“The proper use of imagination is to give beauty to the world…the gift of imagination is used to cast over the commonplace workaday world a veil of beauty and make it throb with our esthetic enjoyment.” — Lin yu-T’ang
I agree — except for that last line. It’s about more than just our esthetic enjoyment.
“As the French playwright Jean Anouilh said, ‘Beauty is one of the few things in the world that do not lead to doubt about God.’… When we’re in the presence of something beautiful — an act of forgiveness, a newborn baby, a sunset — beauty wounds us. It has a visceral effect on us that is delightful, that increases our humanity. Beauty also reveals to us that there is something more to the world and something more to beauty than the beautiful thing itself. It leads to contemplation.” Father Peter Cameron