quotations about beauty
As well might a flower complain of the bee which its sweetness attracts, as a pretty girl of being gazed at when she goes abroad. But the complaint is seldom made in earnest.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Arguments out of a pretty mouth are unanswerable.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Freeholder, Jan. 2, 1716
The spirit in man has been created in accordance with the image of beauty, so that whenever it either hears or sees anything beautiful, it may have a propensity towards it, and seek for communion with it.
MUHAMMAD AL-GHAZALI
The Alchemy of Happiness
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
Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.
SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents
Beauty rests on necessities. The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Conduct of Life
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
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
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"
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
Beauty is a simple passion,
but, oh my friends, in the end
you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.
ANNE SEXTON
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
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
Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
ANNE CARSON
preface, Eros the Bittersweet
The only beautiful thing in the world whose beauty lasts for ever is a pure, fair soul.
BRAM STOKER
"The Rose Prince"
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
In spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.
JOHN KEATS
Endymion
Beauty acts as a cause to produce love, because the being, the attributes and the works of God possess beauty, and every one loves that which is beautiful.
MUHAMMAD AL-GHAZALI
The Alchemy of Happiness
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 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
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