Love beauty; it is the shadow of God on the universe.

The line urges an active devotion to beauty—not as mere ornament or pleasure, but as a sign that points beyond itself. Calling beauty “the shadow of God” frames aesthetic experience as indirect revelation: like a shadow, it is not the divine itself, yet it testifies to a presence and outlines something larger than what can be grasped directly. In this reading, to “love beauty” becomes a moral and spiritual discipline, training attention toward harmony, tenderness, and radiance in the world. The phrase also implies humility: humans encounter transcendence obliquely, through traces and reflections embedded in the universe’s forms.