Beauty . . . cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.
Interpretation
Beauty is subjective and can't be reduced to mere facts or quantities.
Wendell Berry's quote emphasizes that beauty transcends objective measurements and empirical verification. It suggests that beauty resides in personal perception and interpretation, highlighting its complex and intangible nature that cannot be neatly categorized or quantified.
In practice
Discussing art with friends at a gallery opening.
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.
And I may often question choices I make as a producer. But I've never questioned the choices I make as a director.
The really great writers are people like Emily Brontë who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.
In Britten or Berg, there's a tension between the sweet and the sour, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the tonal and the atonal, the happy and the sad. That, to me, is what all western art is about - that tension. It's why we want to say anything at all.
And thus it came to pass that the Silmarils found their long homes: one in the airs of heaven, and one in the fires of the heart of the world, and one in the deep waters.
[When accepting the American Film Institute Life Achievement award] I beg permission to mention by name only four people who have given me the most affection, appreciation, and encouragement, and constant collaboration. The first of the four is a film editor, the second is a scriptwriter, the third is the mother of my daughter Pat (Patricia Hitchcock), and the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen. And their names are Alma Reville.
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