a shandean commonplace book

Our capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful Survives, unlike beauty Amid the harshest distractions. James Longenbach

Nothing can make our lives, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.                        Leo Tolstoy

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture and, if it were possible, speak a few reasonable words.                        Goethe

The point is that rapport with the marvelously purposeless world of nature gives us new eyes for ourselves – eyes in which our very self-importance is not condemned, but seen as something quite other than what it imagines itself to be. In this light, all the weirdly abstract and pompous pursuits of men are suddenly transformed into natural marvels of the same order as the immense beaks of the toucans and hornbills, the fabulous tails of the birds of paradise, the towering necks of the giraffes, and the vividly polychromed posteriors of the baboons… Seen thus, the self-importance of man dissolves in laughter. Alan Watts

The moment one gives close attention to anything, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. Henry Miller