Cloudscape

Ugliness is just a kind of beauty that is too overwhelming to oneself.

Sorrow can make a man passionate about beauty, and passion for beaut can make a man sorrowful.

Over the past millions of years, nature has made its greatest achievement of all time. It has given us the most marvelous ability there is in the universe: the ability to perceive beauty, and so to recreate it in our minds. From this asset spring the most beautiful things in life - love, wonder, esthesia, spirituality. We alone, sentient beings, are capable of experiencing such profound feelings. Our emotions don’t lose any of their meaningfulness just because we were given them by nothing but natural selection: the preservation of our genes and our gene pool is not just what we have our qualities for - it’s how we got them. Emotion can be seen as the final destination of evolution, and this only adds to the magic of its nature - it is what it has been aiming at since time immemorial. This is all the universe was born for, for it is the the ultimate culmination of its development: the ability to experience feelings is the crowning glory of all things. And eventually, this development falls to intelligence, for it is there to complete this creation by expanding itself to infinity. That we are capable of seeking beauty reflects the true nature of evolution: it does not just preserve life, but also enriches it. It does not create life as its slave, but as its child. It is not a machine chasing us with a giant meat grinder, mincing the flesh of all those who fall behind. For although it is associated with death, evolution itself is life: evolution is the exception to death, and so, in fact, its opposite, even though it lives in harmony with it. Evolution is the creation of that which shall survive, not the destruction of that which does not. Evolution can therefore be seen as that which counteracts the law of entropy, and so has brought about everything in the universe in spite of it.

Reason itself may be blind to beauty, but it helps us find it.

Love is beauty. For love is the appreciation of beauty, and beauty does not exist outside one's own appreciation of it. To perceive beauty is in itself beauty.