Modest Beauty Quotes

I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and loveless. Others, of the simplest field flowers, with hearts full of dew and with all the tints of celestial beauty reflected in their modest petals.

The slow arrow of beauty. The most noble kind of beauty is that which does not carry us away suddenly, whose attacks are not violent or intoxicating (this kind easily awakens disgust), but rather the kind of beauty which infiltrates slowly, which we carry along with us almost unnoticed, and meet up with again in dreams; finally, after it has for a long time lain modestly in our heart, it takes complete possession of us, filling our eyes with tears, our hearts with longing. What do we long for when we see beauty? To be beautiful. We think much happiness must be connected with it. But that is an error.

A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life. Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away. Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance. In the glare of your mind, be modest. And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.

I remained a socialist for several years, even after my rejection of Marxism; and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important than equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.

Marginalia Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive - Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" - that kind of thing. I remember once looking up from my reading, my thumb as a bookmark, trying to imagine what the person must look like who wrote "Don't be a ninny" alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson. Students are more modest needing to leave only their splayed footprints along the shore of the page. One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's. Another notes the presence of "Irony" fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal. Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers, Hands cupped around their mouths. Absolutely," they shout to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin. Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!" Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points rain down along the sidelines. And if you have managed to graduate from college without ever having written "Man vs. Nature" in a margin, perhaps now is the time to take one step forward. We have all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge. Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria jotted along the borders of the Gospels brief asides about the pains of copying, a bird singing near their window, or the sunlight that illuminated their page- anonymous men catching a ride into the future on a vessel more lasting than themselves. And you have not read Joshua Reynolds, they say, until you have read him enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling. Yet the one I think of most often, the one that dangles from me like a locket, was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye I borrowed from the local library one slow, hot summer. I was just beginning high school then, reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room, and I cannot tell you how vastly my loneliness was deepened, how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed, when I found on one page A few greasy looking smears and next to them, written in soft pencil- by a beautiful girl, I could tell, whom I would never meet- Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.

Nothing humbles a beautiful woman better than not being wanted by a man whose girlfriend or wife is ugly (or not as beautiful as she is).

If life's not beautiful without the pain, well I'd just rather never ever even see beauty again.

The modest Rose puts forth a Thorn. The humble Sheep a threat'ning Horn. While the Lily white shall in love delight. Nor a Thorn nor a threat stain her beauty bright.

I leaned back on my palms, looking at the Milky Way spilling in modest grandeur across the sky. A fountain of stars frothing over, surrounded by a mist of stardust. It looked like raw magic, like the glimmer I’d spy in a shadowy corner where the sun skimmed off invisible particles, reminding me there was a whole hidden world tucked inside this ordinary one. And it was up there every night, offering its mute beauty while we sat here with our heads down, tragically terrestrial.

Amy was looking around the sanctum in awe. "It's...beautiful!" The girl was modest and thoughtful. How bizarre. So rarely did Ian see these qualities in others–especially during the quest for the 39 Clues. Naturally, he had been taught to avoid these behaviors at all costs and never to consort with anyone who possessed them. They were distasteful–FLO, as Papa would say. For Losers Only. And Kabras never lost. Yet she fascinated him. Her joy in running up Alistair's tiny lawn, her awe at this piddling cubbyhole–it didn't seem possible to gain so much happiness from so little. This gave him a curious feeling he'd never quite experienced. Something like indigestion but quite a bit more pleasant. Ah well. Blame it on the ripped trousers, he thought. Humiliation softened the soul.

I sought a soul that might resemble mine, and I could not find it. I scanned all the crannies of the earth: my perseverance was useless. Yet I could not remain alone. There had to be someone who would approve of my character; there had to be someone with the same ideas as myself. It was morning. The sun in all his magnificence rose on the horizon, and behold, there also appeared before my eyes a young man whose presence made flowers grow as he passed. He approached me and held out his hand: “I have come to you, you who seek me. Let us give thanks for this happy day.” But I replied: “Go! I did not summon you. I do not need your friendship… .” It was evening. Night was beginning to spread the blackness of her veil over nature. A beautiful woman whom I could scarcely discern also exerted her bewitching sway upon me and looked at me with compassion. She did not, however, dare speak to me. I said: “Come closer that I may discern your features clearly, for at this distance the starlight is not strong enough to illumine them.” Then, with modest demeanour, eyes lowered, she crossed the greensward and reached my side. I said as soon as I saw her: “I perceive that goodness and justice have dwelt in your heart: we could not live together. Now you are admiring my good looks which have bowled over more than one woman. But sooner or later you would regret having consecrated your love to me, for you do not know my soul. Not that I shall be unfaithful to you: she who devotes herself to me with so much abandon and trust — with the same trust and abandon do I devote myself to her. But get this into your head and never forget it: wolves and lambs look not on one another with gentle eyes.” What then did I need, I who rejected with disgust what was most beautiful in humanity!

I was born free, and that I might live in freedom I chose the solitude of the fields; in the trees of the mountains I find society, the clear waters of the brooks are my mirrors, and to the trees and waters I make known my thoughts and charms. I am a fire afar off, a sword laid aside. Those whom I have inspired with love by letting them see me, I have by words undeceived, and if their longings live on hope—and I have given none to Chrysostom or to any other—it cannot justly be said that the death of any is my doing, for it was rather his own obstinacy than my cruelty that killed him; and if it be made a charge against me that his wishes were honourable, and that therefore I was bound to yield to them, I answer that when on this very spot where now his grave is made he declared to me his purity of purpose, I told him that mine was to live in perpetual solitude, and that the earth alone should enjoy the fruits of my retirement and the spoils of my beauty; and if, after this open avowal, he chose to persist against hope and steer against the wind, what wonder is it that he should sink in the depths of his infatuation? If I had encouraged him, I should be false; if I had gratified him, I should have acted against my own better resolution and purpose. He was persistent in spite of warning, he despaired without being hated. Bethink you now if it be reasonable that his suffering should be laid to my charge. Let him who has been deceived complain, let him give way to despair whose encouraged hopes have proved vain, let him flatter himself whom I shall entice, let him boast whom I shall receive; but let not him call me cruel or homicide to whom I make no promise, upon whom I practise no deception, whom I neither entice nor receive. It has not been so far the will of Heaven that I should love by fate, and to expect me to love by choice is idle. Let this general declaration serve for each of my suitors on his own account, and let it be understood from this time forth that if anyone dies for me it is not of jealousy or misery he dies, for she who loves no one can give no cause for jealousy to any, and candour is not to be confounded with scorn. Let him who calls me wild beast and basilisk, leave me alone as something noxious and evil; let him who calls me ungrateful, withhold his service; who calls me wayward, seek not my acquaintance; who calls me cruel, pursue me not; for this wild beast, this basilisk, this ungrateful, cruel, wayward being has no kind of desire to seek, serve, know, or follow them. If Chrysostom's impatience and violent passion killed him, why should my modest behaviour and circumspection be blamed? If I preserve my purity in the society of the trees, why should he who would have me preserve it among men, seek to rob me of it? I have, as you know, wealth of my own, and I covet not that of others; my taste is for freedom, and I have no relish for constraint; I neither love nor hate anyone; I do not deceive this one or court that, or trifle with one or play with another. The modest converse of the shepherd girls of these hamlets and the care of my goats are my recreations; my desires are bounded by these mountains, and if they ever wander hence it is to contemplate the beauty of the heavens, steps by which the soul travels to its primeval abode.

Is there some kind of taboo against seeing a woman’s breasts in human culture?” asked Serene. “Breasts are functional. They feed children. Whereas I know many men cultivate their shoulder and abdominal muscles merely to attract the opposite sex. Their chests are the ones that are more decorative and which it is less modest to display!

We are inundated with advice on where to travel to, but we hear little of why and how we should go, even though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial, and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia, or ‘human flourishing’.

There's no time to be modest. Reason will not work here. Without warning, I kiss Kartik. His lips, pressed firmly against mine, are a surprise. They are warm, light as breath, firm as the give of a peach against my mouth. A scent like scorched cinnamon hangs in the air, but I'm not falling into any vision. It's his smell in me. A smell that makes my stomach drop through my feet. A smell that pushes all thought out of my head and replaces it with an overpowering hunger for more.

The suspense is killin’ me, Pigeon!” Travis called. I walked out, fidgeting with my dress while Travis stood in front of me, blank-faced. America elbowed him and he blinked. “Holy shit.” “Are you ready to be freaked out?” America asked. “I’m not freaked out, she looks amazing,” Travis said. I smiled and then slowly turned around to show him the steep dip of the fabric in the back of the dress. “Okay, now I’m freakin’ out,” he said, walking over to me “Okay, now I’m freakin’ out,” he said, walking over to me and turning me around. “You don’t like it?” I asked. “You need a jacket.” He jogged to the rack and then hastily draped my coat over my shoulders. “She can’t wear that all night, Trav,” America chuckled. “You look beautiful, Abby,” Shepley said as an apology for Travis’ behavior. Travis’ expression was pained as he spoke. “You do. You look incredible…but you can’t wear that. Your skirt is…wow, your legs are…your skirt is too short and it’s only half a dress! It doesn’t even have a back on it!” I couldn’t help but smile. “That’s the way it’s made, Travis.” “Do you two live to torture each other?” Shepley frowned. “Do you have a longer dress?” Travis asked. I looked down. “It’s actually pretty modest in the front. It’s just the back that shows off a lot of skin.” “Pigeon,” he winced with his next words, “I don’t want you to be mad, but I can’t take you to my frat house looking like that. I’ll get in a fight the first five minutes we’re there, Baby.

They may talk of a comet, or a burning mountain, or some such bagatelle; but to me a modest woman, dressed out in all her finery, is the most tremendous object of the whole creation.

The beauty with modest smile, whose secrecy of silent love had just been stolen, beamed at this wonderful offer and she replenished herself with his love as a carefree child cossetted with luxurious warmth after a cold shower.

It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. This image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine. She would be old and beautiful like the black-and-white photo of Georgia O'Keeffe I'd once sent her. I held fast to this image for the first couple of weeks after we left the Mayo Clinic, and then, once she was admitted to the hospice wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to the others, more modest and true. I imagined my mother in October; I wrote the scene in my mind. And then the one of my mother in August and another in May. Each day that passed, another month peeled away.

Whether that lady's gentle mind, No longer with the form combined Which scattered love, as stars do light, Found sadness where it left delight, I dare not guess; but in this life Of error, ignorance, and strife, Where nothing is, but all things seem, And we the shadows of the dream, It is a modest creed, and yet Pleasant if one considers it, To own that death itself must be, Like all the rest, a mockery. That garden sweet, that lady fair, And all sweet shapes and odors there, In truth have never passed away: 'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they. For love, and beauty, and delight, There is no death or change: their might Exceeds our organs, which endure No light, being themselves obscure. (--Conclusion, Autumn - A Dirge)

Surely my lord will not hide his beautiful white legs!" exclaimed Infadoos regretfully. But Good persisted, and once only did the Kukuana people get the chance of seeing his beautiful legs again. Good is a very modest man. Henceforward they had to satisfy their aesthetic longings with his one whisker, his transparent eye, and his movable teeth.

Beneath the pleasure generated by the juxtaposition of order and complexity, we can identify the subsidiary architectural virtue of balance. Beauty is a likely outcome whenever architects skilfully mediate between any number of oppositions, including the old and the new, the natural and the man-made, the luxurious and the modest, and the masculine and the feminine.

The beauty of the soul is wrapped in modest fashion.

What grief is not taken away by time? What passion will survive an unequal battle with it? I knew a man in the bloom of his still youthful powers, filled with true nobility and virtue, I knew him when he was in love, tenderly, passionately, furiously, boldly, modestly, and before me, almost before my eyes, the object of his passion - tender, beautiful as an angel - was struck down by insatiable death. I never saw such terrible fits of inner suffering, such furious scorching anguish, such devouring despair as shook the unfortunate lover. I never thought a man could create such a hell for himself, in which there would be no shadow, no image, nothing in the least resembling hope... They tried to keep an eye on him; they hid all instruments he might have used to take his own life. Two weeks later he suddenly mastered himself: he began to laugh, to joke; freedom was granted him, and the first thing he did was buy a pistol. One day his family was terribly frightened by the sudden sound of a shot. They ran into the room and saw him lying with his brains blown out. A doctor who happened to be there, whose skill was on everyone's lips, saw signs of life in him, found that the wound was not quite mortal, and the man, to everyone's amazement, was healed. The watch on him was increased still more. Even at the table they did not give him a knife to and tried to take away from him anything that he might strike himself with; but a short while later he found a new occasion and threw himself under the wheels of a passing carriage. His arms and legs were crushed; but again they saved him. A year later I saw him in a crowded room; he sat at the card table gaily saying 'Petite ouverte,' keeping one card turned down, and behind him, leaning on the back of his chair, stood his young wife, who was sorting through his chips.

He’ll be successful, finally, this coming Sunday, at the modest ceremony to be held in the living room. It’s all so clear. Tyler will write a beautiful, meaningful song. Barrett will find a love that abides, and work that matters. And Liz. Liz will tire of boys, tire of her resolution to grow into a tough, colorful old woman who lives defiantly alone.

Be confident. Be successful. Be beautiful. Be intelligent. Be hard working. Be carefree. Be modest. Be driven. Be forgiving. Be creative. Be relaxed. Be motivated. Be educated. Be thoughtful. Be kind. Be determined. Be good. Just be you!

I come not, Ambrosia for any of the purposes thou hast named," replied Marcela, "but to defend myself and to prove how unreasonable are all those who blame me for their sorrow and for Chrysostom's death; and therefore I ask all of you that are here to give me your attention, for will not take much time or many words to bring the truth home to persons of sense. Heaven has made me, so you say, beautiful, and so much so that in spite of yourselves my beauty leads you to love me; and for the love you show me you say, and even urge, that I am bound to love you. By that natural understanding which God has given me I know that everything beautiful attracts love, but I cannot see how, by reason of being loved, that which is loved for its beauty is bound to love that which loves it; besides, it may happen that the lover of that which is beautiful may be ugly, and ugliness being detestable, it is very absurd to say, "I love thee because thou art beautiful, thou must love me though I be ugly." But supposing the beauty equal on both sides, it does not follow that the inclinations must be therefore alike, for it is not every beauty that excites love, some but pleasing the eye without winning the affection; and if every sort of beauty excited love and won the heart, the will would wander vaguely to and fro unable to make choice of any; for as there is an infinity of beautiful objects there must be an infinity of inclinations, and true love, I have heard it said, is indivisible, and must be voluntary and not compelled. If this be so, as I believe it to be, why do you desire me to bend my will by force, for no other reason but that you say you love me? Nay—tell me—had Heaven made me ugly, as it has made me beautiful, could I with justice complain of you for not loving me? Moreover, you must remember that the beauty I possess was no choice of mine, for, be it what it may, Heaven of its bounty gave it me without my asking or choosing it; and as the viper, though it kills with it, does not deserve to be blamed for the poison it carries, as it is a gift of nature, neither do I deserve reproach for being beautiful; for beauty in a modest woman is like fire at a distance or a sharp sword; the one does not burn, the other does not cut, those who do not come too near. Honour and virtue are the ornaments of the mind, without which the body, though it be so, has no right to pass for beautiful; but if modesty is one of the virtues that specially lend a grace and charm to mind and body, why should she who is loved for her beauty part with it to gratify one who for his pleasure alone strives with all his might and energy to rob her of it?

[339] Vita femina. To see the ultimate beauties in a work-all knowledge and good-will is not enough; it requires the rarest, good chance for the veil of clouds to move for once from the summits, and for the sun to shine on them. We must not only stand at precisely the right place to see this, our very soul itself must have pulled away the veil from its heights, and must be in need of an external expression and simile, so as to have a hold and remain master of itself. All these, however, are so rarely united at the same time that I am inclined to believe that the highest summit of all that is good, be it work, deed, man, or nature, has hitherto remained for most people, and even for the best, as something concealed and shrouded-that, however, which unveils itself to us, unveils itself to us but once. The Greeks indeed prayed: "Twice and thrice, everything beautiful!" Ah, they had their good reason to call on the Gods, for ungodly actuality does not furnish us with the beautiful at all, or only does so once! I mean to say that the world is overfull of beautiful things, but it is nevertheless poor, very poor, in beautiful moments, and in the unveiling of those beautiful things. But perhaps this is the greatest charm of life: it puts a gold- embroidered veil of lovely potentialities over itself, promising, resisting, modest, mocking, sympathetic, seductive. Yes, life is a woman!

Every young sculptor seems to think that he must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of decent clothing. I am weary, even more than I am ashamed, of seeing such things. Nowadays people are as good as born in their clothes, and there is practically not a nude human being in existence. An artist, therefore, as you must candidly confess, cannot sculpture nudity with a pure heart, if only because he is compelled to steal guilty glimpses at hired models. The marble inevitably loses its chastity under such circumstances. An old Greek sculptor, no doubt, found his models in the open sunshine, and among pure and princely maidens, and thus the nude statues of antiquity are as modest as violets, and sufficiently draped in their own beauty. But as for Mr. Gibson's colored Venuses (stained, I believe, with tobacco juice), and all other nudities of to-day, I really do not understand what they have to say to this generation, and would be glad to see as many heaps of quicklime in their stead.

what is the expression which the age demands? the age demands no expression whatever. we have seen photographs of bereaved asian mothers. we are not interested in the agony of your fumbled organs. there is nothing you can show on your face that can match the horror of this time. do not even try. you will only hold yourself up to the scorn of those who have felt things deeply. we have seen newsreels of humans in the extremities of pain and dislocation. you are playing to people who have experienced a catastrophe. this should make you very quiet. speak the words, convey the data, step aside. everyone knows you are in pain. you cannot tell the audience everything you know about love in every line of love you speak. step aside and they will know what you know because you know it already. you have nothing to teach them. you are not more beautiful than they are. you are not wiser. do not shout at them. do not force a dry entry. that is bad sex. if you show the lines of your genitals, then deliver what you promise. and remember that people do not really want an acrobat in bed. what is our need? to be close to the natural man, to be close to the natural woman. do not pretend that you are a beloved singer with a vast loyal audience which has followed the ups and downs of your life to this very moment. the bombs, flame-throwers, and all the shit have destroyed more than just the trees and villages. they have also destroyed the stage. did you think that your profession would escape the general destruction? there is no more stage. there are no more footlights. you are among the people. then be modest. speak the words, convey the data, step aside. be by yourself. be in your own room. do not put yourself on. do not act out words. never act out words. never try to leave the floor when you talk about flying. never close your eyes and jerk your head to one side when you talk about death. do not fix your burning eyes on me when you speak about love. if you want to impress me when you speak about love put your hand in your pocket or under your dress and play with yourself. if ambition and the hunger for applause have driven you to speak about love you should learn how to do it without disgracing yourself or the material. this is an interior landscape. it is inside. it is private. respect the privacy of the material. these pieces were written in silence. the courage of the play is to speak them. the discipline of the play is not to violate them. let the audience feel your love of privacy even though there is no privacy. be good whores. the poem is not a slogan. it cannot advertise you. it cannot promote your reputation for sensitivity. you are students of discipline. do not act out the words. the words die when you act them out, they wither, and we are left with nothing but your ambition. the poem is nothing but information. it is the constitution of the inner country. if you declaim it and blow it up with noble intentions then you are no better than the politicians whom you despise. you are just someone waving a flag and making the cheapest kind of appeal to a kind of emotional patriotism. think of the words as science, not as art. they are a report. you are speaking before a meeting of the explorers' club of the national geographic society. these people know all the risks of mountain climbing. they honour you by taking this for granted. if you rub their faces in it that is an insult to their hospitality. do not work the audience for gasps ans sighs. if you are worthy of gasps and sighs it will not be from your appreciation of the event but from theirs. it will be in the statistics and not the trembling of the voice or the cutting of the air with your hands. it will be in the data and the quiet organization of your presence. avoid the flourish. do not be afraid to be weak. do not be ashamed to be tired. you look good when you're tired. you look like you could go on forever. now come into my arms. you are the image of my beauty.

With what delight did Ambrosio listen to the declaration of her artless gratitude! The natural grace of her manners, the unequalled sweetness of her voice, her modest vivacity, her unstudied elegance, her expressive countenance, and intelligent eyes united to inspire him with pleasure and admiration: While the solidity and correctness of her remarks received additional beauty from the unaffected simplicity of the language, in which they were conveyed.

For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important than equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.

He was not a practical joker nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure. The day was beautiful and it seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty.

Sebastian says modestly that though his twin resembled him very much , she was reputed to be beautiful. But more importantly, she had a mind that was just and beautiful. she drowned in salt water, leaving sebastian to drown her memories in the salt water of his tears.

As soon as the period of mourning for Dona Ester was over and the big house on the corner was finished, Esteban Trueba and Clara del Valle were married in a modest ceremony. Esteban gave his wife a set of diamond jewelry, which she thought beautiful. She packed it away in a shoe box and quickly forgot where she had put it. They spent their honeymoon in Italy and two days after they were on the boat. Esteban was as madly in love as an adolescent, despite the fact that the movement of the ship made Clara uncontrollably ill and the tight quarters gave her asthma. Seated by her side in the narrow cabin, pressing cold compress to her forehead and holding her while she vomited, he felt profoundly happy and desired her with unjust intensity considering the wretched state to which she was reduced. On the fourth day at sea, she woke up feeling better and they went out on deck to look at the sea. Seeing her with her wind-reddened nose, and laughing at the slightest provocation, Esteban swore that sooner or later she would come to love him as he needed to be loved, even if it meant he had to resort to extreme measures. He realized that Clara did not belong to him and that if she continued living in her world of apparitions, three-legged chairs that moved of their own volition, and cards that spelled out the future, she probably never would. Clara's impudent and nonchalant sensuality was also not enough for him. He wanted far more than her body; he wanted control over that undefined and luminous material that lay within her and that escaped him even in those moments when she appeared to be dying of pleasure. His hands felt very heavy, his feet very big, his voice very hard, his beard very scratchy, and his habits of rape and whoring very deeply ingrained, but even if he had to turn himself inside out like a glove, he was prepared to do everything in his power to seduce her.

She’d never had feelings about any man that were important enough to be real romantic love. Affection, lust, yes those things. Instants in time with someone that had touched her, yes that too. But she found no one for romance that she could look up to, that was real , an individual that wasn’t made up of bits and pieces of clichés, buffeted about on the tide of their wants and the opinions of others, no goal, no point of view that they understood themselves why they held it. She had researched him when she was assigned to protect him, she told him. She had not understood in the beginning. “You were a man that had it all! Worthy and courageous military action; you grew up, came of age in war. A successful career, status in letters, a full professorship at a prestigious university if you wanted it. Accrued wealth and income enough to live however you wanted. Beautiful women in your life … you do not show the full measure of your years in either looks or fitness. “You were a full fledged member of the oligarchy, though at a modest level. Yet you threw it all away! You started your novel, became a thorn in the side of the establishment,” she told him. “I didn’t understand until I read the fragment of manuscript that you had Jean Augereau print out for you. You were on a crusade … totally focused! I saw that you were something special then,” she told him, “That’s when you began to become very special to me!

Why the devil couldn’t it have been blue?” I said to myself. And this thought—one of the most profound ever made since the discovery of butterflies—consoled me for my misdeed and reconciled me with myself. I stood there, looking at the corpse with, I confess, a certain sympathy. The butterfly had probably come out of the woods, well-fed and happy, into the sunlight of a beautiful morning. Modest in its demands on life, it had been content to fly about and exhibit its special beauty under the vast cupola of a blue sky, al sky that is always blue for those that have wings. It flew through my open window, entered by room, and found me there. I suppose it had never seen a man; therefore it did not know what a man was. It described an infinite number of circles about my body and saw that I moved, that I had eyes, arms, legs, a divine aspect, and colossal stature. Then it said to itself, “This is probably the maker of butterflies.” The idea overwhelmed it, terrified it; but fear, which is sometimes stimulating, suggested the best way for it to please its creator was to kiss him on the forehead, and so it kissed me on the forehead. When I brushed it away, it rested on the windowpane, saw from there the portrait of my father, and quite possibly perceived a half-truth, i.e., that the man in the picture was the father of the creator of butterflies, and it flew to beg his mercy. Then a blow from a towel ended the adventure. Neither the blue sky’s immensity, nor the flowers’ joy, nor the green leaves’ splendor could protect the creature against a face towel, a few square inches fo cheap linin. Note how excellent it is to be superior to butterflies! For, even if it had been blue, its life would not have been safe; I might have pierced it with a pin and kept it to delight my eyes. It was not blue. This last thought consoled me again. I placed the nail of my middle finger against my thumb, gave the cadaver a flip, and it fell into the garden. It was high time; the provident ants were already gathering around…Yes, I stand by my first idea: I think that it would have been better for the butterfly if it had been born blue.

As soon as we entered I plunged into the giddy whirl of the waltz. That delightful exercise has always been dear to me; I know of nothing more beautiful, more worthy of a beautiful woman and a young man; all dances compared with the waltz are but insipid conventions or pretexts for insignificant converse. It is truly to possess a woman, in a certain sense, to hold her for a half hour in your arms, and to draw her on in the dance, palpitating in spite of herself, in such a way that it can not be positively asserted whether she is being protected or seduced. Some deliver themselves up to the pleasure with such modest voluptuousness, with such sweet and pure abandon, that one does not know whether he experiences desire or fear, and whether, if pressed to the heart, they would faint or break in pieces like the rose. Germany, where that dance was invented, is surely the land of love.

Graceful beauty is a modest appearance.

My mother used to tell me that a woman's beauty lied not in the size of her dowry, but in the modest depths of her maiden heart.

modest, serious, chaste, loyal, naive, undiscourageable, hard-working, soft-spoken, courageous, a brilliant athlete, a beautiful, austere boy.

All this and much else besides is merely a form of identification. Such considering is wholly based upon ‘requirements’. A man inwardly ‘requires’ that everyone should see what a remarkable man he is and that they should constantly give expression to their respect, esteem, and admiration for him, for his intellect, his beauty, his cleverness, his wit, his presence of mind, his originality, and all his other qualities. Requirements in their turn are based on a completely fantastic notion about themselves such as very often occurs with people of very modest appearance. Various writers, actors, musicians, artists, and politicians, for instance, are almost without exception sick people. And what are they suffering from? First of all from an extraordinary opinion of themselves, then from requirements, and then from considering, that is, being ready and prepared beforehand to take offence at lack of understanding and lack of appreciation.

You are,” Mam pushed. “I can see it now. I can see everything so much clearer now.” “See what?” “You,” Mam replied. “The woman you’re becoming. That backbone of steel behind you. The reason why he’s so drawn to you.” “Who?” “Joey.” My face heated. “Oh?” “Obviously, you’re a beautiful-looking girl.” I snorted and waved a hand in front of myself. “Obviously.” “And modest,” Mam jibed before continuing, “But you’re so much more than a pretty face. You are warm, Aoife. That poor boy never stood a chance with you, did he? Not when everything he’s never been given flows from you like a waterfall.

Mom said I could maybe have a Beatles haircut before the last day of school. Paul- Ringo- Paul- Ringo they keep bouncing around my head. Model yourself on them and you'll have no worries. Paul! I love the name. Such a beautiful sound to the ear. Ringo! Such an adorable boy. So sweet and modest. So bouncy. Know that I love you and I'm not crazy. This is a love so strong and real. Oh, love me too, anyone.

Astra is a beauty. (...) Astra is so beautiful that I have no wish to describe her beauty. I will say only that her beauty is the expression of her soul. Her beauty lives in her quiet walk, in her shy movements, in her always-lowered eyelids, in her barely perceptible smile, in the soft outline of her girlish shoulders, in the chastity of her poor, almost beggarly clothing, in her thoughtful grey eyes. She is a white water lily in a pond shadowed by the branches of trees, born amid still, contemplative water. (...) The world of modest female beauty finds its expression in Astra. As for what may lie hidden in the depths of these waters, no-one can say unless he breaks the water's smooth surface, walks barefoot through the cutting sedge and treads the silty, sucking mud — now cold, now strangely warm. But I only stand on the shore, admiring the lily from a distance

The Japanese people struck him as gentle and unpretentious, with a deep appreciation for beauty and ideas. “Of all the people I have met, I like the Japanese most, as they are modest, intelligent, considerate, and have a feel for art,

After that they browsed for a minute or two in a semi-detached fashion. Nick found a set of Trollope which had a relatively modest and approachable look among the rest, and took down The Way We Live Now, with an armorial bookplate, the pages uncut. “What have you found there?” said Lord Kessler, in a genially possessive tone. “Ah, you’re a Trollope man, are you?” “I’m not sure I am, really,” said Nick. “I always think he wrote too fast. What was it Henry James said, about Trollope and his ‘great heavy shovelfuls of testimony to constituted English matters’?” Lord Kessler paid a moment’s wry respect to this bit of showing off, but said, “Oh, Trollope’s good. He’s very good on money.” “Oh…yes…” said Nick, feeling doubly disqualified by his complete ignorance of money and by the aesthetic prejudice which had stopped him from ever reading Trollope. “To be honest, there’s a lot of him I haven’t yet read.” “No, this one is pretty good,” Nick said, gazing at the spine with an air of judicious concession. Sometimes his memory of books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had read and half forgotten, by some fertile process of auto-suggestion. He pressed the volume back into place and closed the gilded cage.

In good time she made tea; and afterwards, when I brought down my books, looked into them, and showed me what she knew of them (which was no slight matter, though she said it was), and what was the best way to learn and understand them. I see her, with her modest, orderly, placid manner, and I hear her beautiful calm voice, as I write these words. The influence for all good, which she came to exercise over me at a later time, begins already to descend upon my breast. I love little Em'ly, and I don't love Agnes—no, not at all in that way—but I feel that there are goodness, peace, and truth, wherever Agnes is; and that the soft light of the coloured window in the church, seen long ago, falls on her always, and on me when I am near her, and on everything around.

When it comes to specifying the values particular to paganism, people have generally listed features such as these: an eminently aristocratic conception of the human individual; an ethics founded on honor (“shame” rather than “sin”); an heroic attitude toward life’s challenges; the exaltation and sacralization of the world, beauty, the body, strength, health; the rejection of any “worlds beyond”; the inseparability of morality and aesthetics; and so on. From this perspective, the highest value is undoubtedly not a form of “justice” whose purpose is essentially interpreted as flattening the social order in the name of equality, but everything that can allow a man to surpass himself. To paganism, it is pure absurdity to consider the results of the workings of life’s basic framework as unjust. In the pagan ethic of honor, the classic antithesis noble vs. base, courageous vs. cowardly, honorable vs. dishonorable, beautiful vs. deformed, sick vs. healthy, and so forth, replace the antithesis operative in a morality based on the concept of sin: good vs. evil, humble vs. vainglorious, submissive vs. proud, weak vs. arrogant, modest vs. boastful, and so on. However, while all this appears to be accurate, the fundamental feature in my opinion is something else entirely. It lies in the denial of dualism.

If one of the luminaries should condescend, then the homely lover, plain of face, knows damn well to choose some modest number, and then begin counting down the days of love. Beauty seeks after beauty, like goes with like; forever this was the way of things, world without end.

Celebrity, even the modest sort that comes to writers, is an unhelpful exercise in self-consciousness. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being ‘somebody,’ to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over animation. One can either see or be seen. Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer. The best seeing is done by the hunted and the hunter, the vulnerable and the hungry; the ‘successful’ writer acquires a film over his eyes. His eyes get fat. Self-importance is a thickened, occluding form of self-consciousness. The binge, the fling, the trip — all attempt to shake the film and get back under the dining room table, with a child's beautifully clear eyes.

Viola, you're allowed to be confident and to think that you're smart and pretty and deserving of the best. Unfortunately, we live in a society where we tell our kids to be confident and successful and then as soon as they are, we tell them to shut up about it and be humble, Especially women. Guys can get away with cockiness until the end of time, but if a woman is cocky, she's arrogant and superior. "Even worse, women are just as likely as men to condemn a confident woman for not being modest enough. The only way we can change that attitude is to change among ourselves. If you're smart, then demand that other people treat you as someone of intelligence. If you look in the mirror and like what you see, then halle-fucking-lujah!" I exclaimed. "Believe me, I spent way too much of my youth, and still do, picking apart my appearance instead of being grateful for what I have. Grateful that all my limbs are intact and my body is healthy." I leaned toward Viola, who was wide-eyed as she listened to me. "Do not ever apologize for liking who you are. It's a beautiful mindset. And that asshole who cheated o you doesn't deserve to come in touching distance of your life.

THE LILY The modest Rose puts forth a thorn, The humble sheep a threat'ning horn: While the Lily white shall in love delight, Nor a thorn nor a threat stain her beauty bright. THE GARDEN OF LOVE I laid me down upon a bank, Where Love lay sleeping; I heard among the rushes dank Weeping, weeping.

An individual is a complex, indefinable object. And so only the individual possesses something that can without lying be called existence. As the Cynic philosophers already knew, nothing real, nothing concrete is definable. The necessities of thought, speech, of science and action force us to act as if the definable exists. Let us consent to this, while all the while smiling at the inevitable. But we should never forget that no word can give us the essence of a being, not even my own essence, and that no thought, whatever good will and sympathy might animate it, will ever penetrate the essence of another. Our most beautiful, strongest, most penetrating truths glory — modestly — in being but lesser lies. The more I strive to seize the concrete, the more my formulas become complex and hesitant, then the more I become irritated at not being able to make them flexible and mobile. Whenever I pronounce absolute words I know I am speaking in the abstract and that I am speaking of the void.

All around him, in his house, everything consisted of fragments of beauty. Sometimes modest, sometimes valuable, these fragments combined to form a unique atmosphere of soft luminosity – the only one worthy of a cultured man, he thought. When he was twenty he had worn a ring with an inscription inside: This thing of Beauty is a guilt for ever (Monsieur

I will never be that man who spends weeks and months crying over an old house! I am the man who builds a new house. A better, a stronger, a more beautiful house. But in this, I can only play the modest role which Providence has assigned to me. I can only be a small, modest architect for this house. The master builder is, and must always remain, the german Volk.

I learned that my new lover was hard, but always good. She did not tease. If you pursued her, she would reveal her sweetest secrets and uncover her hidden places. Yes, she would grant those who came to her by car a measured beauty. There were wonderful things to be seen from the road. Her lesser suitors would jump out of their autos, snapping pictures, trying to save memories before having them, and hurry on. But what can be seen from a road is more enticing than revealing – like a shapely woman whose fleshly mystery cannot be hidden by modest garments but is made more alluring. From the roadside her eyes would invite and challenge: “Will you pursue me?” I did. And though my pursuit cost me a lot – pain, humiliation, hunger and sleepless nights – she was good.

My visit to Her Highness was an agreeable surprise for me. Instead of being ushered into the presence of an over-decorated woman, sporting diamond pendants and necklaces, I found myself in the presence of a modest young woman who relied not upon jewels or gaudy dress for beauty but on her own naturally well formed features and exactness of manners. Her room was as plainly furnished as she was plainly dressed. Her severe simplicity became an object of my envy. She seemed to me an object lesson for many a prince and many a millionaire whose loud ornamentation, ugly looking diamonds, rings and studs and still more loud and almost vulgar furniture offend the taste and present a terrible and sad contrast between them and the masses from whom they derive their wealth.

International trade seems to be the topic of the night, but there are a few differentiations—one talk is about the newest tax codes and how they can better benefit corporations. Snore. Another presents a variation on an old business model. It’s an original idea, but not practical. By the time the fifth student finishes, I’ve met my limit. I nudge Celia out of her reverie. “I’m ready to go,” I begin to say, but stop myself before I get the words out. The woman ascending the stairs to the stage has caught my eye, and all thoughts of leaving disappear. Something about the way she moves is captivating—the wiggle of her hips suggests an undercurrent of sexuality, and her back is straight with confidence. Then she turns toward the audience, and my breathe catches. Even here, twelve rows away, I can tell she’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Her dark brown hair falls just so around her face, accentuating sharp cheekbones. Her eyes are dark. Her short dress reveals long, lean legs. The modest cleavage of her outfit can’t hide perfectly plump tits. There’s something else—something about her carriage that makes me sit up and take notice. And she hasn’t even spoken yet.

The president of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909, Charles William Eliot, thought that ball-carriers in football ought not search for holes in the line that could lead to gaudy breakaway runs, but should do the modest, gentlemanly thing and plow headfirst into the nearest man-pile. (Eliot also didn’t like baseball because he believed curveballs and other deceptive pitches to be unsportsmanlike.)

This modest piece of local calm, sitting on a stoop after a family meal, I’m gripped with a strong déjà vu. Those years I traveled abroad, moments like these felt commonplace, but this one feels impossibly rare. There’s a word for this in Portuguese: saudade. It’s not exactly nostalgia, there’s more of a longing in it, for a feeling or way of life that may be impossible to recapture—that may or may not have even existed in the first place.

my taste is for freedom, and I have no relish for constraint; I neither love nor hate anyone; I do not deceive this one or court that, or trifle with one or play with another. The modest converse of the shepherd girls of these hamlets and the care of my goats are my recreations; my desires are bounded by these mountains, and if they ever wander hence it is to contemplate the beauty of the heavens, steps by which the soul travels to its primeval abode.

The Job Application Esteemed gentlemen, I am a poor, young, unemployed person in the business field, my name is Wenzel, I am seeking a suitable position, and I take the liberty of asking you, nicely and politely, if perhaps in your airy, bright, amiable rooms such a position might be free. I know that your good firm is large, proud, old, and rich, thus I may yield to the pleasing supposition that a nice, easy, pretty little place would be available, into which, as into a kind of warm cubbyhole, I can slip. I am excellently suited, you should know, to occupy just such a modest haven, for my nature is altogether delicate, and I am essentially a quiet, polite, and dreamy child, who is made to feel cheerful by people thinking of him that he does not ask for much, and allowing him to take possession of a very, very small patch of existence, where he can be useful in his own way and thus feel at ease. A quiet, sweet, small place in the shade has always been the tender substance of all my dreams, and if now the illusions I have about you grow so intense as to make me hope that my dream, young and old, might be transformed into delicious, vivid reality, then you have, in me, the most zealous and most loyal servitor, who will take it as a matter of conscience to discharge precisely and punctually all his duties. Large and difficult tasks I cannot perform, and obligations of a far-ranging sort are too strenuous for my mind. I am not particularly clever, and first and foremost I do not like to strain my intelligence overmuch. I am a dreamer rather than a thinker, a zero rather than a force, dim rather than sharp. Assuredly there exists in your extensive institution, which I imagine to be overflowing with main and subsidiary functions and offices, work of the kind that one can do as in a dream? --I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese; that is to say, a person who deems everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid. I know only the need to feel at my ease, so that each day I can thank God for life's boon, with all its blessings. The passion to go far in the world is unknown to me. Africa with its deserts is to me not more foreign. Well, so now you know what sort of a person I am.--I write, as you see, a graceful and fluent hand, and you need not imagine me to be entirely without intelligence. My mind is clear, but it refuses to grasp things that are many, or too many by far, shunning them. I am sincere and honest, and I am aware that this signifies precious little in the world in which we live, so I shall be waiting, esteemed gentlemen, to see what it will be your pleasure to reply to your respectful servant, positively drowning in obedience. Wenzel

Has anyone ever told you how beautiful you are?" she asked softly. A slow boyish smile spread across his features. "What would you think if I told you no?" Lauren laughed. "I'd think you were trying to appear modest." "Then what am I supposed to do now?" he teased. "I suppose you should try to look a little flustered and embarrassed by the flattery." "I don't fluster or embarrass very easily." "In that case, you could try to fluster me by telling me how I look," she hinted broadly.

Contact with an environment permeated by beauty not only offers real protection against impurity, baseness, every kind of letting oneself go, brutality, and untruthfulness; it has also the positive effect of raising us up in a moral sense. It does not draw us into a self-centered pleasure where our only wish is to indulge ourselves. On the contrary, it opens our hearts, inviting us to transcendence and leading us in conspectu Dei (“before the face of God”), before the face of God. Naturally, this last point applies above all to the high, exalted beauty which Kant calls the “sublime” [das Erhabene] and which he contrasts with the “beautiful.” But even in little things that are charming and graceful, even in the more modest beautiful things, one can find a trace of the pure and the noble. This may perhaps not lead us in conspectu Dei, but it does fill us with gratitude to God. It frees us from captivity in our egoistic interests and undoes the fetters of our hearts, releasing us (even if only for a short time) from the wild passions that convulse them.

The formal dinner was a great success. Every time Harry glanced at the other end of the long table, he saw that Poppy was acquitting herself splendidly. She was relaxed and smiling, taking part in conversation, appearing to charm her companions. It was exactly as Harry had expected: the same qualities that were considered faults in an unmarried girl were admired in a married woman. Poppy's acute observations and her enjoyment of lively debate made her far more interesting than a demure society miss with a modest downcast gaze. She was breathtaking in the violet gown, her slender neck encircled with diamonds, her hair rich with dark fire. Nature had blessed her with abundant beauty. But it was her smile that made her irresistible, a smile so sweet and brilliant that it warmed him from the inside out. Harry wished she would smile at him like that. She had, in the beginning. There had to be something that would induce her to warm to him, to like him again. Everyone had a weakness. In the meantime, Harry stole glances of her whenever he could, his lovely and distant wife... and he drank in the smiles she gave to other people.

My ideal was contained within the word beauty, so difficult to define despite all the evidence of our senses. I felt responsible for sustaining and increasing the beauty of the world. I wanted the cities to be splendid, spacious and airy, their streets sprayed with clean water, their inhabitants all human beings whose bodies were neither degraded by marks of misery and servitude nor bloated by vulgar riches; I desired that the schoolboys should recite correctly some useful lessons; that the women presiding in their households should move with maternal dignity, expressing both vigor and calm; that the gymnasiums should be used by youths not unversed in arts and in sports; that the orchards should bear the finest fruits and the fields the richest harvests. I desired that the might and majesty of the Roman Peace should extend to all, insensibly present like the music of the revolving skies; that the most humble traveller might wander from one country, or one continent, to another without vexatious formalities, and without danger, assured everywhere of a minimum of legal protection and culture; that our soldiers should continue their eternal pyrrhic dance on the frontiers; that everything should go smoothly, whether workshops or temples; that the sea should be furrowed by brave ships, and the roads resounding to frequent carriages; that, in a world well ordered, the philosophers should have their place, and the dancers also. This ideal, modest on the whole, would be often enough approached if men would devote to it one part of the energy which they expend on stupid or cruel activities; great good fortune has allowed me a partial realization of my aims during the last quarter of a century. Arrian of Nicomedia, one of the best minds of our time, likes to recall to me the beautiful lines of ancient Terpander, defining in three words the Spartan ideal (that perfect mode of life to which Lacedaemon aspired without ever attaining it): Strength, Justice, the Muses. Strength was the basis, discipline without which there is no beauty, and firmness without which there is no justice. Justice was the balance of the parts, that whole so harmoniously composed which no excess should be permitted to endanger. Strength and justice together were but one instrument, well tuned, in the hands of the Muses. All forms of dire poverty and brutality were things to forbid as insults to the fair body of mankind, every injustice a false note to avoid in the harmony of the spheres.

(Hadley and Mary in the carriage) “Might I repeat how utterly charming you look?” “You are very kind,” she replied, down casting her eyes as a flash of heat invaded her cheeks. “But even if I were dressed in the finest of gowns, I could never be a lady of fashion.” “Never let that disturb you, my pet.” He fingered a mass of curls that had settled over her shoulder just above the expanse of her modestly covered bosom. “I find fashion and beauty are rarely synonymous.” When he caressed a stray lock between thumb and fore!nger and raised it to his lips, Mary felt the dizzying sensation from the roots of her hair to the tips of her toes.

Closing the distance between them, he had savored the modest allure of her walk and felt his body respond to the graceful sway of her hips as they approached the pool. He had envisioned her taking off her robe and showing him her slender nakedness, but instead, she had just stood there, as though searching for someone. It skipped through his mind that when he caught up to the girl, he would either apprehend or ravish her. He still wasn't sure which it would be as he stood before her, blocking her escape with a dark, slight smile. As she peered up at him fearfully from the shadowed folds of her hood, he found himself staring into the bluest eyes he had ever seen. He had only encountered that deep, dream-spun shade of cobalt once in his life before, in the stained glass windows of Chartres Cathedral. His awareness of the crowd them dimmed in the ocean-blue depths of her eyes. 'Who are you?' He did not say a word nor ask her permission. With the smooth self-assurance of a man who has access to every woman in the room, he captured her chin in a firm but gentle grip. She jumped when he touched her, panic flashing in her eyes. His hard stare softened slightly in amusement at that, but then his faint smile faded, for her skin was silken beneath his fingertips. With one hand, he lifted her face toward the dim torchlight, while the other softly brushed back her hood. Then Lucien faltered, faced with a beauty the likes of which he had never seen. His very soul grew hushed with reverence as he gazed at her, holding his breath for fear the vision would dissolve, a figment of his overactive brain. With her bright tresses gleaming the flame-gold of dawn and her large, frightened eyes of that shining, ethereal blue, he was so sure for a moment that she was a lost angel that he half expected to see silvery, feathered wings folded demurely beneath her coarse brown robe. She appeared somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two- a wholesome, nay, a virginal beauty of trembling purity. He instantly 'knew' that she was utterly untouched, impossible as that seemed in this place. Her face was proud and weary. Her satiny skin glowed in the candlelight, pale and fine, but her soft, luscious lips shot off an effervescent champagne-pop of desire that fizzed more sweetly in his veins than anything he'd felt since his adolescence, which had taken place, if he recalled correctly, some time during the Dark Ages. There was intelligence and valor in her delicate face, courage, and a quivering vulnerability that made him ache with anguish for the doom of all innocent things. 'A noble youth, a questing youth,' he thought, and if she had come to slay dragons, she had already pierced him in his black, fiery heart with the lance of her heaven-blue gaze.

Cold soft drinks quenched my thirst one hot and humid July day after a cool drive to a mountain store. Seems like every woman in the place had on halter tops displaying their expensive tans. There were two women standing in front of me at the checkout counter. One said to the other, “You must be a lady of leisure, just look at your beautiful tan.' Then the other woman responded, 'No, you must be a lady of leisure, yours is much darker than mine.' A tall dark and handsome Black dude standing behind me whispering down my Black back said 'Sister, if those two are ladies of leisure, you must surely be a lady of royalty.' And in a modest tone, I replied, 'SHO NUFF?

Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colorful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles. It looks as though the dead are dancing at a children's ball. Yes, a children's ball, because the dead are as innocent as children. No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, in Hitler's time, in Stalin's time, through all occupations. When she felt low, she would get into the car, leave Prague far behind, and walk through one or another of the country cemeteries she loved so well. Against a backdrop of blue hills, they were as beautiful as a lullaby.

My mother has always loved piano music and hungered to play. When she was in her early sixties, she retired from her job as a computer programmer so that she could devote herself more fully to the piano. As she had done with her dog obsession, she took her piano education to an extreme. She bought not one, not two, but three pianos. One was the beautiful Steinway B, a small grand piano she purchased with a modest inheritance left by a friend of her parents’. She photocopied all of her music in a larger size so she could see it better and mounted it on manila folders. She practiced for several hours every day. When she wasn’t practicing the piano she was talking about the piano. I love pianos, too, and wrote an entire book about the life of one piano, a Steinway owned by the renowned pianist Glenn Gould. And I shared my mother’s love for her piano. During phone conversations, I listened raptly as she told me about the instrument’s cross-country adventures. Before bringing the Steinway north, my mother had mentioned that she was considering selling it. I was surprised, but instead of reminding her that, last I knew, she was setting it aside for me, I said nothing, unable to utter the simple words, “But, Mom, don’t you remember your promise?” If I did, it would be a way of asking for something, and asking my mother for something was always dangerous because of the risk of disappointment.

It may fairly be urged that most writing about the history and theory of architecture should be as modest in language and recessive in tone as the writing about its science. You can after all draw effective attention to something special or beautiful without making a song and dance about it. Nor should you try to edge it out of the picture you are drawing. But if Adrian’s notion is true, and buildings and words are complementary, there must be occasions when the writing rises to meet the architecture and does not stand too abjectly in its shadow. The reason why Ruskin and Nairn at their best or, to take two other examples at random, Goethe on Strasbourg Cathedral and Wordsworth on King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, are so exciting and moving is because they have the guts to try and respond to, even emulate, what they are talking about.

I had the grace to say that he flattered me but let it lie when he answered that I was too modest—even though I’m not handsome now and wasn’t then and modesty has never been one of my vices. “But Noisy thought all the girls were beautiful, too—and in one case this may have been true and certainly several of them were pretty. “But he asked me what had become of Olga and added, ‘Golly, what a little beauty she was!’ “Kinfolk, Olga wasn’t even homely, she was ugly. Face like a mud pie, figure like a gunnysack—only on an outpost like Mars could she get by. What she did have was a warm and gentle voice and a sweet personality—which was enough, as a customer might pick her through Hobson’s choice on a busy night, but once he had done so, he picked her some later time on purpose. Mean to say, dears, beauty will lure a man into bed, but it won’t bring him back a second time, unless he’s awfully young or very stupid.

Nah, you’re realizing I’m the total package. Beauty and brains—” “And super modest,” she noted. “Exactly! And, because my amazingness knows no bounds, I even come bearing presents!” He pulled a box of Prattles from his cape pocket with a dramatic flourish. “Today you’re getting my brilliant lesson and candy!” He tore open the box and fished out the tiny satchel, dumping the collectible pin into his hand. “Cool—the Prattles kraken! I’ve always wanted one of those!” He held up the tiny replica of the giant sea monster. “Remember when the Black Swan had us leap under the ocean and that kraken wanted to eat us?” “Kinda hard to forget,” Sophie told him. “And you can keep the pin.” “Uh-uh, it’s yours.” “But you want it.” “And I want you to have it! So how about we call him ours? We’ll name him Krakie, and he can live right here.” He pointed to the bandage covering her right hand. “That way Krakie can protect you from the echo—not that you need protection. He’ll just be your backup.

When Ghada, the beautiful 78 year old Palestinian woman, offered me the bread she had just conjured up on the makeshift and primitive cast iron lid balanced upon a rocky fire outside of her sparse UNRWA tent in 2015 it was precisely then that I decided that my life had to change. No longer could I justify vulgar material possessions and unnecessary finances. I returned home, sold my house,moved into a modest but adequate abode and gave a lot of time and funds to helping those with nothing. Some of us aren't destined to feel rapturous love...find deep faith...have a sense of belonging in this world but thanks to Ghada and the many like her, both young and old,that I encountered in Gaza and the West Bank I finally realized and truly understood what it meant to be a human being and what the real purpose of this life is....to help,to give,to speak out,to speak up,to right the many wrongs...to do all of those things without ever once expecting a single thing in return. After all, it is neither heroic or special to do what is just.

Laurel stood on stage. She was very still. Her lovely blue eyes were lowered modestly. Her silver blonde hair fell in disheveled curls around her face, white roses and strands of pearls woven artfully throughout. A necklace of what looked like diamonds clasped her slender throat while white kid gloves were drawn up to her elbow. She held a fan of frosted silver in one hand, dangling at her side. Her dress was a shimmering sapphire blue, and it fit her exquisitely, molding to her form, hugging her small bosom and lifting her breasts until they appeared ready to spill from the satin bodice. A silver braided sash cinched her waist, emphasizing its narrowness. And then, she lifted her head, raised the hand that held the fan, then the other one and, tipping her head back, opened her eyes. They were haunting and luminous, soft in the candlelight. Her skin was pale and smooth. The crowd was utterly quiet, watching her. And then, she began to sing. If Dare had thought Laurel Spencer beautiful before, now she became goddess-like to him in an instant as a melody so heart-wrenching and lovely spilled forth from her lips.

Again I say, the Christians of to-day are too modest for me .… If Wagner were a Christian, then Liszt was perhaps a Father of the Church! — The need of salvation, the quintessence of all Christian needs, has nothing in common with such clowns; it is the most straightforward expression of decadence, it is the most convincing and most painful affirmation of decadence, in sublime symbols and practices. The Christian wishes to be rid of himself. Le moi est toujours haissable (The Self is always hateful). Noble morality, master-morality, on the other hand, is rooted in a triumphant saying of yea to one's self, — it is the self-affirmation and self-glorification of life; it also requires sublime symbols and practices; but only “because its heart is too full.” The whole of beautiful art and of great art belongs here; their common essence is gratitude. But we must allow it a certain instinctive repugnance to décadents, and a scorn and horror of the latter's symbolism: such things almost prove it. The noble Romans considered Christianity as a foeda superstitio: let me call to your minds the feelings which the last German of noble taste — Goethe — had in regard to the cross.

I instantly saw something I admired no end. So while he was weighing my envelope, I remarked with enthusiasm: "I certainly wish I had your head of hair." He looked up, half-startled, his face beaming with smiles. "Well, it isn't as good as it used to be," he said modestly. I assured him that although it might have lost some of its pristine glory, nevertheless it was still magnificent. He was immensely pleased. We carried on a pleasant little conversation and the last thing he said to me was: "Many people have admired my hair." I'll bet that person went out to lunch that day walking on air. I'll bet he went home that night and told his wife about it. I'll bet he looked in the mirror and said: "It is a beautiful head of hair." I told this story once in public and a man asked me afterwards: "'What did you want to get out of him?" What was I trying to get out of him!!! What was I trying to get out of him!!! If we are so contemptibly selfish that we can't radiate a little happiness and pass on a bit of honest appreciation without trying to get something out of the other person in return - if our souls are no bigger than sour crab apples, we shall meet with the failure we so richly deserve.

Nothing—and I mean really, absolutely nothing—is more extraordinary in Britain than the beauty of the countryside. Nowhere in the world is there a landscape that has been more intensively utilized—more mined, farmed, quarried, covered with cities and clanging factories, threaded with motorways and railroad tracks—and yet remains so comprehensively and reliably lovely over most of its extent. It is the happiest accident in history. In terms of natural wonders, you know, Britain is a pretty unspectacular place. It has no alpine peaks or broad rift valleys, no mighty gorges or thundering cataracts. It is built to really quite a modest scale. And yet with a few unassuming natural endowments, a great deal of time, and an unfailing instinct for improvement, the makers of Britain created the most superlatively park-like landscapes, the most orderly cities, the handsomest provincial towns, the jauntiest seaside resorts, the stateliest homes, the most dreamily-spired, cathedral-rich, castle-strewn, abbey-bedecked, folly-scattered, green-wooded, winding-laned, sheep-dotted, plumply-hedgerowed, well-tended, sublimely decorated 88,386 square miles the world has ever known—almost none of it undertaken with aesthetics

Cam awakened slowly as he felt his wife’s voluptuous body snuggling close to his. She always slept in a nightgown made of modest white cambric, with infinite numbers of tucks and tiny ruffles. It never failed to stir him, knowing what splendid curves were concealed beneath the demure garment. The nightgown had ridden up to her knees during the night. One of her bare legs was hooked over his, her knee resting near his groin. The slight roundness of her stomach pressed against his side. Pregnancy had made her feminine form more ample and delicious. There was a glow about her these days, a burgeoning vulnerability that filled him with an overwhelming urge to protect her. And knowing that the changes in her were caused by his seed, a part of him growing inside her … that was undeniably arousing. He wouldn’t have expected to be this enthralled by Amelia’s condition. In the eyes of the Rom, childbirth and all related issues were considered mahrime, polluting events. And since the Irish were notoriously suspicious and prudish when it came to matters of reproduction, there wasn’t much on either side of his lineage to justify his delight in his wife’s pregnancy. But he couldn’t help it. She was the most beautiful and fascinating creature he had ever encountered.

There was also a package wrapped in pale blue paper and tied with a matching ribbon. Picking up a small folded note that had been tucked under the ribbon, Beatrix read: A gift for your wedding night, darling Bea. This gown was made by the most fashionable modiste in London. It is rather different from the ones you usually wear, but it will be very pleasing to a bridegroom. Trust me about this. -Poppy Holding the nightgown up, Beatrix saw that it was made of black gossamer and fastened with tiny jet buttons. Since the only nightgowns she had ever worn had been of modest white cambric or muslin, this was rather shocking. However, if it was what husbands liked... After removing her corset and her other underpinnings, Beatrix drew the gown over her head and let a slither over her body in a cool, silky drift. The thin fabric draped closely over her shoulders and torso and buttoned at the waist before flowing to the ground in transparent panels. A side slit went up to her hip, exposing her leg when she moved. And her back was shockingly exposed, the gown dipping low against her spine. Pulling the pins and combs from her hair, she dropped them into the muslin bag in the trunk. Tentatively she emerged from behind the screen. Christopher had just finished pouring two glasses of champagne. He turned toward her and froze, except for his gaze, which traveled over her in a burning sweep. "My God," he muttered, and drained his champagne. Setting the empty glass aside, he gripped the other as if he were afraid it might slip through his fingers. "Do you like my nightgown?" Beatrix asked. Christopher nodded, not taking his gaze from her. "Where's the rest of it?" "This was all I could find." Unable to resist teasing him, Beatrix twisted and tried to see the back view. "I wonder if I put it on backward..." "Let me see." As she turned to reveal the naked line of her back, Christopher drew in a harsh breath. Although Beatrix heard him mumble a curse, she didn't take offense, deducing that Poppy had been right about the nightgown. And when he drained the second glass of champagne, forgetting that it was hers, Beatrix sternly repressed a grin. She went to the bed and climbed onto the mattress, relishing the billowy softness of its quilts and linens. Reclining on her side, she made no attempt to cover her exposed leg as the gossamer fabric fell open to her hip. Christopher came to her, stripping off his shirt along the way. The sight of him, all that flexing muscle and sun-glazed skin, was breathtaking. He was a beautiful man, a scarred Apollo, a dream lover. And he was hers.

Nothing – and I mean, really, absolutely nothing – is more extraordinary in Britain than the beauty of the countryside. Nowhere in the world is there a landscape that has been more intensively utilized – more mined, farmed, quarried, covered with cities and clanging factories, threaded with motorways and railway lines – and yet remains so comprehensively and reliably lovely over most of its extent. It is the happiest accident in history. In terms of natural wonders, you know, Britain is a pretty unspectacular place. It has no alpine peaks or broad rift valleys, no mighty gorges or thundering cataracts. It is built to really quite a modest scale. And yet with a few unassuming natural endowments, a great deal of time and an unfailing instinct for improvement, the makers of Britain created the most superlatively park-like landscapes, the most orderly cities, the handsomest provincial towns, the jauntiest seaside resorts, the stateliest homes, the most dreamily spired, cathedral-rich, castle-strewn, abbey-bedecked, folly-scattered, green-wooded, winding-laned, sheep-dotted, plumply hedgerowed, well-tended, sublimely decorated 88,386 square miles the world has ever known – almost none of it undertaken with aesthetics in mind, but all of it adding up to something that is, quite often, perfect. What an achievement that is. And

The billboards ruin everything. The historical flavor, the old-time architecture, even the beauty of the wooded hillside—all are sacrificed. Pole-lines and wires may be accepted, like fences, as part of the basic American landscape. They do their work without striving to be conspicuous, and often their not-ungraceful curves add a touch of interest, an intricacy of pattern, even some beauty. Billboards are different. . . . billboards blast themselves into the viewer's consciousness. . . . some of the smaller billboards—those advertising local hotels, service-stations, or small industries—seem to have a certain rooting in the soil, and are often modest and comparatively harmonious to the setting. The large billboards—owned by special companies, usually advertising the products of mass-production—are always placed in the most conspicuous spots, and have designs and colors carefully chosen to clash with the background. One feels a difference between a home-produced: "Stop at Joe's Service Station for Gas—Two Miles," or "The Liberty Café—Short Orders at All Hours—Give Us a Try!" and some gigantic rectangle advertising tires or beer. Large billboards are now springing up along U. S. 40 even in the vastnesses of the Nevada sagebrush country. They are an abomination! Personally, I try to buy as little as possible of anything that is so advertised.

He turned around and looked at her, in this instance, in precisely the same way that, at one time or another, in one year or another, all his brothers and sisters (and especially his brothers) had turned around and looked at her. Not just with objective wonder at the rising of a truth, fragmentary or not, up through what often seemed to be an impenetrable mass of prejudices, cliches, and bromides. But with admiration, affection, and, not least, gratitude. And, oddly or no, Mrs. Glass invariably took this ‘tribute,’ when it came, in beautiful stride. She would look back with grace and modesty at the son or daughter who had given her the look. She now presented this gracious and modest countenance to Zooey. ‘You do,’ she said, without accusation in her voice. ‘Neither you nor Buddy know how to talk to people you don't like.’ She thought it over. ‘Don't love, really,’ she amended. And Zooey continued to stand gazing at her, not shaving. ‘It's not right,’ she said—gravely, sadly. ‘You're getting so much like Buddy used to be when he was your age. Even your father's noticed it. If you don't like somebody in two minutes, you're done with them forever.’ Mrs. Glass looked over, abstractedly, at the blue bathmat, across the tiled floor. Zooey stood as still as possible, in order not to break her mood. ‘You can't live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes,’ Mrs. Glass said to the bathmat, then turned again toward Zooey and gave him a long look, with very little, if any, morality in it. ‘Regardless of what you may think, young man,’ she said.

The modem European is characterized by two apparently opposite traits: individualism and the demand for equal rights; that I have at last come to understand. The individual is an extremely vulnerable piece of vanity: conscious of how easily it suffers. This vanity demands that every other shall count as its equal, that it should be only inter pares. In this way a social race is characterized in which talents and powers do not diverge very much. The pride that desires solitude and few admirers is quite beyond comprehension; a really "great" success is possible ony through the masses, indeed one hardly grasps the fact any more that a success with the masses is always really a petty success: because pulchrum est paucorum hominum (Beauty belongs to the few) All moralities know nothing of an "order of rank" among men; teachers of law nothing of a communal conscience. The principle of the individual rejects very great human beings and demands, among men approximately equal, the subtlest eye and the speediest recognition of a talent. And because everyone has some kind of talent in such late and civilized cultures - and therefore can expect to receive back his share of honor - there is more flattering of modest merits today than ever before: it gives the age a veneer of boundless fairness. Its unfairness consists in a boundless rage, not against tyrants and public flatterers even in the arts, but against noble men, who despise the praise of the many. The demand for equal rights (i.e. to be allowed to sit in judgment on everything and everyone) is anti-aristocratic. Equally strange to the age is the vanished individual, the absorption in a great type, the desire not to be a personality - which constituted the distinction and ambition of many lofty men in earlier days (the greatest poets among them); or "to be a city" as in Greece, Jesuitism, Prussian officer corps and bureaucracy, or to be a pupil and continuator of great masters - for which non-social conditions and a lack of petty vanity are needed.

Closing the distance between them, he had saved the modest allure of her walk and felt his body respond to the graceful sway of her hips as they approached the pool. He had envisioned her taking off her robe and showing him her slender nakedness, but instead, she had just stood there, as though searching for someone. It skipped through his mind that when he caught up to the girl, he would either apprehend or ravish her. He still wasn't sure which it would be as he stood before her, blocking her escape with a dark, slight smile. As she peered up at him fearfully from the shadowed folds of her hood, he found himself staring into the bluest eyes he had ever seen. He had only encountered that deep, dream-spun shade of cobalt once in his life before, in the stained glass windows of Chartres Cathedral. His awareness of the crowd them dimmed in the ocean-blue depths of her eyes. 'Who are you?' He did not say a word nor ask her permission. With the smooth self-assurance of a man who has access to every woman in the room, he captured her chin in a firm but gentle grip. She jumped when he touched her, panic flashing in her eyes. His hard stare softened slightly in amusement at that, but then his faint smile faded, for her skin was silken beneath his fingertips. With one hand, he lifted her face toward the dim torchlight, while the other softly brushed back her hood. Then Lucien faltered, faced with a beauty the likes of which he had never seen. His very soul grew hushed with reverence as he gazed at her, holding his breath for fear the vision would dissolve, a figment of his overactive brain. With her bright tresses gleaming the flame-gold of dawn and her large, frightened eyes of that shining, ethereal blue, he was so sure for a moment that she was a lost angel that he half expected to see silvery, feathered wings folded demurely beneath her coarse brown robe. She appeared somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two- a wholesome, nay, a virginal beauty of trembling purity. He instantly 'knew' that she was utterly untouched, impossible as that seemed in this place. Her face was proud and weary. Her satiny skin glowed in the candlelight, pale and fine, but her soft, luscious lips shot off an effervescent champagne-pop of desire that fizzed more sweetly in his veins than anything he'd felt since his adolescence, which had taken place, if he recalled correctly, some time during the Dark Ages. There was intelligence and valor in her delicate face, courage, and a quivering vulnerability that made him ache with anguish for the doom of all innocent things. 'A noble youth, a questing youth,' he thought, and if she had come to slay dragons, she had already pierced him in his black, fiery heart with the lance of her heaven-blue gaze.

Everyone wants to be successful rather than forgotten, and everyone wants to make a difference in life. But that is beyond the control of any of us. If this life is all there is, then everything will eventually burn up in the death of the sun and no one will even be around to remember anything that has ever happened. Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavors, even the best, will come to naught. Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavor, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God’s calling, can matter forever. That is what the Christian faith promises. “In the Lord, your labor is not in vain,” writes Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15, verse 58. He was speaking of Christian ministry, but Tolkien’s story shows how this can ultimately be true of all work. Tolkien had readied himself, through Christian truth, for very modest accomplishment in the eyes of this world. (The irony is that he produced something so many people consider a work of genius that it is one of the bestselling books in the history of the world.) What about you? Let’s say that you go into city planning as a young person. Why? You are excited about cities, and you have a vision about how a real city ought to be. You are likely to be discouraged because throughout your life you probably will not get more than a leaf or a branch done. But there really is a New Jerusalem, a heavenly city, which will come down to earth like a bride dressed for her husband (Revelation 21–22). Or let’s say you are a lawyer, and you go into law because you have a vision for justice and a vision for a flourishing society ruled by equity and peace. In ten years you will be deeply disillusioned because you will find that as much as you are trying to work on important things, so much of what you do is minutiae. Once or twice in your life you may feel like you have finally “gotten a leaf out.” Whatever your work, you need to know this: There really is a tree. Whatever you are seeking in your work—the city of justice and peace, the world of brilliance and beauty, the story, the order, the healing—it is there. There is a God, there is a future healed world that he will bring about, and your work is showing it (in part) to others. Your work will be only partially successful, on your best days, in bringing that world about. But inevitably the whole tree that you seek—the beauty, harmony, justice, comfort, joy, and community—will come to fruition. If you know all this, you won’t be despondent because you can get only a leaf or two out in this life. You will work with satisfaction and joy. You will not be puffed up by success or devastated by setbacks. I just said, “If you know all this.” In order to work in this way—to get the consolation and freedom that Tolkien received from his Christian faith for his work—you need to know the Bible’s answers to three questions: Why do you want to work? (That is, why do we need to work in order to lead a fulfilled life?) Why is it so hard to work? (That is, why is it so often fruitless, pointless, and difficult?) How can we overcome the difficulties and find satisfaction in our work through the gospel? The rest of this book will seek to answer those three questions in its three sections, respectively.

O happy age, which our first parents called the age of gold! Not because of gold, so much adored in this iron age, was then easily purchased, but because those two fatal words mine and thine, were distinctions unknown to the people of those fortunate times; for all things were in common in that holy age: men, for their sustenance, needed only lift their hands and take it from the sturdy oak, whose spreading arms liberally invited them to gather the wholesome savoury fruit; while the clear springs, and silver rivulets, with luxuriant plenty, ordered them their pure refreshing water. In hollow trees, and in the clefts of rocks, the laboring and industrious bees erected their little commonwealths, that men might reap with pleasure and with ease the the sweet and fertile harvest of their toils. The tough and strenuous cork-trees did of themselves, and without other art than their native liberality, dismiss and impart their broad light bark, which served to cover these lowly huts, propped up with rough-hewn stakes, that were first built as a shelter against the inclemencies of air. All then was union, all peace, all love and friendship in the world; as yet no rude plough-share with violence to pry into the pious bowels of our mother earth, for she, without compulsion, kindly yielded from every part of her fruitful and spacious bosom, whatever might at once satisfy, sustain, and indulge her frugal children. Then was the when innocent, beautiful young sheperdesses went tripping over the hills and vales; their lovely hairs sometimes plaited, sometimes loose and flowing, clad in no other vestment but what was necessary to cover decently what modesty would always have concealed. The Tyrian dye and the rich glossy hue of silk, martyred and dissembled into every color, which are now esteemed so fine and magnificent, were unknown to the innocent plainness of that age; arrayed in the most magnificent garbs, and all the most sumptous adornings which idleness and luxury have taught succeeding pride: lovers then expressed the passion of their souls in the unaffected language of the heart, with the native plainness and sincerity in which they were conceived, and divested of all that artificial contexture, which enervates what it labours to enforce: imposture, deceit and malice had not yet crept in and imposed themselves unbribed upon mankind in the disguise of truth and simplicity: justice, unbiased either by favour or interest, which now so fatally pervert it, was equally and impartially dispensed; nor was the judge's fancy law, for then there were neither judges nor causes to be judged: the modest maid might walk wherever she pleased alone, free from the attacks of lewd, lascivious importuners. But, in this degenerate age, fraud and a legion of ills infecting the world, no virtue can be safe, no honour be secure; while wanton desires, diffused into the hearts of men, corrupt the strictest watches, and the closest retreats; which, though as intricate and unknown as the labyrinth of Crete, are no security for chastity. Thus that primitive innocence being vanished, the opression daily prevailing, there was a necessity to oppose the torrent of violence: for which reason the order of knight-hood-errant was instituted to defend the honour of virgins, protect widows, relieve orphans, and assist all the distressed in general. Now I myself am one of this order, honest friends; and though all people are obliged by the law of nature to be kind to persons of my order; yet, since you, without knowing anything of this obligation, have so generously entertained me, I ought to pay you my utmost acknowledgment; and, accordingly, return you my most hearty thanks for the same.

In silence we shall love, " because for you and me It is enough without words that are for those Who do not know a different way to say How beautiful is the blooming of the lilac flower" The Lilac Flower ….. Aric Einstein 1939-2013 This week Aric Einstein passed away. For so many Israelis (and for me) Aric Einstein was the sound track of our life. An amazing singer song writer and person. Except for the fact that he sang amazing songs, Aric Einstein was a modest person who lived his life in a simple modest way. In the next days I will post some more quotes from his songs.

A seashell is like a memory. The life is gone. The beauty remains. (excerpt from Merry Musings, Modest Maxims for Happiness by Laurel Darling Roethke) <\i>

The burglar took two quick, long strides to Edith’s side of the bed and reached for a collar. “What’s he doing?!” a wide-eyed Edith asked Stick Cat in an angry whisper. She breathed fast, her shoulders were hunched a bit, and the fur on her back was up. “He’s stealing, Edith.” “My collars?! My daily collars?! My beautiful, colorful collars?!” “Yes.” “He’s stealing from me?!” “Yes.” “A cat?!” “That’s right.” “But I’m a good kitty.” “I know you are.” “I’m a great kitty!” “I know.” “I’m a fabulous, beautiful, and totally modest kitty!” “Mm-hmm.” “And Tuna Todd is stealing from me?” “I’m afraid so.” It took several seconds for Edith to consider and digest this information. As she did, the man began to pick her collars off the pegs one by one. He reached for the first one—Monday’s collar—with his greedy, grabby left hand. “Stick Cat,” Edith said, and looked him right in the eyes. “Yes?” “I don’t like Tuna Todd anymore.” Stick Cat used all his effort to suppress a smile. He knew this was a scary situation, but at this exact moment he was amused that it took something being stolen from Edith herself for her to finally understand the situation. “I’m sorry about your collars,” Stick Cat said. “And I’m sorry Tuna Todd didn’t turn out to be as nice as you thought.” “We should have figured it out earlier,” hissed Edith. “Umm,” Stick Cat said, and stopped. It seemed like he was contemplating the right words to use. “You’re right. If only I had been clever enough to figure out what he was doing.” “Don’t blame yourself, Stick Cat,” Edith said. “Thankfully, you have me here to help.

Genevieve was familiar with one of the duke's properties- Rosemont- as she'd gone to tour it once when he was away at one of his other vast tracts of lands. It was surprisingly modest by duke terms, a redbrick manor in West Sussex presiding over a collection of softly swelling hills, which surrounded a lake populated by enormous, irritable swans and overhung with willows. The garden had been brilliant with its namesake blooms and the fountain in the courtyard featured a lasciviously grinning stone satyr performing an arabesque and spitting water high into the air. She'd found it delightful. Its pocket-sized, whimsical beauty hardly seemed to suit him, but then he normally spent his time in London and likely had all but forgotten he owned it.

She did draw and paint and did both diligently, but possessed modest talent. She didn't mind. Her gift and passion lay in the observation and recognition of talent and beauty, whether it was found in the work of an Italian master or the profile of a viscount-to-be.

We are inundated with advice on where to travel to; we hear little of why and how we should go – though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia or human flourishing.

She is not, indeed, like most modern ladies, to be known in half an hour; her modest worth, and fearful excellence, require both time and encouragement to shew themselves. She does not, beautiful as she is, seize the soul by surprise, but, with more dangerous fascination, she steals it almost imperceptibly.

You made a good choice for your Naga,” she assured me. “Danica is more graceful on a dais than half the serpents I know.” “Provided she isn’t blushing too brightly to see,” another quipped. “The first time I saw our queen perform, I thought she was a lost cause--far too uptight, like most avians--but I’m glad to be proved wrong.” I knew I was grinning. I had never doubted that Danica could learn the serpent art. Much of her loved my world; a part of her craved dance as surely as anyone else in this nest did. Perhaps that thirst came from her time dancing with the currents of air far above where we earthbound creatures roamed, or perhaps it came from the expressive nature her own world forced her to hide. Similar conversation flowed among us until A’isha’s musical voice commanded me, “Zane, admire your queen.” The words brought our attention to the back of the room, where Danica had emerged, looking so beautiful that she took my breath away. In response to her teacher’s words, Danica smiled and shook her head, causing her golden hair to ripple about her face. It made my heart speed and my breath still, as if I was afraid the next movement would shatter the world. She was a spark of fire in sha’Mehay. The serpiente dress rippled around the hawk’s long legs, the fabric so light it moved with the slightest shift of air. The bodice was burgundy silk; it laced up the front with a black ribbon, and though it was more modest than many dancers’ costumes, it still revealed enough cream-and-roses skin to tantalize the imagination. On Danica’s right temple, A’isha had painted a symbol for courage; beneath her left collarbone lay the symbols for san’Anhamirak, abandon and freedom. “You dance every day with the wind. This is not so different,” A’isha said encouragingly to Danica. “Now, look at the man you love and dance for him.” The nest hushed, faces turning to their Naga. Her cheeks held more color than usual, which A’isha addressed with a common dancers’ proverb. “There is no place for shame, Danica. If Anhamirak had not wanted beauty admired, she would not have made our eyes desire it. You are art.” Danica stepped out of A’isha’s grip. “If my mother could see me now,” she murmured, but she smiled as she said it.

We believed Harriet had been collected in 1835 by Charles Darwin himself. She was brought to Australia from England in 1841 by Captain Wickham aboard the HMS Beagle. Actually, three giant Galapagos tortoises had been donated to the Brisbane Botanic Gardens, after Darwin realized they did not flourish in England, where he had originally taken them in 1835. How could we determine whether Harriet was one of the Darwin Three? Scott Thomson found a giant tortoise in the collection of the Queensland Museum that had been mislabeled an Aldabran tortoise. Carved on the carapace was the animal’s name. “Tom,” and “1929.” We now had potentially found two of the three Darwin tortoises. Harriet and Tom had been seen together in living memory. The third tortoise was never found and was presumed buried somewhere in the botanic gardens. Harriet lived on. Steve and I became very excited at this news. Our studies and research into Harriet’s history continued for years, and it was amazing to learn what a special resident we had at the zoo. Despite her impressive background, Harriet remained attractively modest. She had a sweet personality like a little dog. She loved hibiscus flowers, and certain veggies were her favorites. Steve carried on a practice that his parents had implemented: Whatever you feed animals should be good enough for you to eat. Thus Harriet got the most beautiful mustard greens, kale, eggplant, zucchinis, and even roses. In return, Harriet gave zoo visitors a rare chance to watch her keepers cuddle and scratch one of the grandest creatures on earth. She was the oldest living chelonian and the only living creature to have met Charles Darwin and traveled aboard the Beagle. And she gave us all something else, too--a lesson in how to live a long life. Don’t worry too much. Take it easy. Stop and munch the flowers. It was a lesson Steve noted and understood but could never quite take to heart. He was a meteor. Harriet was more of a mountain. In this world, we need both.

And then there she was, a girl of elegant height, perhaps eighteen or nineteen years of age—gawky and coltish, all long legs and arms, but with the promise of stunning beauty to add graceful curves to the lean lines of her body. She was dressed in a pair of my blue jeans, cut off at the tops of her muscled thighs, and my own T-shirt, tied off over her abdomen. A pentacle amulet, identical to my own, if less battered, lay over her heart, between the curves of her modest breasts. Her skin was pale, almost luminous, her hair a shade of brown-gold, like ripe wheat, her eyes a startling, storm-cloud grey in contrast. Her smile lit up her face, made her eyes dance with secret fires that still, even after all the years, made me draw in a sharp breath.

It is both apt and revealing that Sullenberger, a modest and self-evidently decent man, has made exactly this point. In a television interview months after the miracle landing on the Hudson, he offered this beautiful gem of wisdom: Everything we know in aviation, every rule in the rule book, every procedure we have, we know because someone somewhere died . . . We have purchased at great cost, lessons literally bought with blood that we have to preserve as institutional knowledge and pass on to succeeding generations. We cannot have the moral failure of forgetting these lessons and have to relearn them.