could die we might be happy, for the sad voices would be still; but alas! alas! they must sing and we must weep until the Eternal gates swing open.

In the Kingdom of God what is common to all is life in God. This is not the common character which a concept expresses, but is love, a living bond which unites the believers; it is this feeling of unity of life, a feeling in which all oppositions, as pure enmities, and also rights, as unifications of still subsisting oppositions, are annulled. “A new command give I unto you,” says Jesus [John xiii. 34], “that ye love one another; thereby shall men know that ye are my disciples.” This friendship of soul, described in the language of reflection as an essence, as spirit, is the divine spirit, is God who rules the communion. Is there an idea more beautiful than that of a nation of men related to one another by love? Is there one more uplifting than that of belonging to a whole which as a whole, as one, is the spirit of God whose sons the individual members are? Was there still to be an incompleteness in this idea, as incompleteness which would give a fate power over it? Or would this fate be the nemesis raging against a too beautiful endeavor, against an overleaping of nature?

But what he liked above all was to cycle in the dusk along a certain path skirting meadows. There, he would sit on a fence looking at the wispy salmon-pink clouds turning to a dull copper in the pale evening sky and think about things. What things? That cockney girl with her soft hair still in plaits whom he once followed across the common, and accosted and kissed, and never saw again? The form of a particular cloud? Some misty sunset beyond a Black Russian fir-wood (o, how much I would give for such a memory coming to him!)? The inner meaning of grass-blade and star? The unknown language of silence? The terrific weight of a dew-drop? The heartbreaking beauty of a pebble among millions and millions of pebbles, all making sense, but what sense? The old, old question of Who are you? To one’s own self grown strangely evasive in the gloaming, and to God’s world around to which one has never been really introduced. Or perhaps, we shall be nearer the truth in supposing that while Sebastian sat on that fence, his mind was a turmoil of words and fancies, incomplete fancies and insufficient words, but already he knew that this and only this was the reality of his life, and that his destiny lay beyond that ghostly battlefield which he would cross in due time.

When we pulled up to Marlboro Man’s house, I saw my Camry sitting in his driveway. I didn’t expect it to be there; I figured it was still on Marlboro Man’s parents’ road, sitting all crooked in the ditch where I’d left it the night before. Marlboro Man had already fixed it, fishing it out of the ditch and repairing the mangled tires and probably, knowing him, filling the tank with gas. “Oh, thank you so much,” I said as we walked toward the front door. “I thought maybe I’d killed it.” “Aw, it’s fine,” he replied. “But you might want to learn to drive before you get in it again.” He flashed his mischievous grin. I slugged him in the arm as he laughed. Then he lunged at me, grabbing my arms and using his leg to sweep my supporting leg right out from under me. Within an instant, he had me on the ground, right on the soft, green grass of his front yard. I shrieked and screamed, trying in vain to wrestle my way out of his playful grasp, but my wimpy upper body was no match for his impossible strength. He tickled me, and being the most ticklish human in the Northern Hemisphere, I screamed bloody murder. Afraid I’d wet my pants (it was a valid concern), I fought back the only way I knew how--by grabbing and untucking his shirt from his Wranglers…and running my hand up his back, poking at his rib cage. The tickling suddenly stopped. Marlboro Man propped himself on his elbows, holding my face in his hands. He kissed me passionately and seriously, and what started as a playful wrestling match became an impromptu make-out session in his front yard. It was an unlikely place for such an event, and considering it was at the very beginning of our night together, an unlikely time. But it was also strangely perfect. Because sometime during all the laughing and tickling and wrestling and rolling around in the grass, my worry and concern over my parents’ troubles had magically melted away. Only when the chiggers began biting did Marlboro Man suggest an alternate plan. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “I’m cooking dinner.” Yummy, I thought. That means steak. And as we walked into the house, I smiled contentedly, realizing that the stress of the previous twenty-four hours had all but disappeared from view. And I knew it, even then: Marlboro Man, not only that night but in the months to come, would prove to be my savior, my distraction, my escape in the midst of troubles, my strength in the face of upheaval, my beauty in times of terrible, heartbreaking ugliness. He held my heart entirely in his hands, this cowboy, and for the first time in my life, despite everything I’d ever believed about independence and feminism and emotional autonomy, I knew I’d be utterly incomplete without him. Talk about a terrifying moment.

In the story of Wagner and Wagnerism, we see both the highest and the lowest impulses of humanity entangled. It is the triumph of art over reality and the triumph of reality over art; it is a tragedy of flaws set so deep that after two centuries they still infuriate us as if the man were in the room. To blame Wagner for the horrors committed in his wake is an inadequate response to historical complexity: it lets the rest of civilization off the hook. At the same time, to exonerate him is to ignore his insidious ramifications. It is no longer possible to idealize Wagner: the ugliness of his racism means that posterity's picture of him will always be cracked down the middle. In the end, the lack of a tidy moral resolution should make us more honest about the role that art plays in the world. In Wagner's vicinity, the fantasy of artistic autonomy falls to pieces and the cult of genius comes undone. Amid the wreckage, the artist is liberated from the mystification of "great art”. He becomes something more unstable, fragile, and mutable. Incomplete in himself, he requires the most active and critical kind of listening. So it goes with all art that endures: it is never a matter of beauty proving eternal. When we look at Wagner, we are gazing into a magnifying mirror of the soul of the human species. What we hate in it, we hate in ourselves; what we love in it, we love in ourselves also. In the distance we may catch glimpses of some higher realm, some glimmering temple, some ecstasy of knowledge and compassion. But it is only a shadow on the wall, an echo from the pit. The vision fades, the curtain falls, and we shuffle back in silence to the world as it is.

Stoic ethics is a species of eudaimonism. Its central, organizing concern is about what we ought to do or be to live well—to flourish. That is, we make it a lemma that all people ought to pursue a good life for themselves as a categorical commitment second to none. It does not follow from this that they ought to pursue any one particular version of the good life, or to cling tenaciously to the one they are pursuing. … Living virtuously is the process of creating a single, spatiotemporal object—a life. A life has a value as an object, as a whole. It is not always the case that its value as an object will be a function of the value of its spatiotemporal parts considered separately. But it is always the case that an evaluation of the parts will be incomplete until they are understood in the context of the whole life. What seems so clearly valuable (or required or excellent) when we focus on a thin temporal slice of a life (or a single, long strand of a life) may turn out to be awful or optional or vicious when we take a larger view. And it is the life as a whole that we consider when we think about its value in relation to other things, or its value as a part of the cosmos. … In our view, a focus on the parts of a life, or on the sum of its parts, obscures some important features of ethical inquiry. One such feature is the extent to which an agent’s own estimate of the value of his life is necessarily inconclusive: others will have to judge his life as a whole, because its character as a whole is not likely to be predictable while he is around to judge it, and because many important holistic considerations, such as its beauty, excellence, justice, and net effect, are things that he is either not well situated to judge or at least not in a privileged position to judge. Another feature obscured is the range of ways in which a single event or characteristic, without wide causal connections to other elements of one’s life, can nonetheless ruin it; for example, the possibility that a monstrously unjust act can indelibly stain a whole life. A third, related obscurity introduced by ignoring a whole-life frame of reference is the extent to which both aesthetic criteria and the notion of excellence have clear roles in the evaluation of a life. The whole-life frame of reference, together with a plausible account of the variety of ways in which a life can be a good one, keeps Stoicism sharply distinct from Epicurean doctrines, or their modern “welfarist” offshoots. How well my life is going from the inside, so to speak, in terms of the quality of my experience, is only one of the things that enters into a Stoic evaluation of it. We hold that there is a single unifying aim in the life of every rational agent, and that aim, guided by the notion of a good life (happiness, eudaimonia), is virtue, understood as the perfection of agency.

Mountains cry out to be climbed. Dirt says to us, “Dig.” The ocean’s fathomless waters invite us to go on a deep-sea treasure hunt. The heavens declare not only the glory of God; they also declare that we were made to test their bounds and marvel at their beauty. This is true for every sphere of creation and of human culture: God made all of us, male and female, to explore the world he created, to know it, care for it, and have dominion over it for his glory and others’ benefit. God’s original creation was good yet latent with potential. It was pristine yet incomplete. Missing were the work, curiosity, and energy of humans, the only part of the creation bearing the image of God. Human ambition wasn’t something that crept in after the Fall. It was—is—an aspect of bearing the image of God, of filling his world with beauty and industry and delight.

Later, we stand on the pavement outside Marcy's for a few moments, saying our goodbyes, moving aside as people weave in and out of the heavy doors leaving little incomplete jokes hanging in the air behind them like smoke. I glance in the window, into the room which is full of a buttery low light pricked out with candles and silverware, and see the waiter clearing our table, whisking away the wine glasses and the coffee cups, the plate of petit fours, and lowering on a new white cloth with easy dramatic precision. A couple approaches, fresh from an opening night or a concert; the waiter adjusts a knife and swings to greet them. A swift reinvention, the final movement of someone else's evening.

This is Ellie's mom, Stephanie. This is an incomplete account, and will [unfortunately] have to remain that way for a few years. Ellie will need to be 13 before she can have a Goodreads account. Until then, feel free to leave comments about her books here or on my page. Happy reading! :)

Humanity must become aware that if we take away the beautiful beings of nature, we will take the beauty out of the very things that make the world and our lives beautiful. Without these things, our soul and life on this earth will become incomplete.

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.

We can't just displace our flesh and our love for the world by cataloguing all the ways we've been disappointed by our sin or by the world. Perhaps you've seen already how ineffective it is to complain to your friends about any disappointments you've had in your motherhood. Simply airing these discouragements does not provoke in us a thrilling sense of hope in God. Plummeting headlong into disenfranchisement with God's gifts is an incomplete and ultimately useless cure for the heart's ills. This kind of ascetic fervor in renouncing the beauties of motherhood is no more distinctly Christian than the hedonism of a mother who idolizes her motherhood. The depth of our depravity and our heart's inclination to justify itself mean something significant. They mean that merely lamenting the insufficiency of the world is an incompetent way to rescue and recover our captive heart from wrong affections. Our heart needs to be redeemed by Jesus and made new. The superior power of affection and devotion to Jesus can do what no lament of the world or of the temporality of God's earthly gifts could ever do. Simply demonstrating how the lures of _____ and the wiles of _____ will end up biting you back is not enough. You have to introduce a greater affection to the soul -- one that is "powerful enough to dispossess the first of its influence.

AN INCOMPLETE PORTRAIT OF OUR LOVE written by: Zaki Ansari An incomplete portrait of our love Relic of our relationship like a poor injured dove An incomplete portrait of our love framed with some shabby moments Hanging on my heart’s wall. Thirsty for some colors of love Which are missing at all I have painted, the shadow of your smile. I have added Some color of your hair, I drew some marks of your lips I spread shine of your eyes Tried to fill with some of our memories And with some of our dreams I Gave a touch of your laughter, and made the shape of your dimple. Decorated with the beautiful mole mole the same as you have on pretty face but many things are mismade yet, it is dark, it is fade Missing a complete part which has been made That’s You, your love, your presence And all those beautiful colors which you took with you when you left How do I complete without you? even I have lost myself without you, Yes I’m breathing, yes I’m living But that’s not life which spent without you. you are required, Your touch is needed to make complete An incomplete portrait of our love Relic of our relationship, like a poor injured dove thirsty for some colors of love Which are missing at all Maybe there is no chance to make it whole Complete or incomplete, happiness or sorrow tears or laughter, the wounds on the soul Whatever, but it’s a masterpiece of my life, that’s all into the bitter ocean of life only sweetest thing, I have known, Even it’s incomplete but it’s my own An incomplete portrait of our love Relic of our relationship like a poor injured dove

True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally completed the incomplete. The virility of life and art lay in its possibilities for growth.

I must recognize Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm (the Brothers Grimm), German philologists and folktale collectors. Their beautiful collections of tales bore tidings of reworked childhood fantasies that enriched my very young soul. Pridian reflections would be incomplete without mentioning their heart-racing tales of which RUMPELSTILTSKIN has always remained my favourite.

My Window I have a small room with whole world in it. Internet, PC, TV, AC, Fridge, everything in it. But all this was incomplete without a small window. When there is sunrise I see beautiful rainbow. This window bring the whole existence to me. This window bring the bright sunlight to me. When there is dark in my heart, I see my window shining. Suddenly appears on my window a tiny bird singing. This birds sings new chants of melody, She uses my window as his stage. As if she just got free from his cage. In evening I feel the cool breeze flowing from window. I see the trees dancing with the wind. I see humble pigeons humming from window. This always fully relaxes my mind. Though I am alone I feel the whole world is with me. When I see the window I feel the whole world is with me. I am blessed by nature, tree, birds, sun and moonlight. I am never alone with this window either day or night.

When you find anything great or enthralling, you have an almost visceral, instinctive need to praise it to others and get others to recognize it. “Listen to this!” you say to your friend. “I can’t wait for you to read it! You’ll absolutely love it.” “Isn’t it great? Isn’t it wonderful?” Why, when we have had our imaginations captured by something, do we unavoidably need to do this? Lewis answered: I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete until it is expressed. . . . This is so even when our expressions are inadequate, as of course they usually are. But how if one could really and fully praise even such things to perfection—utterly “get out” in poetry or music or paint the upsurge of appreciation which almost bursts you? Then indeed the object would be fully appreciated and our delight would have attained perfect development.305

You understand more now than you ever did before. You are the culmination of all that you have experienced in the past. You are at your highest state of wisdom and strength in this moment. Everything that happened helped you to become who you are now. And even though that person might feel incomplete or broken at times, you are more complete now than you have ever been before. Let your completion continue to unfold as it is. It’s going to be a miraculous and beautiful unfolding.

The Gondola Experience When the performance ended, we returned to the comfort of the Count's gondola, and celebrated the beauty of the evening with more champagne. By now, I was head over heels in love, bewildered by beauty. What had been an enchanted day turned into an unfathomable evening. The organza curtains were drawn, shielding us from the departing theatre crowds. Romantic candles burned as we began, again, the love dance left incomplete, on Lido. Mario’s expert hands blissfully caressed every inch of my smooth body as Andy lowered his expert mouth on my growing organ. I wanted both the Count and Andy, together, at the same moment. As the gondola sailed out into the wide expanse of the Grand Canal, both lovers were inside me, moving in tandem with the rhythmic sounds of waves lapping against the Love-Boat. I surrendered myself wholly to indescribable sexual ecstasy, rocking to the motion of their sliding cocks filling me to the brim. I wanted them and I desired every drop of their precious seed to feed my deepest center. I was awakened by the chirping sounds of two love birds perched on the gondola's window. My lovers lay in deep slumber, their arms draped around my naked body. I gently lifted their arms, and sat up. I saw the majestic steeples of Saint Mark's Cathedral. The singing larks turned long enough to look at me with knowing smiles. I had been to heaven; I did not want my night's pleasures to end.

The Crocodile The sun of the Macusi people was worried. Every day there were fewer fish in their ponds. He put the crocodile in charge of security. The ponds got emptier. The crocodile, security guard and thief, invented a good story about invisible assailants, but the sun didn’t believe it, took a machete, and left the crocodile’s body all crisscrossed with cuts. To calm him down, the crocodile offered his beautiful daughter in marriage. “I’ll be expecting her,” said the sun. As the crocodile had no daughter, he sculpted a woman in the trunk of a wild plum tree. “Here she is,” he said, and plunged into the water, looking out of the corner of his eye, the way he always looks. It was the woodpecker who saved his life. Before the sun arrived, the woodpecker pecked at the wooden girl below the belly. Thus she, who was incomplete, was open for the sun to enter. (112)

This book has been about community . . . But when all is said and done, each of us, and in the deepest part of our self, has to learn to accept our own essential solitude. In each of our hearts, there is a wound - the wound of our own loneliness, which hurts at moments of setback and can be even more painful at the time of our death. Death is a passage which cannot be made in community. It has to be made completely alone. And all suffering, sadness and depression is a foretaste of that death, a manifestation of our deep wound which is part of the human condition. . . . We can experience moments of communion and love, of prayer and ecstasy - but they are only moments. We quickly find ourselves back in the incompleteness which is the result of our immortality and limitations and those of others. . . Even the most beautiful community can never heal the wound of loneliness that we carry. It is only when we discover that this loneliness can become a sacrament that we touch wisdom, for this sacrament is purification and presence of God. If we stop fleeing from our own solitude, and if we accept our wound, we will discover that this is the way to meet Jesus Christ. It is when we stop fleeing into work and activity, noise and illusion, and when we remain conscious of our wound, that we will meet God. . . . Those who enter marriage believing that it will slake their thirst for communion and heal their wound will not find happiness. In the same way, those who enter community hoping that it will totally fulfil and heal them, will be disappointed. We will only find the true meaning of marriage or community when we have understood and accepted our wound. It is only when we stand up, with all our failings and sufferings, and try to support others rather than withdraw into ourselves, that we can fully live the life of marriage or community. It is only when we stop seeing others as a refuge that we will become, despite our wound, a source of life and comfort. It is only then that we will discover peace.

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete until it is expressed. . . . This is so even when our expressions are inadequate, as of course they usually are. But how if one could really and fully praise even such things to perfection—utterly “get out” in poetry or music or paint the upsurge of appreciation which almost bursts you? Then indeed the object would be fully appreciated and our delight would have attained perfect development.

Do you remember what life is, Lan?” She didn’t, not right away. He had to pick up one foot and hold it off the ground—an incomplete step—before she remembered. “Motion?” “Motion,” he agreed. “Never forget that. There are no side-steps. There is no waiting. You are moving even as we speak, so you need to decide what it is you really want and how much you’re really willing to give up to achieve it, because everything you do and say, every decision that you make, can only bring you closer to your goal or further from it.

Sexuality is a beautiful, good, extremely powerful, sacred energy, given us by God and experienced in every cell of our being as an irrepressible urge to overcome our incompleteness, to move toward unity and consummation with that which is beyond us.

Contemplate without thinking. Be certain only in your uncertainty, content to be completely incomplete. Stop the rush. Slow down time. Breathe and notice. Slow down everything. Let it all be. Shut off the noise. Hush. Relax. Seize this higher moment. Reconnect. Feel and sense what surrounds you. Listen to all the colours of light whisper as they envelope you. See the melody and harmony that float about unnoticed. Taste the solitude of all this wonderment. Smell the beautiful silence. Now discover your peaceful serenity. Then, reach out and touch your faith with all your senses. This is my world. Awaken!

When I asked a Portuguese mathematician of my acquaintance whether he had any insight to offer me on the subject, he replied, “The foundations of mathematics are full of holes and I never felt comfortable dealing with such things.” Full of holes. Earlier generations of mathematicians assumed that the stability of the landscape on which mathematical structures were built was guaranteed by God or nature. They strode in like pioneers or surveyors, their task to map the fundamentals and in so doing secure the territory that future generations would colonize. But then the holes—of which the liar’s paradox is merely one—started popping up, and the mathematicians started falling in. Never mind! Each hole could be plugged. But soon enough another would open, and another, and another . . . Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) spoke for any number of idealistic mathematicians when he wrote in 1907, The discovery that all mathematics follows inevitably from a small collection of fundamental laws, is one which immeasurably enhances the intellectual beauty of the whole: to those who have been oppressed by the fragmentary and incomplete nature of most existing chains of deduction, this discovery comes with all the overwhelming force of a revelation: like a palace emerging from the autumn mist as the traveller ascends an Italian hill-side, the stately storeys of the mathematical edifice appear in their due order and proportion, with a new perfection in every part. I remember that when I read George Eliot’s Middlemarch in college, I was particularly fascinated by the character of Mr. Casaubon, whose lifework was a Key to All Mythologies that he could never finish. If Mr. Casaubon’s Key was doomed to incompletion, my astute professor observed, it was at least in part because “totalizing projects,” by their very nature, ramify endlessly; they cannot hope to harness the multitude of tiny details demanded by words like “all,” just as they cannot hope to articulate every generalization to which their premises (in this case, the idea that all mythologies have a single key) give rise. Perhaps without realizing it, my professor was making a mathematical statement—she was asserting the existence of both the infinite and the infinitesimal—and her objections to Mr. Casaubon’s Key hold as well for any number of attempts on the part of mathematicians to establish a Key to All Mathematics.

She has fame, beauty, wealth…and love. She’s a woman who has everything. And now she wants a pet…with everything she had, she still feels incomplete…and she expects “Count D” to satisfy that.

The abundance of windows meant that the great room was cheered by a constant diffused light, even on a winter afternoon. The panes were not colored like church windows, and the lead-framed squares of clear glass allowed the light to enter in the purest possible fashion, not modulated by human art, and thus to serve its purpose, which was to illuminate the work of reading and writing. I have seen at other times and in other places many scriptoria, but none where there shone so luminously, in the outpouring, of physical light which made the room glow, the spiritual principle that light incarnates, radiance, source of all beauty and learning, inseparable attribute of that proportion the room embodied. For three things concur in creating beauty: first of all integrity or perfection, and for this reason we consider ugly all incomplete things; then proper proportion or consonance; and finally clarity and light, and in fact we call beautiful those things of definite color. And since the sight of the beautiful implies peace, and since our appetite is calmed similarly by peacefulness, by the good, and by the beautiful, I felt myself filled with a great consolation and I thought how pleasant it must be to work in that place.

As the world experiences different seasons, life must also experience different emotions. Everyone strives to be happy in life, but it is impossible to always remain happy. Although Gautama Buddha's ideas about eliminating sadness are beautiful, we should not attempt to eradicate sadness completely because it goes against the natural order. Instead, we should allow life to flow like a river. Just as eternal life on earth would become monotonous, eternal happiness would leave us feeling incomplete. Therefore, a fulfilling life must consist of a mixture of various emotions. Sadness is not a disease; it is an emotion, just like happiness. Furthermore, it would be absurd to be constantly happy. If humans had no sadness, they would laugh inappropriately in both positive and negative situations. For example, when someone experiences an accident, we should not feel joy; we should feel sadness. Happiness is like a fleeting butterfly, and we should cherish the moments when it lands in our lives!

Prayer is bringing your helplessness to Jesus. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, summarized it beautifully: Prayer is an expression of who we are. . . . We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment.

My Spring and Your Eyes After a long winter spell the Spring is here, But without seeing it reflect through your eyes, for me it appears to be nowhere, Everything, the buds of May, even the bright day seem to be glad, But without you around my love, every surrounding and every corner looks so sad, Million flowers await to bloom from every hopeful bud of Spring, But to me, without you, nothing, no matter how beautiful does any joy bring, The freshness of light green hue, covers everything, even the morning dew, But I only think of you, even though the nature looks so beautiful and new, The Spring has rescued everything from the veil of seemingly permanent gloom, But I, my thoughts, and my joys wait for you, to be able to bloom, In the distance I can hear the river flowing happily to meet the sea, But I wait for my beautiful Spring that only through your eyes I can feel and see, And I know the Spring is here and it surely has arrived, But for me, the Spring bliss is incomplete unless from your senses it is derived, To me the real Spring shall feel like you and be as beautiful as you, But with you not here, maybe it is Spring time somewhere, but not here , not here, because this year it does not feel like you, So I shall let them rejoice and say “the Spring is here!” But for me as long as you are not here, it is Spring there but not here, not here!

While it is nice to describe a beautiful rose in full bloom, it would be incomplete without a description of everything—right from its roots, the stem, the manure and nutrients that have sustained it, the fresh and dried leaves as also the thorns, in order to conceptualize the beauty of that rose in all its dimensions. Likewise, for a human being’s biography, he needs to be presented ‘as is’ and not ‘as should be’—from head to toe, nothing more, nothing less, as transparent and true to reality as one can be. Everything that can be said or unsaid, that is embarrassing or praiseworthy has to be documented without inhibitions and fears.

For three things concur in creating beauty: first of all integrity or perfection, and for this reason we consider ugly all incomplete things; then proper proportion or consonance; and finally clarity and light, and in fact we call beautiful those things of definite color.