"Beauty does not linger, it only visits"

"The media," observed John O'Donohue in Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, "generate relentless images of mediocrity and ugliness in talk-shows, tapestries of smothered language and frenetic gratification. The media are becoming the global mirror and these shows tend to enshrine the ugly as the normal standard. Beauty is mostly forgotten and made to seem naïve and romantic."

We long for beauty because we need beauty. Beauty does not just sit alongside of truth and goodness, but integrates, synthesizes and, above all, makes them concrete, that is, perceptible. O'Donohue wrote of "the Beautiful as a threshold which holds the real and the ideal in connection and conversation with each other."

St. Augustine wrote: "I asked the earth, I asked the sea and the deeps, among the living animals, the things that creep. I asked the winds that blow, I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars, and to all things that stand at the doors of my flesh ...My question was the gaze I turned to them. Their answer was their beauty."