C. S. Lewis on beauty

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

Love, while always forgiving of imperfections and mistakes, can never cease to will their removal.

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one!’

Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.

John Keats1795–1821Ode on a Grecian Urn, Stanza 5. The final lines of this poem have been rendered in various ways in different editions, some placing the entire last two lines within quotation marks, others only the statement “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” …In context

• Truth & Lies

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Helen Keller1880–1968Letter to Rev. Phillips Brooks (8 June 1891)

It is hard, if not impossible, to snub a beautiful woman⁠—they remain beautiful and the rebuke recoils.

Winston Churchill1874–1965

• Women