quotations about beauty
Beauty can afford to laugh at distinctions: it is itself the greatest distinction.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
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Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
The only beautiful thing in the world whose beauty lasts for ever is a pure, fair soul.
BRAM STOKER
"The Rose Prince"
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
In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.
EDWARD BULWER LYTTON
What Will He Do With It?
The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
preface, Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence
Life deprived of beauty is not worthy of being called human.
LUIS BARRAGÁN
attributed, Artes de Mexico, 1994
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
Beauty can pierce one like pain.
THOMAS MANN
Buddenbrooks
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
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
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
Judge nothing by the appearance. The more beautiful the serpent, the more fatal its sting.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world. All privilege is that of beauty; for there are many beauties; as, of general nature, of the human face and form, of manners, of brain, or method, moral beauty, or beauty of the soul.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Conduct of Life
In spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.
JOHN KEATS
Endymion
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
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
Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.
EUDORA WELTY
On Writing
Beautiful things may be admired, if not loved.
L. FRANK BAUM
The Tin Woodman of Oz
Much that is beautiful must be discarded
So that we may resemble a taller
Impression of ourselves.
JOHN ASHBERY
"Illustration"
Beautiful peaches are not always the best flavored; neither are handsome women the most amiable.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs