Beauty is the harmony of chance and the good.
The beautiful is the necessary which, while remaining obedient to its own law and to it alone, obeys the good.
Object of science: the beautiful (that is, order, proportion, harmony) insofar as it is suprasensible and necessary.
Object of art: the sensible and contingent beautiful, perceived through the net of chance and evil.
The beautiful in nature: union of sensory impression and the feeling of necessity. It must be so (in the first place), and precisely so it is.
Beauty seduces the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass through to the soul.
The beautiful contains, among other unities of contraries, that of the instantaneous and the eternal.
The beautiful is that which one can contemplate. A statue, a painting that one can look at for hours.
The beautiful is something to which one can pay attention.
Gregorian music. When one sings the same things for hours each day and every day, whatever is even a little below supreme excellence becomes unbearable and is eliminated.
The Greeks looked at their temples. We tolerate the statues in the Luxembourg Gardens because we do not look at them. A painting such that it could be placed in the cell of a prisoner condemned to perpetual solitary confinement, without that being an atrocity -- on the contrary. Immobile theater is the only truly beautiful theater. Shakespeare's tragedies are of the second order, except Lear. Racine's are of the third order, except Phedre. Corneille's are of the Nth order. A work of art has an author, and yet, when it is perfect, it has something essentially anonymous about it. It imitates the anonymity of divine art. Thus the beauty of the world proves a God who is at once personal and impersonal, and neither one nor the other. The beautiful is a carnal attraction that keeps one at a distance and implies a renunciation. Including the most intimate renunciation, that of the imagination. One wants to eat every other object of desire. The beautiful is that which one desires without wanting to eat it. We desire that it should be. To remain still and unite oneself with what one desires and does not approach. One unites oneself with God in this way: one cannot approach him. Distance is the soul of the beautiful. Gazing and waiting -- that is the attitude corresponding to the beautiful. So long as one can conceive, will, wish, the beautiful does not appear. This is why in all beauty there is contradiction, bitterness, irreducible absence.
Poetry: impossible pain and impossible joy. Poignant touch, nostalgia. Such is Provencal and English poetry. A joy which, by dint of being pure and unmixed, hurts. A pain which, by dint of being pure and unmixed, soothes. Beauty: a fruit one looks at without reaching out one's hand. Likewise a misfortune one looks at without drawing back. Double descending movement: to redo through love what gravity does. Is not the double descending movement the key to all art? The descending movement, mirror of grace, is the essence of all music. The rest serves only to frame it. The rising of notes is a purely sensory rising. The descent is at once a sensory descent and a spiritual ascent. Therein lies the paradise that every being desires: that the slope of nature should lead upward toward the good. In everything that arouses in us the pure and authentic feeling of the beautiful, there is truly the presence of God. There is something like an incarnation of God in the world, of which beauty is the mark. The beautiful is the experimental proof that incarnation is possible. From that point on, all first-rate art is essentially religious. (This is what we no longer know today.) A Gregorian melody bears witness as much as the death of a martyr. If the beautiful is the real presence of God in matter, if contact with the beautiful is a sacrament in the full sense of the word, how is it that there are so many perverse aesthetes? Nero. Does this resemble the hunger of devotees of black masses for consecrated hosts? Or, more probably, do these people not attach themselves to authentic beauty, but to a bad imitation? For just as there is a divine art, there is a demonic art. It was no doubt the latter that Nero loved. A large part of our art is demonic. A passionate lover of music may well be a wicked man -- but I would find it hard to believe this of someone who thirsts for Gregorian chant. We must indeed have committed crimes that have made us accursed, since we have lost all the poetry of the universe. Art has no immediate future because all art is collective and there is no longer any collective life (there are only dead collectivities), and also because of this rupture of the true pact between body and soul. Greek art coincided with the beginnings of geometry and with athletics, medieval art with craftsmanship, Renaissance art with the beginnings of mechanics, etc. Since 1914 there has been a complete break. Even comedy is almost impossible; there is room only for satire (when has it been easier to understand Juvenal?). Art can be reborn only from the heart of the great anarchy -- epic no doubt, because misfortune will have simplified many things... It is therefore quite useless on your part to envy da Vinci or Bach. Greatness, in our day, must take other paths. It can, moreover, only be solitary, obscure, and without echo... (yet there is no art without echo).