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... there is a beauty of thought, a beauty of feeling. This is something we perceive very often; when someone has done a very noble deed, very generous, very unselfish, quite spontaneously we say, "It is beautiful!" And it's true, it gives the sense of beauty. (The Mother, 1 June 1955)

"Harmony and beauty of the mind and soul, harmony and beauty of the thoughts and feelings, harmony and beauty in every outward act and movement, harmony and beauty of the life and surroundings, this is the demand of [https://ie.auroville.org.in/index.php/M#MAH.C4.80LAK.E1.B9.A2MI Mahalakshmi].... Where love and beauty are not or are reluctant to be born, she does not come." (The Mother, 12 May 1951) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/12-may-1951#p1</ref>

There are people who are just like beautiful animals—all their movements are harmonious, their energies are spent harmoniously, their uncalculating efforts call in energies all the time and they are always happy; but sometimes they have no thoughts in their head, sometimes they have no feelings in their heart, they live an altogether animalish life. I have known people like that: beautiful animals. They were handsome, their gestures were harmonious, their forces quite balanced and they spent without reckoning and received without measure. They were in harmony with the material universal forces and they lived in joy. They could not perhaps have told you that they were happy—joy with them was so spontaneous that it was natural—and they would have been still less able to tell you why, for their intelligence was not very developed. (The Mother, 13 January 1951) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/13-january-1951#p15</ref>

For example, you enter a historical building, and suddenly you are seized by the sense of a great beauty; how do you explain it? If someone asks you about it you would say, "Well, I feel that it is beautiful." But if an architect enters a building and has the same feeling that it is beautiful, he will immediately tell you, "It's because the lines meet harmoniously, the mass of the volumes is in harmony, the entire structure follows certain laws of beauty, order and rhythm", and he will explain them to you. But that's because he is an architect, and yet you could have felt the beauty as much as he without being able to explain it. Well, your feeling for beauty is what Sri Aurobindo calls infrarational, and his feeling for beauty is what Sri Aurobindo calls rational, because he can explain with his reason why he finds it beautiful. (The Mother, 1 June 1955) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/1-june-1955#p21</ref>

It [beauty] is a kind of harmony which you experience much more than think, and the true suprarational relation with beauty is not at all a "reasonable" relation (Sri Aurobindo will tell you this at the end), it completely overpasses reason, it is a contact in a higher realm. But what precisely he tells us in this paragraph is that when it is an instinct it is found mixed with movements of ignorance and a lack of culture and refinement. So this instinct is sometimes very gross and very imperfect in its expression. One can experience an aesthetic pleasure (let us call it that) in seeing something which is truly beautiful and at the same time something else which is not beautiful, but which gives one some sort of pleasure, because it is mixed, because one's aesthetic instinct is not pure, it is mixed with all kinds of sensations which are very crude and untrained. So it is here, as he says, that reason has its role, that it comes in to explain why a thing is beautiful, to educate the taste; but it is not final, and reason is not the final judge; it can very well make mistakes, only it is a little higher, as judgment, than that of a completely infrarational being who has no reason and no understanding of things. It is a stage. It is a stage, that's what he says, it is a stage. But if you want to realise true beauty, you must go beyond that, very far beyond this stage... At first your sense of beauty is instinctive, impulsive, infrarational, lacking light, wanting reason, simply without any true understanding, and so, because the origin of the aesthetic sense is infrarational, it is understood, one always says this: "There's no disputing tastes and colours." You know, there are all kinds of popular proverbs which say that the appreciation of the beautiful is not a matter of reasoning, everyone likes a particular thing he doesn't know why, he takes pleasure in looking at a thing, and this pleasure cannot be discussed. Well, this is the infrarational stage of the aesthetic sense. (The Mother, 1 June 1955) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/1-june-1955#p24</ref>

The higher principle of beauty is a suprarational principle and therefore reason understands nothing at all about it. If you want to judge art by reason you are sure to say foolish things. (The Mother, 25 May 1955) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/25-may-1955#p37</ref>

...the supramental beauty is something much higher and more perfect; it is a beauty untainted by any ugliness and it does not need the proximity of ugliness in order to look beautiful. When the supramental forces descend into [https://ie.auroville.org.in/index.php/M#Matter Matter ] in order to manifest, this perfect beauty will express itself quite naturally and spontaneously in all forms. (The Mother, 6 March 1933) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/6-march-1933#p4</ref>

Perhaps not the highest sense of beauty, but in the vital one finds a complete sense of beauty and harmony. The beauty which is fundamental, profound, universal, constant belongs only to the psychic, but the sense of the beauty of form, of appearance, of colour, the educated, refined vital fully possesses. (The Mother, 1 March 1951) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/1-march-1951#p30</ref>

As soon as there is organic life, the vital element comes in, and it is this vital element which gives to flowers the sense of beauty. It is not perhaps individualised in the sense we understand it, but it is a sense of the species and the species always tries to realise it. (The Mother, 1 March 1951) <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/1-march-1951#p34 http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/1-march-1951#p34</ref>