Intrinsic Beauty Quotes

I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.

human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered "intrinsic" to human happiness and far outweigh "extrinsic" values such as beauty, money and status.

Men were created before women. ... But that doesn't prove their superiority – rather, it proves ours, for they were born out of the lifeless earth in order that we could be born out of living flesh. And what's so important about this priority in creation, anyway? When we are building, we lay foundations on the ground first, things of no intrinsic merit or beauty, before subsequently raising up sumptuous buildings and ornate palaces. Lowly seeds are nourished in the earth, and then later the ravishing blooms appear; lovely roses blossom forth and scented narcissi.

Our society does reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty "fixes" that harm our long-term health, since our life spans are inverted under the beauty myth, and there is no great social or economic incentive for women to live a long time. A thin young woman with precancerous lungs [who smokes to stay thin] is more highly rewarded socially that a hearty old crone. Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty used to punish women for their failure to achieve and conform to it]and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.

Newsflash she already has body image issues.  It's an intrinsic part of being a woman. Every woman in the world has some part of herself that she absolutely hates.  Her hands are too small, her feet are too big, her hair is too straight, too curly, her ears stick out, her bums too flat, her nose is too big and, you know, nothing you can say will change how we feel.  What men don't understand is, the right clothes, the right shoes, the right makeup it just... It, it hides the flaws we think we have.  They make us look beautiful to ourselves.  That's what makes us look beautiful to others. Used to be all she needed to feel beautiful was a pink tutu and a plastic tiara. And we spend our whole lives trying to feel that way again.

A mature person has the integrity to be alone. And when a mature person gives love, he gives without any strings attached to it: he simply gives. And when a mature person gives love, he feels grateful that you have accepted his love, not vice versa. He does not expect you to be thankful for it – no, not at all, he does not even need your thanks. He thanks you for accepting his love. And when two mature persons are in love, one of the greatest paradoxes of life happens, one of the most beautiful phenomena: they are together and yet tremendously alone, they are together so much so that they are almost one. But their oneness does not destroy their individuality; in fact, it enhances it: they become more individual. Two mature persons in love help each other to become more free. There is no politics involved, no diplomacy, no effort to dominate. How can you dominate the person you love? Just think over it. Domination is a sort of hatred, anger, enmity. How can you even think of dominating a person you love? You would love to see the person totally free, independent; you will give him more individuality. That’s why I call it the greatest paradox: they are together so much so that they are almost one, but still in that oneness they are individuals. Their individualities are not effaced; they have become more enhanced. The other has enriched them as far as their freedom is concerned. Immature people falling in love destroy each other’s freedom, create a bondage, make a prison. Mature persons in love help each other to be free; they help each other to destroy all sorts of bondages. And when love flows with freedom there is beauty. When love flows with dependence there is ugliness. Remember, freedom is a higher value than love. That’s why, in India, the ultimate we call moksha. Moksha means freedom. Freedom is a higher value than love. So if love is destroying freedom, it is not of worth. Love can be dropped, freedom has to be saved; freedom is a higher value. And without freedom you can never be happy, that is not possible. Freedom is the intrinsic desire of each man, each woman – utter freedom, absolute freedom. So anything that becomes destructive to freedom, one starts hating it. Don’t you hate the man you love? Don’t you hate the woman you love? You hate; it is a necessary evil, you have to tolerate it. Because you cannot be alone you have to manage to be with somebody, and you have to adjust to the other’s demands. You have to tolerate, you have to bear them. Love, to be really love, has to be being-love, gift-love. Being-love means a state of love. When you have arrived home, when you have known who you are, then a love arises in your being. Then the fragrance spreads and you can give it to others. How can you give something which you don’t have? To give it, the first basic requirement is to have it.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Leaves of Grass. 1900. To You WHOEVER you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams, I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands; Even now, your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you, Your true Soul and Body appear before me, They stand forth out of affairs—out of commerce, shops, law, science, work, forms, clothes, the house, medicine, print, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying. Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem; I whisper with my lips close to your ear, I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you. O I have been dilatory and dumb; I should have made my way straight to you long ago; I should have blabb’d nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you. I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you; None have understood you, but I understand you; None have done justice to you—you have not done justice to yourself; None but have found you imperfect—I only find no imperfection in you; None but would subordinate you—I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you; I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself. Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all; From the head of the centre figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light; But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color’d light; From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever. O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! You have not known what you are—you have slumber’d upon yourself all your life; Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time; What you have done returns already in mockeries; (Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return?) The mockeries are not you; Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk; I pursue you where none else has pursued you; Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustom’d routine, if these conceal you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me; The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these balk others, they do not balk me, The pert apparel, the deform’d attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside. There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you; There is no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good is in you; No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you; No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you. As for me, I give nothing to any one, except I give the like carefully to you; I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you. Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard! These shows of the east and west are tame, compared to you; These immense meadows—these interminable rivers—you are immense and interminable as they; These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution—you are he or she who is master or mistress over them, Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution. The hopples fall from your ankles—you find an unfailing sufficiency; Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself; Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted; Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.

Self-denial can lock women into a smug and critical condescension to other, less devout women. According to Appel, cult members develop..."an attitude of moral superiority, a contempt for secular laws, rigidity of thought, and the diminution of regard for the individual." A premium is placed on conformity to the cult group; deviation is penalized. "Beauty" is derivative; conforming to the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty that is then used to punish women physically and psychologically for failure to achieve and conform to it] is "beautiful." The aim of beauty thinking, about weight or age, is rigid female thought. Cult members are urged to sever all ties with the past: "I destroyed all my fat photographs!"; "It's a new me!

Beauty or meaning is not intrinsic too suffering. But if you can take the suffering and find the parts that are funny or profound, you can curate your world into something that might be entertaining for someone for a while. Eventually, maybe, that time will have been useful. More useful than, like, working in a bank.

But then again, there’s nothing intrinsically valuable about any kind of art. That’s not me complaining or making light. It’s one of the most wonderful aspects to art—the fact that people decide what is beautiful. We don’t get to decide what is food and what is not. (Yes, exceptions exist. Don’t be pedantic. When you pass those marbles, we’re all going to laugh.) But we absolutely get to decide what counts as art. If Yumi’s people wanted to declare that rock arrangements surpassed painting or sculpture as an artistic creation…well, I personally found it fascinating. The spirits agreed.

There can be no love unless there is faith which means a feeling or vision of the ideal's beauty and this ultimately depends upon what intrinsic beauty the ideal has. The nearer an ideal is to Beauty of Consciousness, the greater the possibility of our loving it completely and passionately loving it

A few minutes after discovering we had a goal but no plan, Brent was laughing heartily at a pathetic joke I had made. It reminded me of the first day on campus when I had thought his laughter sounded like a melody. It did now, even more so. It was music, beautiful, in a manly way, like a sensual, slow jazz. I loved jazz. “Jazz, huh?” Brent asked, his voice suddenly husky. “Uh . . . what?” “My laugh reminds you of jazz? Is there anything about me you don’t find attractive?” He rubbed his hand over his lips trying to cover his smirk. “So tell me, how much do you love jazz?” I’m sure my face was pinker than the inside of a watermelon. “I didn’t say any of that.” “You didn’t have to say it, Yara, I could hear it.” Brent tapped the side of his head. “I can hear your thoughts.” “You’re not serious.” “Oh, but I am,” he said, completely straight-faced.

Instances of delightfulness are always intrinsically beautiful, so to speak, and yet under the right circumstances they may be swinish as well, for what is humanly beautiful might, as it were, be too beautiful for human beings, for which reason people are glad to place beauty in proximity to pigpens, as one is no doubt justified in saying.

A beautiful object has no intrinsic quality that is good for the mind, nor an ugly object any intrinsic power to harm it. Beautiful and ugly are just projections of the mind. The ability to cause happiness or suffering is not a property of the outer object itself. For example, the sight of a particular individual can cause happiness to one person and suffering to another. It is the mind that attributes such qualities to the perceived object.

A true sensual woman is intrinsically connected to her inner passion and adept at channeling that passion to drive every beauty, fashion and lifestyle choice she makes.

Depending on one’s point of view, Hagakure represents a mystical beauty intrinsic to the Japanese aesthetic experience, and a stoic but profound appreciation of the meaning of life and death.

The beauty of things means virtue and value in them It is in the beholder's eye, not the worlds? Certainly. It is the human mind's translation of the transhuman Intrinsic glory. It means the world is sound.

We imagine ourselves in complex ways, but oftentimes that can be distilled down into some core identities. And we imagine these identities as part of a story, and that that story is some intrinsically positive thing. It might be being part of a tradition, or breaking free of one. It might be your race or height or hair color. Your status as a child or a parent. Being a job creator or a Star Wars fan or a snowboarder. We create positive narratives around these things, and when we fit in them, we feel like we matter.

Difficult roads can lead you to beautiful destinations; and the beauty of humanity is in our shared mutuality and intrinsic reciprocity, you are never alone in your difficulty, we are all made of the same stardust! The essence of spirituality and the bigger picture is to uncover who you truly are and share in that hard-won individuality; to be a force of good aligning with your gifts, talents and special qualities that we all grow from. We can transmute and transition every seemingly negative thought, emotion, and circumstance for our greater good and those around us.

In Ranec’s eye the finest and most perfect example of anything was beautiful, and anything beautiful was the finest and most perfect example of spirit; it was the essence of it. That was his religion. Beyond that, at the core of his aesthetic soul, he felt that beauty had an intrinsic value of its own, and he believed there was a potential for beauty in everything. While some activities or objects could be simply functional, he felt that anyone who came close to achieving perfection in any activity was an artist, and the results contained the essence of beauty. But the art was as much in the activity as in the results. Works of art were not just the finished product, but the thought, the action, the process that created them.

And so all great music, great prose, everything beautiful must depend upon the sure, free measure with which it is gardened and put into language for the people, for each lovely thing has its intrinsic value and belongs in its own position for the world to study, understand and thrive upon.

Life is a great big beautiful three-ring circus. There are those on the floor making their lives among the heads of lions and hoops of fire, and those in the stands, complacent and wowed, their mouths stuffed with popcorn. I know less now than ever about life, but I do know its size. Life is enormous. Much grander than what we’ve taken for ourselves, so far. When the show is over and the tent is packed, the elephants, lions and dancing poodles are caged and mounted on trucks to caravan to the next town. The clown’s makeup has worn, and his bright, red smile has been washed down a sink. All that is left is another performance, another tent and set of lights. We rest in the knowledge: the show must go on. Somewhere, behind our stage curtain, a still, small voice asks why we haven’t yet taken up juggling. My seminars were like this. Only, instead of flipping shiny, black bowling balls or roaring chainsaws through the air, I juggled concepts. The world is intrinsically tied together. All things march through time at different intervals but move ahead in one fashion or another. Though we may never understand it, we are all part of something much larger than ourselves—something anchoring us to the spot we have mentally chosen. We sniff out the rules, through spiritual quests and the sciences. And with every new discovery, we grow more confused. Our inability to connect what seems illogical to unite and to defy logic in our understanding keeps us from enlightenment. The artists and insane tiptoe around such insights, but lack the compassion to hand-feed these concepts to a blind world. The interconnectedness of all things is not simply a pet phrase. It is a big “T” truth that the wise spend their lives attempting to grasp.

I believe that in our culture of simulation, the notion of authenticity is for us what sex was for the Victorians—threat and obsession, taboo and fascination. I have lived with this idea for many years; yet, at the museum, I found the children’s position strangely unsettling. For them, in this context, aliveness seemed to have no intrinsic value. Rather, it is useful only if needed for a specific purpose. Darwin’s endless forms so beautiful were no longer sufficient unto themselves.

Beauty, he tells his students, is a constructed, not intrinsic, condition.

self-determination theory, which holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered “intrinsic” to human happiness and far outweigh “extrinsic” values such as beauty, money, and status.

Our forefathers were not only brave. I believe they were right. I believe that what they meant was that every man born had equal right to grow from scratch by way of his own power unhindered to the highest expression of himself possible to him. This of course not antagonistic by sympathetic to the growth of all men as brothers. Free emulation not imitation of the "bravest and the best" is to be expected of him. Uncommon he may and will and should become as inspiration to his fellows, not a reflection upon them, not to be resented but accepted--and in this lies the only condition of the common man's survival. So only is he intrinsic to democracy. Persistently holding quality above quantity only as he attempts to live a superior life of his own, and to whatsoever degree in whatever case he finds it; this is his virtue in a democracy such as ours was designed to be. Only this sense of proportion affords tranquility of spirit, in itself beauty, in either character of action. Nature is never other than serene even in a thunderstorm. The assumption of the "firm countenance, lips compressed" in denial or resentment is not known to her as it is known to civilization. Such negation by human countenance may be moral (civilization is inclined to morality) but even so not nature. Again exuberance is repose but never excess.

When radical acceptance blossoms in our relationships, it becomes a kind of spiritual re-parenting that enables us to trust the goodness and beauty of who we really are. Just as good parenting mirrors back to a child that they are lovable, when we understand and accept others, we affirm their intrinsic worth and belonging. To receive this kind of Radical Acceptance can transform our lives.

He went farther; agonised by the reflection, at the moment when it passed by him, so near and yet so infinitely remote, that, while it was addressed to their ears, it knew them not, he would regret, almost, that it had a meaning of its own, an intrinsic and unalterable beauty, foreign to themselves, just as in the jewels given to us, or even in the letters written to us by a woman with whom we are in love, we find fault with the 'water' of a stone, or with the words of a sentence because they are not fashioned exclusively from the spirit of a fleeting intimacy and of a 'lass unaparalleled.

Kintsugi is based on the belief that something broken is stronger and more beautiful because of its imperfections, the history attached to it, and its altered state. Instead of hiding what’s been damaged, the shards are mended with a special resin mixed with gold dust. The bonded seams become an intrinsic part of the ceramic and add a personalized, one-of-a-kind beauty through its imperfections.

doing profitable and intrinsically significant work, of helping men and women to achieve independence from bosses, so that they may become their own employers, or members of a self-governing, co-operative group working for subsistence and a local market . . . this differently orientated technological progress (would result in) a progressive decentralisation of population, of political and economic power’.

The findings are in keeping with something called self-determination theory, which holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered “intrinsic” to human happiness and far outweigh “extrinsic” values such as beauty, money, and status. Bluntly

The Genesis declaration carries the central truth that each human person is a precious individual, whether strong or weak, rich or poor, able-bodied or handicapped, intellectually brilliant or limited, beautiful or plain.

The conventions of hedonism and of utility can, in fact, be extremely elaborate. Its motives, however, though perhaps wholly free of greed, remain strictly those of need. Goodness remains reducible to utility, rightness to prudence, beauty to aesthetic enjoyment. The point of reference is individual preference, not the generically human vision of a moral sense of life. What is missing is the recognition of intrinsic beauty, rightness, goodness.

We are young,beautiful scum,pissed off with the world…We are the suicide of the non-generation.We are as far away from anything in the 80s as possible, e.g. 80s' pop automation, the long running saga of the whimsical pop essay and the intrinsic musical sculptures of post-modernism…We are the only young kids in UK Channel Boredom to realise the future is in tight trousers, dyed hair and NOT the baggy loose attitude scum fuck retard zerodom of Madchester

We strive to live in a world that places tremendous, even infinite value on a single human life. We do not live in that society, but I think part of the reason we strive for it is because we need to signal that our existence is intrinsically meaningful.

We are not to restrict God's presence in the world to a limited range of “pious” objects and situations, while labelling everything else as “secular”; but we are to see all things as essentially sacred, as a gift from God and a means of communion with him. It does not, however, follow that we are to accept the fallen world on its own terms. This is the unhappy mistake of much “secular Christianity” in the contemporary west. All things are indeed sacred in their true being, according to their innermost essence; but our relationship to God's creation has been distorted by sin, original and personal, and we shall not rediscover this intrinsic sacredness unless our heart is purified. Without self-denial, without ascetic discipline, we cannot affirm the true beauty of the world. That is why there can be no genuine contemplation without repentance.

Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes. The “old blue” that we hang about our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried. Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house? That china dog that ornaments the bedroom of my furnished lodgings. It is a white dog. Its eyes blue. Its nose is a delicate red, with spots. Its head is painfully erect, its expression is amiability carried to verge of imbecility. I do not admire it myself. Considered as a work of art, I may say it irritates me. Thoughtless friends jeer at it, and even my landlady herself has no admiration for it, and excuses its presence by the circumstance that her aunt gave it to her. But in 200 years’ time it is more than probable that that dog will be dug up from somewhere or other, minus its legs, and with its tail broken, and will be sold for old china, and put in a glass cabinet. And people will pass it round, and admire it. They will be struck by the wonderful depth of the colour on the nose, and speculate as to how beautiful the bit of the tail that is lost no doubt was. We, in this age, do not see the beauty of that dog. We are too familiar with it. It is like the sunset and the stars: we are not awed by their loveliness because they are common to our eyes. So it is with that china dog. In 2288 people will gush over it. The making of such dogs will have become a lost art. Our descendants will wonder how we did it, and say how clever we were. We shall be referred to lovingly as “those grand old artists that flourished in the nineteenth century, and produced those china dogs.” The “sampler” that the eldest daughter did at school will be spoken of as “tapestry of the Victorian era,” and be almost priceless. The blue-and-white mugs of the present-day roadside inn will be hunted up, all cracked and chipped, and sold for their weight in gold, and rich people will use them for claret cups; and travellers from Japan will buy up all the “Presents from Ramsgate,” and “Souvenirs of Margate,” that may have escaped destruction, and take them back to Jedo as ancient English curios.

If diamonds were needy and readily available, no human searching for value would want them. And the same goes, when you want from a state of neediness of lack, you will scared away people despite your intrinsic worth, even if you don't show it, their subconscious will pick up on this energy. The moment you believe don't need anyone and fall in love with yourself, you will attract genuine love, because people can feel that you are love manifested in human form and their is magnetic pull surround that about that state. You will radiate a light to which people gather around like moths to a flame to witness your beauty.

felt it for the first time when I was working on the legal codes and drafts of the Enlightenment. They were based on the belief that a good order is intrinsic to the world, and that therefore the world can be brought into good order. To see how legal provisions were created paragraph by paragraph out of this belief as solemn guardians of this good order, and worked into laws that strove for beauty and by their very beauty for truth, made me happy. For a long time I believed that there was progress in the history of law, a development towards greater beauty and truth, rationality and humanity, despite terrible setbacks and retreats. Once it became clear to me that this belief was a chimera, I began playing with a different image of the course of legal history. In this one it still has a purpose, but the goal it finally attains, after countless disruptions, confusions, and delusions, is the beginning, its own original starting point, which once reached must be set off from again.

For Chesterton and Tolkien, the goodness, truth, and beauty of fairy stories are to be found in the way they judge the way things are from the perspective of the way things ought to be. The should judges the is. This is the way things ought to be. We do not condone selfishness merely because it is normal, nor should we. A healthy perspective always judges selfishness—most especially our own selfishness—from the perspective of selflessness. In the language of religion, we always judge sin from the perspective of virtue, that which is wrong from the perspective of that which is right. Fairy stories share with religion the belief in objective morality, which is the fruit of the knowledge of the union of the natural with the supernatural and therefore the communion of the one with the other. This moral perspective is condemned by the materialist and the relativist, which is why such people are equally skeptical of the respective value of fairy stories and religion, seeing both as intrinsically untrue.

Make the race proud," the elders used to say. But by then, I knew that I wasn't so much bound by a biological race as to a group of people, and these people were not black because of any uniform color or any uniform physical feature. They were bound because they suffered under the weight of the dream, and they were bound by all the beautiful things, all the language and mannerisms, all the food and music, all the literature and philosophy, all the common language that they had fashioned like diamonds under the weight of the dream. ... In other words, I was part of a world. And looking out, I had friends who too were part of other worlds. The world of Jews, or New Yorkers. The world of southerners or gay men. Of immigrants, of Californians, of Native Americans, or a combination of any of these worlds stitched into worlds like tapestry. And though I could never myself be a native of any of these worlds, I knew that nothing so essentialist as race stood between us. I had read too much by then, and my eyes, my beautiful precious eyes, were growing stronger each day. And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us, but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us. Intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do. In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after.

The findings are in keeping with something called self-determination theory, which holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered “intrinsic” to human happiness and far outweigh “extrinsic” values such as beauty, money, and status.

Plato's proposals in this matter are abhorrent to all true Christians. His intentions were, of course, excellent, for he desired the greatest possible improvement of the human race; but his good intentions led him to the proposal of measures which are necessarily unacceptable and repugnant to all those who adhere to Christian principles concerning the value of the human personality and the sanctity of human life. Moreover, it by no means follows that what has been found successful in the breeding of animals, will also prove successful when applied to the human race, for man has a rational soul which is not intrinsically dependent on matter but is directly created by Almighty God. Does a beautiful soul always go with a beautiful body or a good character with a strong body? Again, if such measures were successful — and what does "successful" mean in this connection? — in the case of the human race, it does not follow that the Government has the right to apply such measures. Those who to-day follow, or would like to follow, in the footsteps of Plato, advocating, e.g. compulsory sterilisation of the unfit, have not, be it remembered, Plato's excuse, that he lied at a period anterior to the presentation of the Christian ideals and principles. — 230

This nostalgic impulse is of course extremely powerful, and has recently been harnessed to great effect by reactionary and fascist political movements, but I’m not convinced that this means the impulse itself is intrinsically fascistic. I think it makes sense that people are looking back wistfully to a time before the natural world started dying, before our shared cultural forms degraded into mass marketing and before our cities and towns became anonymous employment hubs.

If you think about it, an enormous amount of damage is created by the myth of utopia. There is an intrinsic feeling in nearly every person that your life could be perfect if you only had such-and-such a car of such-and-such a spouse or such-and-such a job. We believe we will be made whole by our accomplishments, our possessions, or our social status. It's written in the fabric of our DNA that life used to be beautiful and now it isn't, and if only this and if only that, it would be beautiful again.

The world is bulging with desirable women, as you have no doubt noticed already, but there are some who have a special presence, as if the space they occupy has more intrinsic depth and reality than that of others. These ones are surreptitiously incandescent, they glow with an invisible light reminiscent of mountains, shortly after dawn, in a tropical land. When I encounter one of these, it is like being in a clearing in the Amazon when a jaguar strolls past, sniffing the air, or like going to the front of a boat, looking down into the water, and seeing dolphins curvetting across the bows.

Without being aware of it, Carlos was making a distinction in relationships that Aristotle had made more than two thousand years earlier in his Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle wrote that there is a kind of a friendship ladder, from lowest to highest. At the bottom—where emotional bonds are weakest and the benefits are lowest—are friendships based on utility: deal friends, to use Carlos’s coinage. You are friends in an instrumental way, one that helps each of you achieve something else you want, such as professional success. Higher up are friends based on pleasure. You are friends because of something you like and admire about the other person. They are entertaining, or funny, or beautiful, or smart, for example. In other words, you like an inherent quality, which makes it more elevated than a friendship of utility, but it is still basically instrumental. At the highest level is Aristotle’s “perfect friendship,” which is based on willing each other’s well-being and a shared love for something good and virtuous that is outside either of you. This might be a friendship forged around religious beliefs or passion for a social cause. What it isn’t is utilitarian. The other person shares in your passion, which is intrinsic, not instrumental. Of

Success, Bill Gates said, is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose. Same goes for good looking people. Beauty reduces the consciousness that it takes more to catch the heart of the right partner. We often think being good at one thing is all we need to succeed, but hey, success is less of what you are good at, but more of what you are good for. Of what use is beauty with no brains, culture without character, knowledge that does not impact, or skill that does not add value? For any seemingly "good" thing to last, great attention we must pay to the unseen intrinsic component that sustains it.

One cure for the pain of desecration is the move towards total PROFANATION: in other words, to wipe out all vestiges of sanctity from the once worshipped object, to make it merely a thing OF the world, and not just a thing IN the world, something that is nothing over and above the substitutes that can at any time replace it. That is what we see in the spreading addiction to pornography - a profanation that removes the sexual bond entirely from the realm of intrinsic values. It involves wiping out one area in which the idea of the beautiful had taken root, so as to protect ourselves from the possibility of loving it and therefore losing it.

I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly as language became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language. But how was one to rehabilitate and transform words betrayed and perverted by the enemy? Hunger—thirst—fear—transport—selection—fire—chimney: these words all have intrinsic meaning, but in those times, they meant something else. Writing in my mother tongue—at that point close to extinction—I would pause at every sentence, and start over and over again. I would conjure up other verbs, other images, other silent cries. It still was not right. But what exactly was "it"? "It" was something elusive, darkly shrouded for fear of being usurped, profaned. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale, lifeless. Was there a way to describe the last journey in sealed cattle cars, the last voyage toward the unknown? Or the discovery of a demented and glacial universe where to be inhuman was human, where disciplined, educated men in uniform came to kill, and innocent children and weary old men came to die? Or the countless separations on a single fiery night, the tear- ing apart of entire families, entire communities? Or, incredibly, the vanishing of a beautiful, well-behaved little Jewish girl with golden hair and a sad smile, murdered with her mother the very night of their arrival? How was one to speak of them without trembling and a heart broken for all eternity?

I think, if it’s real at all, that women would be better at it than men,” said Rachel, looking out across the lake. “And not because women are intrinsically more intuitive—we’re all so obsessed with the idea of a woman’s intuition. No. It’s because women can see patterns better than men. Think, for example, of textiles. For centuries, women have been weavers. And those women have been able to see patterns and make inferences that create beautiful things. All we’re doing is weaving together a life. Trying to see where the different threads take us.” I thought of Moirai, the Greek weaving goddesses who were said to assign our fate at birth. Clotho spun the fabric of our lives, while Lachesis pulled the thread out. Atropos, the cutter, decided when it would end. The three, it was believed, decided a baby’s fate within a few days of its birth.

The tribal ceremonies of birth, initiation, marriage, burial, installation, and so forth, serve to translate the individual's life-crises and life-deeds into classic, impersonal forms. They disclose him to himself, not as this personality or that, but as the warrior, the bride, the widow, the priest, the chieftain; at the same time rehearsing for the rest of the community the old lesson of the archetypal stages. All participate in the ceremonial according to rank and function. The whole society becomes visible to itself as an imperishable living unit. Generations of individuals pass, like anonymous cells from a living body; but the sustaining, timeless form remains. By an enlargement of vision to embrace this superindividual, each discovers himself enhanced, enriched, supported, and magnified. His role, however unimpressive, is seen to be intrinsic to the beautiful festival-image of man—the image, potential yet necessarily inhibited, within himself. Social duties continue the lesson of the festival into normal, everyday existence, and the individual is validated still. Conversely, indifference, revolt—or exile—break the vitalizing connectives. From the standpoint of the social unit, the broken-off individual is simply nothing—waste. Whereas the man or woman who can honestly say that he or she has lived the role—whether that of priest, harlot, queen, or slave—is something in the full sense of the verb to be. Rites of initiation and installation, then, teach the lesson of the essential oneness of the individual and the group; seasonal festivals open a larger horizon. As the individual is an organ of society, so is the tribe or city—so is humanity entire—only a phase of the mighty organism of the cosmos.

I am thirty. I made two girls within my own body, felt the rush of bringing them into the world, and when I saw their bodies, I saw a miracle. Their skin and eye lashes perfect. Tiny lips, tiny fingernails, eyes embodying innocence and awe. They grow and run around my house naked and scream wildly without self-awareness or social concern. I teach them about our culture and what is and isn’t acceptable. But what I will not teach them is shame of their body. It was beautiful from moment one, and that will not change - not with age, not with anything. One daughter looks at her body in the mirror, we talk about the organs and skin, how her body will change. She is beautiful on every count. I remember when I was six, and I know I have to warn her. Not shame her, but tell her how some people were not taught to love, but take for themselves and she must be brave and aware. It pains me as I tell her, her innocent mind not know why one person would hurt another in such a way. “Do not be afraid,” I tell her. “But this is our culture, so be smart and be aware my brave girl.” Shame teaches us, but I will not teach my daughters in this way. I will empower them to be proud of their bodies, respectful of their bodies, in awe of how miraculous it is and what it is capable of. I will tell my daughter that to be a woman is not to be lesser, not object, not the bed in the red light district, nor the “bitch” in the hotel. She is not the body to exploit or product to consume. “She” is not shame. “She” is beautiful woman with beautiful body, capable of cosmic realities. Holding someone close, experiencing love, making love, creating life, accepting another human life as her own, feeling pain, joy, giving strength, healing with a kiss, wholeness with a touch; giving physical and mental nourishment with her own body. “She” is grounded enough to follow, still capable to lead from a child to a nation. The woman’s body is made in the image of Love, from Love herself, Life herself, so she herself is of God. For my Grandmother, for my Mother, for my daughters, my friends, and as a reminder to myself: be proud, beautiful woman, your body is intrinsically good, perfectly good. Perfect from moment one.

And my eyes—my beautiful, precious eyes—were growing stronger each day. And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do. In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after. In that single exchange with that young man, I was speaking the personal language of my people. It was the briefest intimacy, but it captured much of the beauty of my black world—the ease between your mother and me, the miracle at The Mecca, the way I feel myself disappear on the streets of Harlem. To call that feeling racial is to hand over all those diamonds, fashioned by our ancestors, to the plunderer. We made that feeling, though it was forged in the shadow of the murdered, the raped, the disembodied, we made it all the same. This is the beautiful thing that I have seen with my own eyes, and I think I needed this vantage point before I could journey out. I think I needed to know that I was from somewhere, that my home was as beautiful as any other.

I had been thinking earlier that if I had not enjoyed my first experience of La Berma it was because, as with my earlier encounters with Gilberte in the Champs-Élysées, I had approached it with too strong a desire. Between these two disappointments there was perhaps not only this resemblance, but another, deeper one. The impression made upon us by a person or a work of strong character (or its interpretation) is intrinsic to them. We have brought along with us the ideas of “beauty,” “breadth of style,” “pathos,” which we might just possibly think we recognize in the banality of a passable talent or face, but our critical mind is confronted in fact with the nagging presence of a form for which it possesses no intellectual equivalent, the unknown part of which it needs to extricate. It hears a high-pitched sound, an oddly questioning intonation. It asks: “Is that good? Is it admiration I am feeling? Is this what is meant by richness of color, nobility, power?” And what answers back is a high-pitched voice, an oddly questioning tone, the despotic impression, wholly material, caused by a person we do not know, in which no scope is left for “breadth of interpretation.” And for this reason, really fine works of art, if they are given genuine attention, are the ones that disappoint us most, because in the sum total of our ideas there is none that responds to an individual impression.

I know we agree that civilization is presently in its decadent declining phase, and that lurid ugliness is the predominant visual feature of modern life. Cars are ugly, buildings are ugly, mass-produced disposable consumer goods are unspeakably ugly. The air we breathe is toxic, the water we drink is full of microplastics, and our food is contaminated by cancerous Teflon chemicals. Our quality of life is in decline, and along with it, the quality of aesthetic experience available to us. The contemporary novel is (with very few exceptions) irrelevant; mainstream cinema is family-friendly nightmare porn funded by car companies and the US Department of Defense; and visual art is primarily a commodity market for oligarchs. It is hard in these circumstances not to feel that modern living compares poorly with the old ways of life, which have come to represent something more substantial, more connected to the essence of the human condition. This nostalgic impulse is of course extremely powerful, and has recently been harnessed to great effect by reactionary and fascist political movements, but I’m not convinced that this means the impulse itself is intrinsically fascistic. I think it makes sense that people are looking back wistfully to a time before the natural world started dying, before our shared cultural forms degraded into mass marketing and before our cities and towns became anonymous employment hubs.

The Blue Mind Rx Statement Our wild waters provide vast cognitive, emotional, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual values for people from birth, through adolescence, adulthood, older age, and in death; wild waters provide a useful, widely available, and affordable range of treatments healthcare practitioners can incorporate into treatment plans. The world ocean and all waterways, including lakes, rivers, and wetlands (collectively, blue space), cover over 71% of our planet. Keeping them healthy, clean, accessible, and biodiverse is critical to human health and well-being. In addition to fostering more widely documented ecological, economic, and cultural diversities, our mental well-being, emotional diversity, and resiliency also rely on the global ecological integrity of our waters. Blue space gives us half of our oxygen, provides billions of people with jobs and food, holds the majority of Earth's biodiversity including species and ecosystems, drives climate and weather, regulates temperature, and is the sole source of hydration and hygiene for humanity throughout history. Neuroscientists and psychologists add that the ocean and wild waterways are a wellspring of happiness and relaxation, sociality and romance, peace and freedom, play and creativity, learning and memory, innovation and insight, elation and nostalgia, confidence and solitude, wonder and awe, empathy and compassion, reverence and beauty — and help manage trauma, anxiety, sleep, autism, addiction, fitness, attention/focus, stress, grief, PTSD, build personal resilience, and much more. Chronic stress and anxiety cause or intensify a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. Being on, in, and near water can be among the most cost-effective ways of reducing stress and anxiety. We encourage healthcare professionals and advocates for the ocean, seas, lakes, and rivers to go deeper and incorporate the latest findings, research, and insights into their treatment plans, communications, reports, mission statements, strategies, grant proposals, media, exhibits, keynotes, and educational programs and to consider the following simple talking points: •Water is the essence of life: The ocean, healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands are good for our minds and bodies. •Research shows that nature is therapeutic, promotes general health and well-being, and blue space in both urban and rural settings further enhances and broadens cognitive, emotional, psychological, social, physical, and spiritual benefits. •All people should have safe access to salubrious, wild, biodiverse waters for well-being, healing, and therapy. •Aquatic biodiversity has been directly correlated with the therapeutic potency of blue space. Immersive human interactions with healthy aquatic ecosystems can benefit both. •Wild waters can serve as medicine for caregivers, patient families, and all who are part of patients’ circles of support. •Realization of the full range and potential magnitude of ecological, economic, physical, intrinsic, and emotional values of wild places requires us to understand, appreciate, maintain, and improve the integrity and purity of one of our most vital of medicines — water.

It is strange how this fails to annoy me, although as a rule I am sensitive to bad manners. It is just that occasionally, very occasionally, one meets someone who is so markedly a contrast with the general run of people that one’s instinctive reaction is one of admiration, indulgence, and, no doubt, if one is not very careful indeed, of supplication. I am not arguing the rights and wrongs of this: I am simply stating the facts as they appear to me. And not only to me, for I have noticed that extremely handsome men and extremely beautiful women exercise a power over others which they themselves have no need, or indeed no time, to analyse. People like Nick attract admirers, adherents, followers. They also attract people like me: observers. One is never totally at ease with such people, for they are like sovereigns and one’s duty is to divert them. Matters like worth or merit rarely receive much of their attention, for, with the power of choice which their looks bestow on them, they can change their minds when they care to do so. Because of their great range of possibilities, their attention span is very limited. And their beauty has accustomed them to continuous gratification. I find such people – and I have met one or two – quite fascinating. I find myself respecting them, as I would respect some natural phenomenon: a rainbow, a mountain, a sunset. I recognize that they might have no intrinsic merit, and yet I will find myself trying to please them, to attract their attention. ‘Look at me,’ I want to say. ‘Look at me.’ And I am also intrigued by their destinies, which could, or should, be marvelous. I will exert myself for such people, and I will miss them when they leave. I will always want to know about them, for I tend to be in love with their entire lives. That is a measure of the power they exert. That is why I join Nick in a smile of complicity when he spares himself the boredom of a conversation with Dr. Simek. It is a kind of law, I suppose.

While the indecisive customer hovered over an array of perfumes that Nettle had brought out for her, the American girls browsed among the shelves of perfumes, colognes, pomades, waxes, creams, soaps, and other items intended for beauty care. There were bath oils in stoppered crystal bottles, , and tins of herbal unguents, and tiny boxes of violet pastilles to freshen the breath. Lower shelves held treasure troves of scented candles and inks, sachets filled with clove-saturated smelling salts, potpourri bowls, and jars of pastes and balms. Nettle noticed, however, that while the younger girl, Daisy, viewed the assortment with only mild interest, the older one, Lillian, had stopped before a row of oils and extracts that contained pure scent. Rose, frangipani, jasmine, bergamot, and so forth. Lifting the amber glass bottles, she opened them carefully and inhaled with visible appreciation. Eventually the blond woman made her choice, purchased a flacon of perfume, and left the shop, a small bell ringing cheerfully as the door closed. Lillian, who had turned to glance at the departing woman, murmured thoughtfully, "I wonder why it is that so many light-haired women smell of amber..." "You mean amber perfume?" Daisy asked. "No- their skin itself. Amber, and sometimes honey..." "What on earth do you mean?" the younger girl asked with a bemused laugh. "People don't smell like anything, except when they need to wash." The pair regarded each other with what appeared to be mutual surprise. "Yes, they do," Lillian said. "Everyone has a smell... don't say you've never noticed? The way some people's skin is like bitter almond, or violet, while others..." "Others have a scent like plum, or palm sap, or fresh hay," Nettle commented. Lillian glanced at him with a satisfied smile. "Yes, exactly!" Nettle removed his spectacles and polished them with care, while his mind swarmed with questions. Could it be? Was it possible that this girl could actually detect a person's intrinsic scent? He himself could- but it was a rare gift, and not one that he had ever known a woman to have.

The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse. Hiro's avatar is now on the Street, too, and if the couples coming off the monorail look over in his direction, they can see him, just as he's seeing them. They could strike up a conversation: Hiro in the U-Stor-It in L.A. and the four teenagers probably on a couch in a suburb of Chicago, each with their own laptop. But they probably won't talk to each other, any more than they would in Reality. These are nice kids, and they don't want to talk to a solitary crossbreed with a slick custom avatar who's packing a couple of swords. Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment. If you're ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you've just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these. Hiro's avatar just looks like Hiro, with the difference that no matter what Hiro is wearing in Reality, his avatar always wears a black leather kimono. Most hacker types don't go in for garish avatars, because they know that it takes a lot more sophistication to render a realistic human face than a talking penis. Kind of the way people who really know clothing can appreciate the fine details that separate a cheap gray wool suit from an expensive hand-tailored gray wool suit. You can't just materialize anywhere in the Metaverse, like Captain Kirk beaming down from on high. This would be confusing and irritating to the people around you. It would break the metaphor. Materializing out of nowhere (or vanishing back into Reality) is considered to be a private function best done in the confines of your own House. Most avatars nowadays are anatomically correct, and naked as a babe when they are first created, so in any case, you have to make yourself decent before you emerge onto the Street. Unless you're something intrinsically indecent and you don't care.

Enjoyment requires discernment. It can be a gift to wrap up in a blanket and lose myself in a TV show but we can also amuse ourselves to death. My pleasure in wine or tea or exercise is good in itself but it can become disordered. As we learn to practice enjoyment we need to learn the craft of discernment: How to enjoy rightly, to have, to read pleasure well. There is a symbiotic relationship, cross-training, if you will, between the pleasures we find in gathered worship and those in my tea cup, or in a warm blanket, or the smell of bread baking. Lewis reminds us that one must walk before one can run. We will not be able to adore God on the highest occasions if we have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest. At best our faith and reason will tell us that He is adorable but we shall not have found Him so. These tiny moments of beauty in our day train us in the habits of adoration and discernment, and the pleasure and sensuousness of our gathered worship teach us to look for and receive these small moments in our days, together they train us in the art of noticing and reveling in our God’s goodness and artistry. A few weeks ago I was walking to work, standing on the corner of tire and auto parts store, waiting to cross the street when I suddenly heard church bells begin to ring, loud and long. I froze, riveted. They were beautiful. A moment of transcendence right in the middle of the grimy street, glory next to the discount tire and auto parts. Liturgical worship has been referred to sometimes derisively as smells and bells because of the sensuous ways Christians have historically worshipped: Smells, the sweet and pungent smell of incense, and bells, like the one I heard in neighborhood which rang out from a catholic church. At my church we ring bells during the practice of our eucharist. The acolyte, the person often a child, assisting the priest, rings chimes when our pastor prepares the communion meal. There is nothing magic about these chimes, nothing superstitious, they’re just bells. We ring them in the eucharist liturgy as a way of saying, “pay attention.” They’re an alarm to rouse the congregation to jostle us to attention, telling us to take note, sit up, and lean forward, and notice Christ in our midst. We need this kind of embodied beauty, smells and bells, in our gathered worship, and we need it in our ordinary day to remind us to take notice of Christ right where we are. Dostoevsky wrote that “beauty will save the world.” This might strike us as mere hyperbole but as our culture increasingly rejects the idea and language of truth, the churches role as the harbinger of beauty is a powerful witness to the God of all beauty. Czeslaw Milosz wrote in his poem, “One more day,” “Though the good is weak, beauty is very strong.” And when people cease to believe there is good and evil, only beauty will call to them and save them so that they still know how to say, “this is true and that is false.” Being curators of beauty, pleasure, and delight is therefore and intrinsic part of our mission, a mission that recognizes the reality that truth is beautiful. These moments of loveliness, good tea, bare trees, and soft shadows, or church bells, in my dimness, they jolt me to attention and remind me that Christ is in our midst. His song of truth, sung by His people all over the world, echos down my ordinary street, spilling even into my living room.

Bali Style Magazine, Book Review. James Fenton. "Books About Food and Spirit. Bali's Food Culture." Vol. 10, no.2 May 2014 “To an outsider, the cuisine of Bali is perhaps one of its least visible cultural features. Just about every visitor to the ‘island of the gods’ will have witnessed the spell-binding beauty of Bali’s brightly festooned temples and colourful ceremonies. Many of us have had the experience of being stopped in traffic while a long procession of Balinese in traditional dress pass by. However, how many of us have witnessed first-hand the intrinsic cultural links between Bali’s cuisine and its culture and religion? How many of us have witnessed the pains-taking predawn rituals of preparing the many and varied dishes that accompany a traditional celebration, such as Lawar or Babi Guling? In Balinese Food: The Traditional Cuisine & Food Culture of Bali, social and cultural historian Dr. Vivienne Kruger has compiled a meticulously researched record of the many aspects of Balinese cuisine—from the secular to the spiritual—with an eye for detail that evades most observers. In the book Dr Kruger chronicles in careful detail the ceremonies, rituals and practices that accompany virtually all of Bali’s unique culinary arts—from satay to sambal. All the classic Balinese dishes are represented such as a babi guling, the popular spit-roast pork to bebek betutu, whole smoked duck—each accompanied with a detailed recipe for those who would like to have a go at preparing the dish themselves. Lesser known aspects of Bali’s intriguing eating habits are also presented here. You may not know that the Balinese enjoy catching and eating such delicacies as dragon flies and rice paddy eels. Dog is also widely eaten around the island, and regretfully, endangered species of turtle are still consumed on some occasions. In all, Dr. Kruger has prepared a spicy and multi-layered dish as delicious and pains-takingly prepared as the dishes described within to create an impressive work of scholarship jampacked with information and insight into the rarely seen world of Bali’s cultural cuisine.

For all the intrinsic meaning of the word kilometer, we might just as well say that “we’re moving toward Leo at three pizzas and a cabbage per walrus.

There is a certain beauty in our intrinsic human cruelty.

In the beautiful God's glory is revealed as something communicable and intrinsically delightful, as including the creature in its ends, and as completely worthy of love; what God's glory necessitates and commands, beauty shows also to be gracious and inviting; glory calls not only for awe and penitence, but also for rejoicing; God's ordinance is also ordonnance, so to speak. There

evangelical Christianity needs to recover the form and beauty that are intrinsic to Christianity.

Here the glory-cross antithesis undergirds the distinction between human and divine love. Human love, Luther claims, is reactive: it responds to something intrinsically attractive in an object, which consequently draws it out. In other words, human love is attracted to what it first finds lovely. When a husband recalls the moment he fell in love with his wife, he remembers that he saw something intrinsically attractive within her—perhaps her physical beauty or her charming personality—and his heart was moved to love her. There was something in the object of his love that existed prior to his love and drew him toward her. This is the basic dynamic of human love; but we must remember that the revelation of God on the cross inverts such human logic. Thus, divine love, by contrast, is not reactive but creative: God does not find that which is lovely and then move out in love toward it; something is made lovely by the fact that God first sets his love upon it. He does not look at sinful human beings and see among the mass of people some who are intrinsically more righteous or holy than others and thus find himself attracted to them. Rather, the lesson of the cross is that God chooses that which is unlovely and repulsive, unrighteous and with no redeeming quality, and lavishes his saving love in Christ upon it.

So much of the consumerism that chokes our society, bringing misery to the haves and the have-nots alike, is driven by this desire to have, to wear, to drive: to possess the status symbols, the ‘exclusive’ signs of belonging. Time and again goods and services are offered by manufacturers not for their intrinsic virtue, the beauty of their design, or the genuine pleasure that might be had from owning or using them, but for their ‘exclusive’ cachet, their ‘exclusive designer label’.

Artists sometimes talk about art for art's sake. What they mean is that art has intrinsic worth: it has value in and of itself, apart from any utility. This needs to be said because there are always some people who wonder why we need art, on the assumption that in order to be a legitimate calling it must perform some practical function. But since God has made us to enjoy beauty, art itself is able to nourish our souls.

The fact that you do so much good doesn't mean that there'll be lots of people around you when everything you own, you lose. Being good most times leaves you vulnerable but great joy and satisfaction lies in its intrinsic value; A conscience that doesn't stutter, a heart that is free, a beautiful mind.

Taking those two considerations together, we reach the following interesting suggestion, which is that, whenever people attempt to close up the redundancy of practical reasoning by choosing between appearances, they are also disposed to interpret those appearances as intrinsically meaningful, and to present the meaning that they discover through a kind of reasoned dialogue, the goal of which is to secure some measure of agreement in judgements among those who have an interest in the choice. In saying this, we come very close to the eighteenth-century idea of taste, as a faculty whereby rational beings order their lives through a socially engendered sense of the right and wrong appearance.

When you decide to have kids, you must kill the illusion that you have any control over outcomes. It is a dangerous fantasy that will break your heart. When your life is intrinsically tied to other human beings, you have two choices: (a) spend a lifetime worrying about every possible outcome for people who ultimately grow up to make their own decisions, or (b) surrender to the reality that life is full of beauty and hurt and we can't really control the incidence of either. I've spent a lot of time trying to move from a to b.

The modern person feels himself to be disengaged from the world around him, rather than intrinsically related to it (by family, tribe, birthplace, vocation, and so forth). He is expected to forge his own destiny by an exercise of choice. He is concerned less with what is right than with what his rights are, or rather he grounds the former on the latter. The world for him is just a neutral space for his action, his free choice, and the greatest mysteries lie not outside but within himself.

Seeking happiness selfishly is the best way there is to make yourself, or anyone else, unhappy. Some people might think that the smartest way to guarantee their own well-being is to isolate themselves from others and to work hard at their own happiness, without consideration for other people. They probably assume that if everybody does that, we’ll all be happy. But the result would be exactly the opposite: instead of being happy, they would be torn between hope and fear, make their own lives miserable and ruin the lives of the people around them as well. In the end, just ‘looking out for number one’ is a losing proposition for everybody. One of the fundamental reasons such an approach is doomed is that the world is not made up of independent entities endowed with intrinsic properties that make them by nature beautiful or ugly, friends or enemies. Things and beings are essentially interdependent and in a constant state of transformation. The very elements that

I had friends who too were part of other worlds—the world of Jews or New Yorkers, the world of Southerners or gay men, of immigrants, of Californians, of Native Americans, or a combination of any of these, worlds stitched into worlds like tapestry. And though I could never, myself, be a native of any of these worlds, I knew that nothing so essentialist as race stood between us. I had read too much by then. And my eyes—my beautiful, precious eyes—were growing stronger each day. And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do. In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after.

We strive to live in a world that places tremendous, even infinite value on a single human life. We do not live in that society, but I think part of the reason we strive for it is because we need to signal that our existence is intrinsically meaningful. This is the only source of meaning that does not rely on other people; it is also the hardest one to hold on to.

The need of theory is supported by the eros of the philosopher. It is not the expression of his will to conquer nature. Therefore, the joys of contemplation are "immediate enjoyments," joys that belong intrinsically to contemplation, and they come without further setting of goals or justification to the one receptive to them. They are not tied to social use, neither dependent upon the opinion of others nor gained from the expectation of future glory. The love for the observation of nature, for the observation of the details of the structure in which nature becomes comprehensible, of the order in which nature is articulated, of the spectacle nature provides for one who takes an interest in its objects, who lets its forms, colors, and sounds affect him, this love accords with the love of oneself. Both discourage highfalutin plans to change the world by the transformation of nature. Both impose moderation on the philosopher. He will be especially adequate to his desire to "contribute" something "to this beautiful system" by his conceiving it as a "system" and as "beautiful." The contribution most his own is that he has the whole in view; that he sees things and beings within the horizon of the whole, that he investigates and orders them as parts, that he knows himself as a part and reflects on his relation to the whole or that he poses the question of the whole. But if he wants to keep the question of the whole in view, he may not lose himself. To conceive the "beautiful system," he must devote himself to it in detail and again return to himself. To be able to observe nature, he may not blend into it. Observation requires both proximity and distance.

Suppose it becomes the acknowledged purpose of inventors and engineers, observed Aldous Huxley, to provide ordinary people with the means of 'doing profitable and intrinsically significant work, of helping men and women to achieve independence from bosses, so that they may become their own employers, or members of a self-governing, co-operative group working for subsistence and a local market ... this differently orientated technological progress (would result in) a progressive decentralisation of population, of accessibility of land, of ownership of the means of production, of political and economic power'. Other advantages, said Huxley, would be 'a more humanly satisfying life for more people, a greater measure of genuine self-governing democracy and a blessed freedom from the silly or pernicious adult education provided by the mass producers of consumer goods through the medium of advertisements'.

The fascination with Medusa did not diminish at the end of the Greek Classical Era. She continued to function as a lightning rod for prevailing cultural attitudes. During the Greco-Roman period, images of Medusa were reproduced for wealthy patrons on mosaics and sculptural reliefs as mostly young and beautiful rather than disturbingly ferocious. Nevertheless, Christian zealots, who were rising in prominence, considered all pagan images abominations to be destroyed, especially of the Gorgon Medusa. During the Medieval period in Europe, Christian scholars considered the beheading of Medusa by Perseus to be an allegory of the virtuous son of god destroying the manifestation of evil, intrinsic to all women, that threatens men's souls.

To put it in somewhat contradictory terms, true tea existed only before the advent of the tea ceremony. After the coming of tea, when deformation came to be consciously sought, common everyday beauty disappeared and unnatural manipulation began. This meant the demise of the beauty of tea. Every country, according to its historical and geographical conditions, has its own peculiar character. India is characterized by intellect, China by ready action and Japan by aesthetic perception - the three splendors of the East. Indians are adept at thinking, Chinese at acting and Japanese at appreciating art. In Europe, France is close to Japan, Judaism to China and Germany to India. In Germany, however, the intellect tends to be philosophical rather than religious. While there may be many intrinsic contradictions, I still think that there is probably no country like Japan whose people live in surroundings composed of specially chosen objects. Behind it all is undoubtedly some sort of educated taste or standard of beauty. In Korea, the number of monochrome pieces in white or black glaze is stupendous. there are no intricate designs featuring a multitude of colors. the same is true for Korean textiles, which are undyed. Everyone wears white clothing.

Then there are those regions (and we’re getting into deeper gray now) where what matters is not a person’s relationship with some external thing, such as food or clothes or music, but rather some intrinsic quality of his or her own: beauty or physical fitness. Or intelligence. Since we can discard these attributes even less easily than our clothes, we can always be strictly categorized according to the perceptions emanating from these areas: of who matters (the beautiful, the athletic, and the intelligent, respectively) and who doesn’t (the ugly, the flabby and the dumb). Contempt for the unfit is stronger, I think, than disdain for the plain. Perhaps because of the passivity of beauty? But no, intelligence is every bit as passive, a gift either granted or denied. And yet the scorn felt for the unintelligent is an almost moral outrage. Never mind that the dull can’t help themselves, that they would, granted the sense to do so, have chosen to be otherwise. Their very existence is felt as a moral affront by those of us who dwell where the genius is hero. The color of our zone is only just discernably lighter than the true black of those who perceive people according to their acceptance of some moral or religious or political code.

Andy Scamp's simple list of the ways people feel valuable. 1. Just believing it. Sometimes this is religious, sometimes it is not. God cares for everyone, but society is supposed to as well. We strive to live in a world that places tremendous even infinite value on a single human life. We do not live in that society, but I think part of the reason we strive for it is because we need to signal that our existence in intrinsically meaningful. This is the only source of meaning that does not rely on other people, it is also that hardest to hold onto. 2. Story We understand ourselves in complex ways, but often times that can be distilled down into some core identities and we imagine these identities as part of a story and that that story is some intrinsically positive thing. It might being part of a tradition or breaking free of one. It might be your race or height or hair color. Your status as a child or a parent. Being a job creator or a Star Wars fan or a snowboarder. We create positive narrative around these things and when we fit in them we feel like we matter. 3. Being appreciated It might be hearing someone laugh at your joke or being paid a living wage or getting likes on Instagram. It might be only external or come from within. Appreciation is almost synonymous with value and I think this is where most meaning comes from. 4. Helping People This might sound the same as appreciation, but it is not. Indeed I think your average waste water treatment engineer will tell you that you can help a lot of people and not get a ton of thanks for it, but we are empathy machines and one of the most lasting and true ways of finding meaning is to actually be of service. 5. Comparison You know, keeping up with the Jones. Also, every sport, but it is more than just comparing ourselves to other people. We also compare our current selves to our past selves which is why getting better at something makes us feel valuable. Even if we are the only ones who really understand how much we are improving. 6. Impacting the World This one is simple, but so dangerous. If the world is different because you were in it then you must matter. You must be important if things changed because you exist, but if that is what you believe then the bigger the impact the more you matter and that can lead to some bad places.

Malook – Women’s Pret Clothing Brand is an upcoming fashion label founded by Shazia Ovais. Malook is a tribute to the strong, multifaceted beauty of today’s woman and its delicately crafted apparel designs aim to balance an intrinsic sense of feminity with avant-garde innovation.

The first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant events in the evolution of human consciousness. The feelings of joy and love are intrinsically connected to that recognition.

There is an intrinsic law: thoughts don’t have their own life. They are parasites; they live on your identifying with them. When you say, “I am angry,” you are pouring life energy into anger, because you are getting identified with anger.

And I think how beautiful it was then, through that void, to draw lines and parabolas, pick out the precise point, the intersection between space and time where the event would spring forth, undeniable in the prominence of its glow; whereas now events come flowing down without interruption, like cement being poured, one column next to the other, one within the other, separated by black and incongruous headlines, legible in many ways but intrinsically illegible, a doughy mass of events without form or direction, which surrounds, submerges, crushes all reasoning.

Yoga, whether dualist or nondualist, is concerned with the elimination of suffering (duhkha). Here suffering does not mean the pain resulting from a cut or the emotional torment experienced through political oppression. These are simply manifestations of a deeper existential suffering. That suffering is the direct outcome of our habitual sense of being locked into a body-mind that is separate from all others. Yoga seeks to prevent future suffering of this kind by pointing the way to the unitary consciousness that is disclosed in ego-transcending ecstatic states. From the viewpoint of traditional Yoga, even the pleasure or well-being (sukha) experienced as a result of the regular performance of yogic postures, breath control, or meditation is suffused with suffering. First of all, the pleasure is bound to be only temporary, whereas the innate bliss (ānanda) of the Self is permanent. Second, pleasure is relative: We can compare our present sense of enjoyment with similar experiences at different times or by different people. Thus, our experience contains an element of envy. Third, there is always the hidden fear that a pleasurable state will come to an end, which is a reasonable assumption. Yoga is a systematic attempt to step out of this whole cycle of gain and loss. When the yogin or yoginī is in touch with the Reality beyond the bodymind, and when he or she has a taste of the unalloyed delight of the Self, all possible pleasures that derive from objects (rather than the Self) come to lose their fascination. The mind begins to be more equanimous. As the Bhagavad-Gītā (2.48), the most popular Hindu Yoga scripture, puts it: “Yoga is balance (samatva).” This notion of balance is intrinsic to Yoga and occurs on many levels of the yogic work. Its culmination is in the “vision of sameness” (sama-darshana), which is the graceful state in which we see everything in the same light. Everything stands revealed as the great Reality, and nothing excites us as being more valuable than anything else. We regard a piece of gold and a clump of clay or a beautiful person and an unattractive individual with the same even-temperedness. Nor are we puffed up by praise or deflated by blame. This condition, which is one of utter lucidity and serenity, must not be confused with one of the many types of ecstasy (samādhi) known to yogins. Ecstasies, visions, and psychic (paranormal) phenomena are not at all the point of spiritual life. They can and do occur when we earnestly devote ourselves to higher values, but they are by-products rather than the goal of authentic spirituality. They should certainly not be made the focus of our aspiration. Thus, Yoga is a comprehensive way of life in which the ultimate Reality, or Spirit, is given precedence over other concerns. It is a sacred path that conducts us, in the words of an ancient Upanishad, from the unreal to the Real, from falsehood to Truth, from the temporal to the Eternal.

Through Unschooling, families rediscover the intrinsic value of spending time together, engaging in shared learning experiences, and celebrating the beauty of each family member's unique journey. It offers an opportunity to break free from the constraints of rigid schedules, standardized curricula, and external expectations, fostering an environment where curiosity, creativity, and exploration thrive.

Scandinavians generally possess an intimate understanding of nature and because of this have a heightened appreciation of the intrinsic qualities of raw materials (especially local ones). The long and rich traditions of craftmanship and folk art that have existed in all five countries demonstrate not only the Scandinavian peoples' empathy for materials, but also their desire to infuse everyday objects with a natural, unpretentious beauty.

you allow other entities to take away your freedoms all the time. It’s an intrinsic part of your system. It couldn’t function without that. You grant companies access to your attention so that they can alter your choices in exchange for entertainment. You identify with groups and grant them the ability to choose for you which problems you will be most concerned about. You listen to a friend when they care about something, and then you care about it too. One of the most powerful traits of your system is how ardently you believe in your individuality while simultaneously operating almost entirely as a collective.

But then again, there’s nothing intrinsically valuable about any kind of art. That’s not me complaining or making light. It’s one of the most wonderful aspects to art—the fact that people decide what is beautiful. We don’t get to decide what is food and what is not. (Yes, exceptions exist. Don’t be pedantic. When you pass those marbles, we’re all going to laugh.) But we absolutely get to decide what counts as art.

Being curators of beauty, pleasure, and delight is therefore an intrinsic part of our mission, a mission that recognizes the reality that truth is beautiful.

Life’s intrinsic nature is magical and beautiful. But you will discover that magic and beauty only when you learn to embrace pain. Now, you can’t negotiate with pain – it comes unannounced and uninvited; you can’t postpone it either. So, you simply have to accept it. When you embrace pain, Life reveals its true Self to you – of how compassionate it is, giving you what you need most – including your pain – so that you can grow and evolve. So that you learn to be happy despite your circumstances. So that you live fully, happily, with what is…

What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering. Similarly, 'Man's problem is not suffering itself', but the lack of answer to the crying question 'why do I suffer?'. He certainly demonstrated a knack for reversing of perspectives, in describing how illness granted him freedom from abrupt changes, encouraged forgetting painful memories, and living at an easy relaxed pace. It saved him from bookishness and philology, forcing him to listen to his own voice and think. The period of sickness was a period of happiness, a return to himself and to creativity. Illness enabled him to appreciate health, which is often taken for granted. It was an energizing self-restorative power that motivated him to live and create. Sickness increased his enjoyment of small things; and most importantly, with the instinct for self-healing, it cured him of his discouragement and philosophy of pessimism. The sage sees everything, and especially things like pain, which cannot be changed, as advantageous, as a blessing. Nietzsche described personal providence in the midst of 'the beautiful chaos of existence', and how the playful chance sometimes leads to beautiful unexpected places, that we could not have found on our own. With a positive mindset, the sage believes that everything eventually works out for the best. Providence however, needs our help in interpreting and rearranging events in a way that would benefit us

Aesthetic culture implies a way of life marked by uselessness and superfluousness, that is to say, the embodiment of romantic resignation and passivity. But it outdoes romanticism; it not only renounces life for the sake of art, it seeks for the justification of life in art itself. It regards the world of art as the only real compensation for the disappointments of life, as the genuine realization and consummation of an existence that is intrinsically incomplete and inarticulate. But this not only means that life seems more beautiful and more conciliatory when clothed in art, but that, as Proust, the last great impressionist and aesthetic hedonist, thought, it only grows into significant reality in memory, vision and the aesthetic experience. We live our experiences with the greatest intensity not when we encounter men and things in reality—the ‘time’ and the present of these experiences are always ‘lost’—but when we ‘recover time’, when we are no longer the actors but the spectators of our life, when we create or enjoy works of art, in other words, when we remember. Here, in Proust, art takes possession of what Plato had denied it: ideas—the true remembrance of the essential forms of being.

If the standard model is correct, the universe started in a state of high density and temperature, with all matter and radiation forming one great continuous mass. It is very remarkable that this undifferentiated soup should have the intrinsic property that in due course of time it develops into galaxies of which at least one creates life with such staggering complexity, subtlety and diversity and often such stunning beauty. It also creates thinking and feeling beings which in turn can contemplate the universe and study its properties and which can love and hate.

Nyoshul Lungtok, who later became one of the greatest Dzogchen masters of recent times, followed his teacher Patrul Rinpoche for about eighteen years. During all that time, they were almost inseparable. Nyoshul Lungtok studied and practiced extremely diligently, and accumulated a wealth of purification, merit, and practice; he was ready to recognize the Rigpa, but had not yet had the final introduction. Then, one famous evening, Patrul Rinpoche gave him the introduction. It happened when they were staying together in one of the hermitages high up in the mountains above Dzogchen Monastery. It was a very beautiful night. The dark blue sky was clear and the stars shone brilliantly. The sound of their solitude was heightened by the distant barking of a dog from the monastery below. Patrul Rinpoche was lying stretched out on the ground, doing a special Dzogchen practice. He called Nyoshul Lungtok over to him, saying: "Did you say you do not know the essence of Mind?" Nyoshul Lungtok guessed from his tone that this was a special moment and nodded expectantly. "There's nothing to it really," Patrul Rinpoche said casually, and added, "My son, come and lie down over here: be like your old father." Nyoshul Lungtok stretched out by his side. Then Patrul Rinpoche asked him, "Do you see the stars up there in the sky?" "Yes." "Do you hear the dogs barking in Dzogchen Monastery?" "Yes." "Do you hear what I'm saying to you?" "Yes." "Well, the nature of Dzogchen is this: simply this." Nyoshul Lungtok tells us what happened then: "At that instant, I arrived at a certainty of realization from within. I had been liberated from the fetters of 'it is' and 'it is not.' I had realized the primordial wisdom, the naked union of emptiness and intrinsic awareness. I was introduced to this realization by his blessing, as the great Indian master Saraha said: He in whose heart the words of the master have entered, Sees the truth like a treasure in his own palm.

Those who view mathematical science, not merely as a vast body of abstract and immutable truths, whose intrinsic beauty, symmetry and logical completeness, when regarded in their connexion together as a whole, entitle them to a prominent place in the interest of all profound and logical minds, but as possessing a yet deeper interest for the human race, when it is remembered that this science constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world, and those unceasing changes of mutual relationship which, visibly or invisibly, consciously or unconsciously to our immediate physical perceptions, are interminably going on in the agencies of the creation we live amidst...

human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered “intrinsic” to human happiness and far outweigh “extrinsic” values such as beauty, money, and status.

To have been created intentionally, imagined in the mind of God, and then brought into being communicates something profound about a person’s intrinsic worth. It speaks—you are loved; you are wanted; you are valued. Further to this, to have been created as some kind of reflection or embodiment of the divine serves only to strengthen the idea that human beings are of infinite worth and beauty.