Beauty

“Yet how will you know,” he will say, “who does or does not present a speech or any other action whatsoever beautifully, when the beautiful is unknown to you? And when you are in such a state, do you think you are better off alive or dead?” So, as I say, that is what happens to me. I get abused and criticised by yourselves and abused by him. But, in fact, I probably need to endure all this, since, strangely, it may be beneficial. So I think, Hippias, that I have been benefited by this interaction with both of you, for I think I now understand the precise meaning of the proverb, “Whatever is beautiful is difficult.”

These things I then knew not, and I loved these lower beauties, and I was sinking to the very depths, and to my friends I said, “Do we love any thing but the beautiful? What then is the beautiful? and what is beauty? What is it that attracts and wins us to the things we love? for unless there were in them a grace and beauty, they could by no means draw us unto them.” And I marked and perceived that in bodies themselves, there was a beauty, from their forming a sort of whole, and again, another from apt and mutual correspondence, as of a part of the body with its whole, or a shoe with a foot, and the like. And this consideration sprang up in my mind, out of my inmost heart, and I wrote “on the fair and fit,” I think, two or three books. Thou knowest, O Lord, for it is gone from me; for I have them not, but they are strayed from me, I know not how.