"The books or music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them: it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of the worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news form a country we have never yet visited."

—C.S. Lewis

"Our deepest joys often hold hands with the sweetest sorrow."

~ Lisa TerKeurst

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.” (Charles Bukowski).

"Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God’s handwriting—a wayside sacrament.—Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing."

—Ralph Waldo Emerson