Beauty is the perception of coherence. Where inner and outer, truth and goodness, mind and world, are aligned and in right relationship.
It is the most fundamental of the Goodness, Truth, and Beauty triad (transcendentals). Truth is its masculine, cold, outer expression, while Goodness is its feminine, warm, inner expression. Where truth serves goodness, there is beauty.
Beauty is a foretaste of being's good truth.
D. C. Schindler
It is the guide by which Story knows itself to be living, and the criterion by which we distinguish between the two fundamental expressions of story: vision and narrative.
It is the attractor around which culture coheres and the evidence of the alignment and right relationship between power and wisdom.