The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.
Havelock EllisRead
The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
Interpretation
Perfection in beauty can be seen as an unattainable ideal, suggesting that imperfection adds depth and character.
Havelock Ellis's quote suggests that true beauty is not found in a flawless appearance but in the uniqueness and imperfections that make something or someone real and relatable. The idea proposes that striving for absolute perfection detracts from the authenticity of beauty, and that it is often the flaws and variations that make beauty resonate on a deeper level.
In practice
Sharing this quote during a talk about self-acceptance.
The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.
Life is livable because we know that wherever we go most of the people we meet will be restrained in their actions towards us by an almost instinctive network of taboos.
To live remains an art which everyone must learn, and which no one can teach.
Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.
It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.
It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained, and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our knowledge.
Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen. [...] Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.
God will never reject you. Whether you accept Him is your decision.
Once the inner connection is grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions collapses before their collapse in practice -- Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann (July 11, 1868)
My existence from day to day has become a matter of averting my eyes, of cringing. Death is the only truth left. Death is what I cannot bear to think. At every moment when I am thinking of something else, I am not thinking death, am not thinking the truth.
The true nature of anything is what it becomes at its highest.
What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.
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