“One can see why beauty … has been perceived to be bound up with the immortal, for it prompts a search for a precedent, which in turn prompts a search for a still earlier precedent, and the mind keeps tripping backward until it at last reaches something that has no precedent, which may very well be the immortal.

The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental state of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction—to locate what is true… beauty is a starting place for education.” 

—from On Beauty and Being Just, by Elaine Scarry