„It was one of the few things he had to believe in, the possibility of beauty when faced with the reality of so much ugliness.“

— Cassandra Clare

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„I long so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things require effort and disappointment and perseverance.“
— Vincent Van Gogh
„the beautiful are found in the edge of a roomcrumpled into spiders and needles and silenceand we can never understand why theyleft, they were sobeautiful.they dont make it,the beautiful die youngand leave the ugly to their ugly lives.“
— Charles Bukowski
„He had been through a good deal in the course of the Great Quest — he had seen beautiful things and horrible things — but up until now he had not known that one and the same creature can be both, that beauty can be terrifying.“
— Michael Ende
„Because so many of our writers were born in ugly environments, in monstrous poverty and humilitation, they continue to assert that this is the natural environment, reality, and that beauty is artifice. Why should the natural state be ugliness? Natural to whom? We may be born in ugliness, but the natural consequences should be a thirst for its opposite. To mistake ugliness for reality is one of the frauds of the realistic school. A hunger for the unknown, and an aspiration towards beauty were inseparable from civilization. In America the word art was distorted to mean artificial.We are born with the power to alter what we are given at birth.When the Japanese paint flowers or the sea on a kimono they mean to establish a link with nature. But they select only what is beautiful in nature to maintain their love of life.The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything. That is the deepest meaning of rebellion, not the wearing of different clothes, haircuts, or the adopting of other cultures.“
— Anaïs Nin