Beauty
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- "Le beau est toujours bizarre." (Eng: what is beautiful is always bizarre.) --Baudelaire
- "The most wonderful of all things in life is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a growing depth, beauty and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvellous thing; it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of divine accident, and the most wonderful of all things in life." -- Sir Hugh Walpole
Beauty is commonly defined as a characteristic present in a person, place, object or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning or satisfaction to the mind or to the eyes, arising from sensory manifestations such as a shape, color, personality, sound, design or rhythm.<ref> Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.</ref> Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology and culture. Beauty, as a cultural creation, is also extremely commercialized.
The subjective experience of "beauty" often involves the interpretation of some entity as being in balance and harmony with nature, which may lead to feelings of attraction and emotional well-being. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is a common phrase attributed to this concept.
In its most profound sense, beauty may engender a salient experience of positive reflection about the meaning of one's own existence. An "object of beauty" is anything that reveals or resonates with personal meaning. Hence religious and moral teachings often focus on the divinity and virtue of beauty, and to assert natural beauty as an aspect of a spirituality and truth.
