Shortly thereafter some friends encouraged me to try out for the Miss South Carolina World beauty pageant. To my surprise I won - and was sent to New York City to compete nationally.

Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off the belief it inspires is what counts.

Congress has an obligation to protect our country's natural beauty embodied in our nation's parks rivers and breathtaking landscapes.

We also maintain - again with perfect truth - that mystery is more than half of beauty the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through the imagination.

The concept of active cooperation has taken the place of opposition to the new form of government and of dreamy resignation entranced with the beauty of times past.

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly well-ordered or confused.

What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics nor all logic but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.

Facts which at first seem improbable will even on scant explanation drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts as for that subtle something that quality of air that emanation from old trees that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.