Proverbs of Beauty and Goodness

Music: Fugue in A Major
By Dimitri Shostakovich. Sequenced by J. Marques.

Alpha List Philosophical Poems Proverbs Contents Home Copyright by Nicholas Gordon

1. Beauty in people is called goodness; goodness in things is called beauty. 2. An essential quality of both is wonder. In beauty wonder is expressed as radiance; in goodness, as love. 3. Another essential quality of both is harmony. In beauty harmony is expressed as balance; in goodness, as justice. 4. Dissonance and asymmetry increase radiance by suggesting powerfully what is not there; injustice and evil similarly increase love. 5. Thus harmony and wonder are in permanent tension. In any object or person justice and love, or balance and radiance, are locked in a continuous dance. 6. The desire for harmony and capacity for wonder are inborn, having evolved to enhance an individual's relish for life and ability to live peacefully in society. 7. Beauty and goodness objectively are a single quality of being itself, present in all beings insofar as they exist. The more beauty and goodness, the more being; the less beauty and goodness, the less being. 8. Beauty and goodness as we know them are subjective judgments based on one's experience of an objective quality. Thus the broader one's experience of beautiful things and good people, the more developed one's taste and finer one's judgment. 9. The aesthetic experience is no more divorced from the moral than the moral from the aesthetic. For a beautiful person may be more beautiful in soul than in person, while a good book may well find its radiant relish for life in love.