quotations about beauty
Beauty is a precarious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well. Often it seems to me to be an evil flower of nothingness, or else the cry of the world as it dies, or a desperate, sumptuous prayer.
EUGENE IONESCO, Present Past / Past Present
The beautiful things of the earth become more dear as they elude pursuit.
THOMAS HARDY, Desperate Remedies
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
MARGARET HUNGERFORD, Molly Bawn
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness.
JOHN KEATS, Endymion
Beauty when most unclothed is clothed best.
PHINEAS FLETCHER, Sicelides
Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.
JOHN DONNE, The Anagram
Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.
CONFUCIUS
Beautiful things may be admired, if not loved.
L. FRANK BAUM, The Tin Woodman of Oz
Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.
PETRARCH, De Remedies
Beauty is the gift from God.
ARISTOTLE
For beauty being the best of all we know
Sums up the unsearchable and secret aims
Of nature.
ROBERT BRIDGES, The Growth of Love
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
LEO TOLSTOY, The Kreutzer Sonata
Beauty always comes with dark thoughts.
NIGHTWISH, "Wish I Had An Angel"
Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, The Brothers Karamazov
Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure and are awed
because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Each single angel is terrifying.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, Duino Elegies
Beauty, n. The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
AMBROSE BIERCE, The Devil's Dictionary
Much that is beautiful must be discarded
So that we may resemble a taller
Impression of ourselves.
JOHN ASHBERY, "Illustration"
The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
HAVELOCK ELLIS, Impressions and Comments
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
FRANCIS BACON, Essays
It is foolish to wish for beauty. Sensible people never either desire it for themselves or care about it in others. If the mind be but well cultivated, and the heart well disposed, no one ever cares for the exterior.
ANNE BRONTE, Agnes Grey
Beautiful peaches are not always the best flavored; neither are handsome women the most amiable.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY, Proverbs
Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover, Fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense.
JOSEPH ADDISON, Cato
Beauty is power; a smile is its sword.
CHARLES READE
I find beauty in unusual things, like hanging your head out the window or sitting on a fire escape.
SCARLETT JOHANSSON, Seventeen Magazine, May 2007
It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But ... it is better to be good than to be ugly.
OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray
If you get simple beauty and nought else,
You get about the best thing God invents.
ROBERT BROWNING, Fra Lippo Lippi
At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.
TONI MORRISON, Tar Baby
What do I care if you are good?
Be beautiful! and be sad!
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, Flowers of Evil
Beauty is Nature's coin, must not be hoarded,
But must be current, and the good thereof
Consists in mutual and partaken bliss.
JOHN MILTON, Comus
It's important for all types of women to know that you don't have to fit a prototype of what one person thinks is beautiful in order to be beautiful or feel beautiful.... People think, Sexy, big breasts, curvy body, no cellulite. It's not that. Take the girl at the beach with the cellulite legs, wearing her bathing suit the way she likes it, walking with a certain air, comfortable with herself. That woman is sexy. Then you see the perfect girl who's really thin, tugging at her bathing suit, wondering how her hair looks. That's not sexy.
JENNIFER LOPEZ, Readers Digest, Aug. 2003
Beauty is like life itself: a dawn mist
the sun burns off. It gives no peace, no rest.
GREGORY ORR, The Caged Owl: New & Selected Poems
Beauty itself soon fades, and when a woman has beauty and nothing else, well, it's like putting all the goods in the shop window, isn't it? And the moment she loses her good looks--poor creature! what is she? Just a mere bit of faded finery to be thrown aside.
HENRY ARTHUR JONES, Her Tongue
Sculptors, poets, painters, musicians--they're the traditional purveyors of Beauty. But it can as easily be created by a gardener, a farmer, a plumber, a careworker.
CHARLES DE LINT, The Onion Girl
What is lovely never dies, But passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH, A Shadow of the Night
Horns to bulls wise Nature lends;
Horses she with hoofs defends;
Hares with nimble feet relieves;
Dreadful teeth to lions gives;
Fishes learn through streams to slide;
Birds through yielding air to glide;
Men with courage she supplies;
But to women these denies.
What then gives she? Beauty, this
Both their arms and armour is:
She, that can this weapon use,
Fire and sword with ease subdues.
ANACREON, "Beauty"
Most people tend to think the best of those who are blessed with beauty; we have difficulty imagining that physical perfection can conceal twisted emotions or a damaged mind.
DEAN KOONTZ, Odd Thomas
Some women are born beautiful, others achieve beauty, and still others are on good terms with the society editors.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES, Poems and Paragraphs
Though beauty is, with the most apt similitude, I had almost said with the most literal truth, called a flower that fades and dies almost in the very moment of its maturity; yet there is, methinks, a kind of beauty which lives even to old age; a beauty that is not in the features, but, if I may be allowed the expression, shines through them. As it is not merely corporeal it is not the object of mere sense, nor is it to be discovered but by persons of true taste and refined sentiment.
FULKE GREVILLE, Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles.
GEORGE ELIOT, Adam Bede
Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.
ROGER SCRUTON, Beauty
Judge nothing by the appearance. The more beautiful the serpent, the more fatal its sting.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY, Proverbs
Beauty is but a lease from nature.
EDWARD COUNSEL, Maxims
The only beautiful thing in the world whose beauty lasts for ever is a pure, fair soul.
BRAM STOKER, "The Rose Prince"
The perfection of her face created a sense of emptiness--like a house with no curtains in the window.
Black Jack Point
Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired:
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.
EDMUND WALLER, Go, Lovely Rose
We discern beauty in concrete objects and abstract ideas, in works of nature and works of art, in things, animals and people, in objects, qualities and actions. As the list expands to take in just about every ontological category (there are beautiful propositions as well as beautiful worlds, beautiful proofs as well as beautiful snails, even beautiful diseases and beautiful deaths), it becomes obvious that we are not describing a property like shape, size, or colour, uncontroversially present to all who can find their way around the physical world. For one thing: how could there be a single property exhibited by so many disparate types of thing?
ROGER SCRUTON, Beauty
Ne'er boast; for beauty is a dream that fades.
THEOCRITUS, "A Countryman's Wooing"
The kind of beauty I want is the hard-to-get kind that comes from within--strength, courage, dignity.
RUBY DEE, Woman's Day Magazine, Sep. 1, 2009
Beauty, of course, is an asset. But the girls who have greenbacks don't have to worry over not having pink faces.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES, Poems and Paragraphs
A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.
ALAIN DE BOTTON, The Architecture of Happiness
The pageant of a former hour,
Is Beauty in the Grave.
WILLIAM B. TAPPAN, "Beauty in the Grave"
What can still that hunger of the heart which sickens the eye for beauty, and makes sweet-scented ease an oppression?
GEORGE ELIOT, Daniel Deronda
If you admire yourself in the mirror, let it be in fear and not delight, because the only thing that beauty will bring to you is terror of losing it.
AMÉLIE NOTHOMB, Fear and Trembling
Birds of fine plumage are not the best songsters; neither are comely women the most virtuous.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY, Proverbs
True love survives all shocks: an affection originally produced by admiration for unusual beauty may not only survive the loss of that beauty, but may become more intense if the beauty has changed into ugliness through causes that bind the lovers together in tender associations.
ARTHUR LYNCH, Moods of Life
The queen whose beauty does the gaze transfix,
Adorns herself with pallid crucifix.
EDWIN LEIBFREED, "The Quest for God"
Much that is said about beauty and its importance in our lives ignores the minimal beauty of an unpretentious street, a nice pair of shoes or a tasteful piece of wrapping paper, as though those things belonged to a different order of value from a church by Bramante or a Shakespeare sonnet. Yet these minimal beauties are far more important to our daily lives, and far more intricately involved in our own rational decisions, than the great works of art which (if we are lucky) occupy our leisure hours. They are part of the context in which we live our lives, and our desire for harmony, fittingness and civility is both expressed and confirmed in them. Moreover, the great works of architecture often depend for their beauty on the humble context that these lesser beauties provide.
ROGER SCRUTON, Beauty
Affect not to despise beauty: no one is freed from its dominion;
But regard it not a pearl of price--it is fleeting as the bow in the clouds.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER, Proverbial Philosophy
For one to admire a woman merely for her beauty, is to love the building for its exterior; but to love one for the greatness of her soul, is to appreciate the tenement for its intrinsic value.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY, Proverbs
Were we to aim in every case at the kind of supreme beauty exemplified by Sta Maria della Salute, we should end with aesthetic overload. The clamorous masterpieces, jostling for attention side by side, would lose their distinctiveness, and the beauty of each of them would be at war with the beauty of the rest.
ROGER SCRUTON, Beauty
The beauty of a lovely woman is like music ... the rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more than their prettiness--by their close kinship with all we have known of tenderness and peace.
GEORGE ELIOT, Adam Bede
E'en Beauty mourns in her decaying bower,
That Time upon her angel brow should set
His crooked autograph, and mar the jet
Of glossy locks. Lo! how her chaplet green,
The hoar frost and the canker worm destroy.
Decay's dull film obscures those matchless eyes.
ISAAC MCLELLAN, "Musings"
A woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.
J.M. COETZEE, Disgrace
The beauty that men seek is half a dream--
Where'er we wander, yet it lies afar;
It touches with its wand a setting star,
It stirs the ripple of an ebbing stream.
And though we run beyond the dawning gleam,
Or kneel to worship at an altar bright,
We may not know the soul of its delight,
Or more than marvel at its palest beam.
KENNETH RAND, "The True Magic"
Beauty comes from a life well lived. If you've lived well, your smile lines are in the right places, and your frown lines aren't too bad.
JENNIFER GARNER, Woman's Day Magazine, Sep. 1, 2009
Choosing beauty over content (or choosing beauty as content) is always an act of sedition. If we accept the cant of official culture, we must believe that the beauty we steal from any man-made thing is stolen from its more virtuous and metaphysical backstory, wherein "real" beauty is said to reside.
DAVE HICKEY, The Invisible Dragon
Beauty may be said to be God's trademark in creation.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
ABRAHAM MILLER, Unmoral Maxims
To speak of beauty is to enter another and more exalted realm--a realm sufficiently apart from our everyday concerns as to be mentioned only with a certain hesitation. People who are always in praise and pursuit of the beautiful are an embarrassment, like people who make a constant display of their religious faith. Somehow, we feel such things should be kept for our exalted moments, and not paraded in company, or allowed to spill out over dinner.
ROGER SCRUTON, Beauty
ETHEL PUFFER HOWES, The Psychology of Beauty
Beauty and Genius must be kept afar if one would avoid becoming their slave.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
DAVE HICKEY, The Invisible Dragon
The Nature of Beauty is in the relation of means to an end; the means, the possibilities of stimulation in the motor, visual, auditory, and purely ideal fields; the end, a moment of perfection, of self-complete unity of experience, of favourable stimulation with repose. Beauty is not perfection; but the beauty of an object lies in its permanent possibility of creating the perfect moment. The experience of this moment, the union of stimulation and repose, constitutes the unique aesthetic emotion.
ETHEL PUFFER HOWES, The Psychology of Beauty
GEORGE SANTAYANA, The Sense of Beauty
While beauty made its own rules, it also created its own problems and disappointments.
MIA TYLER, Creating Myself
FULKE GREVILLE, Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
The Beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of nature, which, without its presence, would never have been revealed.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
GEORGE SANTAYANA, The Sense of Beauty
The idea of Beauty has been greatly widened since the age of Plato. Then, it was only in order, proportion, unity in variety, that beauty was admitted to consist; today we hold that the moderns have caught a profounder beauty, the beauty of meanings, and we make it matter for rejoicing that nothing is too small, too strange, or too ugly to enter, through its power of suggestion, the realm of the aesthetically valuable; and that the definition of beauty should have been extended to include, under the name of Romantic, Symbolic, Expressive, or Ideal Beauty, all of the elements of aesthetic experience, all that emotionally stirs us in representation.
ETHEL PUFFER HOWES, The Psychology of Beauty
LEO TOLSTOY, What Is Art?
Incapacity to appreciate certain types of beauty may be the condition sine qua non for the appreciation of another kind; the greatest capacity both for enjoyment and creation is highly specialized and exclusive, and hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant. The invectives of one school against another, perverse as they are philosophically, are artistically often signs of health, because they indicate a vital appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of them that has grown into a jealous passion.
GEORGE SANTAYANA, The Sense of Beauty
GEORGE MOORE, Confessions of a Young Man
An essential quality of beauty is aloofness.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH, Trivia
It is part and parcel of every man's life to develop beauty in himself. All perfect things have in them an element of beauty.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
Beauty can never really understand itself.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
NORMAN MACDONALD, Maxims and Moral Reflections
The criterion of true beauty is, that it increases on examination; of false, that it lessens. There is something therefore in true beauty that corresponds with right reason, and is not merely a creature of fancy.
FULKE GREVILLE, Maxims, Characters and Reflections
EDWARD COUNSEL, Maxims
In spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.
JOHN KEATS, Endymion
I was brought up imagining that cream rises to the top, merit wins out, the race is to the swift and riches to men of understanding, but it ain't necessarily so. The swift stand a better chance if they are also beautiful.
GARRISON KEILLOR, "Not Smart? Not a Problem," A Prairie Home Companion, Jun. 22, 2010
Perhaps there is no gift of nature that requires as little exertion on the part of the owner as personal beauty. I am not certain but that it is this very absence of effort which excites our admiration.
BRET HARTE, "On a Pretty Girl at the Opera"
It has been said that the beauties of the mind are valuable because they are more lasting than those of the body; but I do not remember to have heard it said that the beauties of the mind are valuable because they make those of the body more lasting.
FULKE GREVILLE, Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
JOHN KEATS, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
Beauty walks in bravest dress,
And, fed with April's mellow showers,
The earth laughs out with sweet May-flowers,
That flush for very happiness.
GERALD MASSEY, "The Ballad of Babe Christabel"
Our world oft turns in gloom, and Life both many a perilous way,
Yet there's no path so desolate and thorny, cold and gray,
But Beauty like a beacon burns above the dark of strife,
And like an Alchemist aye turns all things to golden life.
GERALD MASSEY, "The Chivalry of Labour Exhorted to the Worship of Beauty"
Beauty in a woman is a moving thing,
Yet sometimes just the patient lack of it
Will pierce the heart to deeper poignancies,
And, melting, draw a note of tenderness
That not the fairest woman could evoke!
DONALD EVANS, "Shrines of Unloveliness"
Beauty is best when it comes mixed with danger.
SHERRILYN KENYON & DIANNA LOVE, Blood Trinity
Oft as by chance, a little while apart
The pall of empty, loveless hours withdrawn,
Sweet Beauty, opening on the impoverished heart,
Beams like a jewel on the breast of dawn.
ALAN SEEGER, "Sonnet VIII"
Beautiful things are so easily broken by the world.
CASSANDRA CLARE, City of Fallen Angels
Ask me where beauty is, I'll say
'Tis in sweet maiden's witchery;
Amid the beams of her flashing eye
When pleasure's cup is sparkling high,
And new-born love's first artless glances
Illume her brow,
And joy within her young heart dances
For the first vow;
When she knows not ofo blighting care,
And all is bright, and fresh, and fair;
And fancy's banner is unfurled,
Tinting with rose her future world;
Nor cloud, nor mist dims in her eye
The sunshine of life's morning sky,
That, with such gay and golden beams,
Colours her happy youth with dreams.
C. B. LANGSTON, "Where Is Beauty?"
All beautiful things bring sadness, nor alone
Sweet music, as our wisest Poet spake,
Because in us keen longings they awake.
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, "All Beautiful Things"
Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist--a master ... can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is ... and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be ... and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart ... no matter what the merciless hours have done to her.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN, Stranger in a Strange Land
Beauty requires contrast.
JOHN GARDNER, Grendel
