"What is beauty? Is beauty according to a principle, according to certain rules? Or, though there must be attention to proportion and so on, is beauty something entirely different? When you see mountains, range after range, blue in the evening, and when the sun touches them in early morning before everything else, the reaction to that seeing is great silence. You keep quiet; there is space, enormous space, between you and that — and beyond. When you see such marvelous beautiful mountains, snow-clad against the blue sky, for an instant you become silent. The very beauty, the very grandeur, the majesty of the mountains keeps you, makes you absolutely quiet. You can say, the shock of beauty. When you see something extraordinarily grand, of great height and depth, then the very shock of that beauty drives away for the moment all your problems. There is no self wondering, worrying, talking to itself; there is no entity, the self, the 'me,' looking. At that moment when the self is not, there is great beauty.
"What is the role of art in our lives? Why should anything play a role in our lives? The greatest art is the art of living, not the paintings, the sculpture, the poems, and the marvelous literature. They have their place, but to find out for oneself the art of living is the greatest art. It surpasses any role in life."
