It seems to me that whatever else is beautiful apart from absolute Beauty is beautiful because it partakes of that absolute Beauty, and for no other reason... [I]t is by Beauty that beautiful things are beautiful.

Socrates
About This Quote

Is there anything beautiful apart from Beauty? If not, what is it? And why is it beautiful? These questions have plagued philosophers and writers through the centuries. A good beginning for an investigation on beauty is to look at Beauty itself. What is it? And how can we capture it in words and images? In his famous essay on understanding beauty, Kant described beauty as “the purposive form of an object as a necessary condition of its being perceived as an object of sense.” In other words, beauty is that quality that makes something seem to be something else. In order for something to look beautiful, it must first be seen as beautiful.

Source: Apology, Crito And Phaedo Of Socrates.

Some Similar Quotes
  1. I wonder how many people don't get the one they want, but end up with the one they're supposed to be with. - Fannie Flagg
  2. Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another. - Thomas Merton
  3. But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one he loves. - Mikhail Bulgakov
  4. ...some things are better left in the past. And true things are destined to repeat themselves. - Suzanne Young
  5. She had to go on this quest. The fate of the world might depend on it. But part of him wanted to say: Forget the world. He didn’t want to be without her. - Rick Riordan
More Quotes By Socrates
  1. Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle-class life-style will never write anything but crap.
  2. It seems to me that no matter whether you marry, settle down or live with a bird or not, certain ones simply have your number on them, like bombs in the war; and even if you don’t happen to like them all that much there’s...
  3. ...perhaps, when it got utterly dark, the peace of the darkness would become the same as light so that my last experience would become as mysterious and musical as my first, so that in my last darkness there might not be the same need of...
  4. A quick butchers shows up Old Bill three-handed, also a particularly nasty female grass—-and if looks were acid baths the two she collects from us would reduce her to gristle quicker than Mrs. Durand-Deacon.
  5. You Englishmen, ’ said Herr Wurter. ‘You are all the same. Wherever you are you behave as if you were at home and your word was law.
Related Topics