How do you define beauty?

Dear Roy Roy,

When I was 17 years old (oh, say 1962), I found a small book in our library, and it was the collected sayings of Rabindranath Tagore...title, FIREFLIES. One of Tagore's "fireflies" was this, and it has been my own standard of beauty ever since!

Anything that deeply moves me. I've witnessed the most beautiful things in places no one thought to look.

Beauty is mere perception. Look at a reptile like snake. The color combination, smooth movements, speed, glossy and the beauty with which it strikes it's prey. This might sound weird but for people this is also beauty. So beauty is truly how we have defined it for our self. It not something which can be categories or defined. Hence the statement beauty lies in the eye of the beholder is absolutely true.

Beauty is something that invokes a deep emotion. It rarely has to do with way something "looks", but more in the way you feel. Beauty is an old couple who still holds hands when they walk. A mother cradling an infant. The stark contrast of a wildflower growing out of a crack of a rocky mountain side. A sunrise so bright and colorful at the start a new day evoking a promise of things to come. Or the sunset glowing at the end of the day, closing out the events of the day.

There are already some excellent answers and Gator Blu's is so close to the way I feel that I won't offer another opinion.

But...

C.S.Lewis wrote a poem "A Confession" about the things he found beautiful, compared to some of the more jarring attempts to describe beauty by some of the modern poets. His final verse was this:

"I'm like that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom
A primrose was a yellow primrose, one whose doom
Keeps him forever in the list of dunces,
Compelled to live on stock responses,
Making the poor best that I can
Of dull things . . . peacocks, honey, the Great Wall, Aldebaran,
Silver weirs, new­cut grass, wave on the beach, hard gem,
The shapes of horse and woman, Athens, Troy, Jerusalem."

All of the great answers were given, so I'll give my usual Hippy wise a$$ answer. Toe cleavage.

Beauty is that which inspires us to joy by simply existing. 

Gator wrote the most profound definitiion. Beauty is not without but within the observer. Beauty makes me feel as if suspended in time.