According to Aristotle's commendable formula . . . the beautiful is defined as that which the eye can easily embrace in its entirety and which can be surveyed as a whole.

--- Friedrich Kittler, "The World of the Symbolic--A World of the Machine", cited by http://noraproject.org/. Text via Google Books

This is evocative because it connects cognitive capacity to aesthetics, not least the aesthetics of programmers who use elegance as a criterion for good code.

The Hopi way cherishes the intangible: the riches realized from interaction and interrelationships with all beings above all else. Great abundances of material things, even food, the Hopi elders believe, tend to lure human attention away from what is most valuable and important. The views of the Hopi elders are not much different from those elders in all the Pueblos.

---Leslie Marmon Silko, Landscape, History and the Pueblo Imagination, The Migration Story: and Interior Journey, in Antaeus, no. 57, Autumn 1986, reprinted in The Norton Books of Nature Writing, eds. Robert Finch and John Elder, 1990

Being an Oxford graduate is like having a permanent source of emotional central heating. Whatever happens to you later in life, the fact that you were once at Oxford marks you out as someone who was destined for greatness before accountancy beckoned.

--- Guy Browning, Oxford Today, Trinity Issue 2007, p. 64

A happy woman is one who has no cares at all; a cheerful woman is one who has cares but doesn't let them get her down.

--- Beverly Sills. More great quotes at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/b/beverly_sills.html

For example: "Attachment to spiritual things is... just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else. "