[Come enjoy my latest book Redesign Your Mind. It will serve you beautifully!]

Beauty is such a tricky word . Here are 10 prompts that will encourage you to think deeply about beauty.

1.

“We live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting.”—Kahlil Gibran

What is this beauty Gibran is affirming?

2.

“If you seek happiness and beauty simultaneously, you will attain neither. For the price of beauty is self-denial.”—Gustave Flaubert

Respond to the prompt, “Beauty and happiness are different conversations.”

3.

“Once in a lifetime a really beautiful song comes along. Until it does, I’d like to do this one.”—Cliff Richard

Is only the “really beautiful” beautiful? Or can there be beauty one or two tiers down?

4.

“The pain passes but the beauty remains.”—Pierre Auguste Renoir

Respond to the prompt, “Beauty can and does return.”

5.

“The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish.”—Virginia Woolf

How do beauty and anguish connect?

6.

“The beautiful is as useful as the useful. Perhaps more so.”—Victor Hugo

Respond to the prompt, “Sometimes you need a can opener, sometimes you need beauty.”

7.

“The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.”—Francis Bacon

If so, then what can a painting express? Only hints and intimations?

8.

“I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood.”—Charlie Chaplin

If trying to explain “beauty” isn’t the way, how can beauty be discussed? Or can it?

9.

“Beauty is unbearable. It drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.”—Albert Camus

If we can’t stretch out beauty to last over time, what should we do when the beauty isn’t there?

10.

“It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and pain, of strength and freedom, of disappointment and never-satisfied love.”—Benjamin Britten

Respond to the prompt, “If beauty can bring us pain, should we maybe try to avoid it?”

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