Philosophy
Lovers!
Click Here
Are Beauty and Pleasure the Best Things
that Life has to Offer? If So, what Kinds?
[In the following passage from his autobiography C. S. Lewis describes a distant cousin whose family helped raise him and his brother after his mother’s death.]
As for the youngest, G., I can only say that she was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, perfect in shape and colour and voice and every movement—but who can describe beauty? The reader may smile at this as the far-off echo of a precocious calf-love, but he will be wrong. There are beauties so unambiguous that they need no lens of that kind to reveal them; they are visible even to the careless and objective eyes of a child.
Of Psyche’s beauty—at every age the beauty proper to that age—there is only this to be said, that there were no two opinions about it, from man or woman, once she had been seen. It was beauty that did not astonish you till afterwards when you had gone out of sight of her and reflected on it. While she was with you, you were not astonished. It seemed the most natural thing in the world. As the Fox delighted to say, she was “according to nature”; what every woman, or even every thing, ought to have been and meant to be, but had missed by some trip of chance. Indeed, when you looked at her you believed, for a moment, that they had not missed it. She made beauty all round her.
C. S. Lewis (from Till We Have Faces)
Unsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy, things that sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness. The buzz of life ceases at their touch as a piano-string stops sounding when the damper falls upon it. Of course the music can commence again;—and again and again—at intervals. But with this the healthy-minded consciousness is left with an irremediable sense of precariousness. It is a bell with a crack; it draws its breath on sufferance and by an accident.
William James
The pleasure of the moment begins to wither almost as soon as it blossoms; our pleasures are soon swallowed up in time’s relentless torrent.
What do men mean by the desire to be dissolved and to enjoy the spirit free and without attachments? That many men have so desired there can be no doubt, and the best men, whose holiness one recognizes at once, tell us that the joys of the soul are incomparably higher than those of the living man. In India, moreover, there are great numbers of men who do the most fantastic things with the object of thus unprisoning the soul, and Milton talks of the same thing with evident conviction, and the Saints all praise it in chorus. But what is it? For my part I cannot understand so much as the meaning of the words, for every pleasure I know comes from an intimate union between my body and my very human mind, which last receives, confirms, revives, and can summon up again what my body has experienced. Of pleasures, however, in which my senses have had no part I know nothing.
The only two things that can satisfy the soul are a person and a story; and even a story must be about a person. There are indeed very voluptuous appetites and enjoyments in mere abstractions—like mathematics, logic, or chess. But these mere pleasures of the mind are like mere pleasures of the body. That is, they are mere pleasures, though they may be gigantic pleasures; they can never by a mere increase of themselves amount to happiness. A man just about to be hanged may enjoy his breakfast; especially if it be his favourite breakfast; and in the same way he may enjoy an argument with the chaplain about heresy, especially if it is his favourite heresy. But whether he can enjoy either of them does not depend on either of them; it depends upon his spiritual attitude towards a subsequent event. And that event is really interesting to the soul; because it is the end of a story and (as some hold) the end of a person.
Once, as he had sat writing near an open window in Cambridge, he had looked up and shuddered to see, as he supposed, a many coloured beetle of unusually hideous shape crawling across his paper. A second glance showed him that it was a dead leaf, moved by the breeze; and instantly the very curves and re-entrants which had made its ugliness turned into its beauties. NEW ITEM (Dec 2/11)
C. S. Lewis (from Out of the Silent Planet)
Thoughts about Beauty & Pleasure
BEAUTY: The adjustment of all parts proportionately so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole.
We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty and folly are old companions.
Benjamin Franklin
Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
Edgar Allen Poe
*
Beauty is the promise of happiness.
Stendhal
Fair tresses man’s imperial race ensnare,
And beauty draws us with a single hair.
Alexander Pope
*
Every religion of the beautiful ends in orgy.
Benjamin Disraeli
What begins as the love of life and beauty often ends in the worship of eroticism or force.
Her great simplicity of character and goodness shone in her face, making her beautiful. I have always loved such qualities and those who have them, and, contrariwise, been attracted sensually by those who lack them—who are egotistic and greedy and faithless.
Malcolm Muggeridge
*
I shouldn’t be surprised if the greatest rule of all weren’t to give pleasure.
Molière
Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of pleasure.
John Stuart Mill
I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want—an adorable pancreas?
Jean Kerr
It makes no moral sense that beauty should erase sin. And yet, in this world at least, it does.
Jonathan Kay
*
Mathematics possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty.
Bertrand Russell
*
No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.
Oscar Wilde
Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.
John Ruskin
One must work, if not from taste then at least from despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure.
Baudelaire
People feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, to the extent that their activities are creative.
Ivan Illich
Pleasure is the only thing to live for. Nothing ages like happiness.
Oscar Wilde
To a happy soul, pleasures are no longer necessary; to a pleasure-seeking soul, happiness is not yet possible.
Pleasures are shafts of God’s glory as it strikes our sensibility. As it impinges on our will or understanding, we give it different names—goodness or truth or the like. But its flash upon our senses and mood is pleasure.
C. S. Lewis
*
The perception of beauty is a moral test.
Henry David Thoreau
Beauty is a form of genius—is higher indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial, but at least it is not so superficial as thought. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
Oscar Wilde
The preponderance of pain over pleasure is the cause of our fictitious morality and religion.
Friedrich Nietzche
*
The surest way of spoiling a pleasure is to start examining your satisfaction.
C. S. Lewis
There are few pleasures more complete, or to me more rare, than that of shopping extravagantly at someone else’s expense.
Evelyn Waugh
*
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
Bertrand Russell
Talking about serious questions is a pleasure; it is perhaps the greatest mere pleasure known to man... But in our time it is a secret pleasure; it is enjoyed in dark corners, like a vice.
G. K. Chesterton
*
Those who are now pursuing pleasure are not only fleeing from boredom, but are acutely suffering from it.
Aldous Huxley
Instant gratification is bad psychology. Pleasure must be earned because part of its very intensity comes from resistance or self-control. To gratify every impulse at once destroys this intensity, as the breaking of a dam reduces all water to the same level.
*
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
Tolstoy
Beauty is indeed a good gift of God; but that the good may not think it a great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked.
St Augustine
To download the MS Word (2002) version of this file
click Here.
To download the WordPerfect (6.1) version of this file
click Here.
For more topics in this format
click Here.
Philosophy
Lovers!
Click Here