Pursuing the Beautiful

The better you come to know something you love in itself, the better you understand how it differs from everything else, how it does something that has never been done before. but the better you understand that, the more other things you need to know in order to compare them to what you love and to distinguish it from them. and the better you know those things, the more likely you are to find that some of them, too, are beautiful, which will start you all over again in an ever-widening circle of new communities and new things to say. it is a dangerous game, pursuing the beautiful. you may never be able to stop.

Alexander Nehamas, An Essay on Beauty and Judgment