To misstate, or even merely understate, the relation of the universities to beauty is one kind of error that can be made. A university is among the precious things that can be destroyed.

Permitted to inhabit neither the realm of the ideal nor the realm of the real, to be neither aspiration nor companion, beauty comes to us like a fugitive bird unable to fly, unable to land.

Beauty always takes place in the particular, and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down

The generation is unceasing. Beauty, as both Plato’s Symposium and everyday life confirm, prompts the begetting of children: when the eye sees someone beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce the person.

When we come upon beautiful things they act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space.

How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.

Beauty brings copies of itself into being.