quotations about beauty
For beauty being the best of all we know
Sums up the unsearchable and secret aims
Of nature.
ROBERT BRIDGES
The Growth of Love
In our time, at all events, Beauty has never walked the streets with so frank a radiance, so confident an air of security, and in her eyes and in her carriage, as in her subtly shaped and subtly scented garments, so conspicuous a challenge to the musty, outworn, proprieties to frown upon her all they please.
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
"The Persecutions of Beauty", Vanishing Roads and Other Essays
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
Beauty is but for a day.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
A Room of One's Own
Beauty and Genius must be kept afar if one would avoid becoming their slave.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
There are sometimes beauties in a character which would never have appeared but for a defect, and defects which would never have appeared but for a beauty.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims
I found a money back guarantee on a beauty cream. Rushed down to the store. They took one look at me and paid me in advance.
PHYLLIS DILLER
stand-up routine, 1978
It's amazing how lovely common things become, if one only knows how to look at them.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Marjorie's Three Gifts
For admiration and personal love and youthful enjoyment, beauty of course is supreme; but as we cannot be always young nor always apt for pleasure, it is as well to provide for the days when the daughters of music shall be brought low and the years draw nigh which have no pleasure in them.
ELIZA LYNN LINTON
The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays
Beauty is best when it comes mixed with danger.
SHERRILYN KENYON & DIANNA LOVE
Blood Trinity
To me, merely and pretty were words that had nothing to do with each other. Pretty went with miraculously, and merely belonged in another paragraph entirely.
GAIL CARSON LEVINE
Fairest
It is one of the arts of a great beauty to heighten the effect of her charms by affecting to be sweetly unconscious of them.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
It's a good thing beauty is only skin deep, or I'd be rotten to the core.
PHYLLIS DILLER
The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes
Where Beauty was, nothing ever ran quite straight, which, no doubt, was why so many people looked on it as immoral.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
The Forsyte Saga
Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt in God.
JEAN ANOUILH
Becket
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"
Beauty is certainly a soft, smooth, slippery thing, and therefore of a nature which easily slips in and permeates our souls.
PLATO
Lysis
Let a young maiden, who would preserve her beauty, preserve the purity of soul, those sweet qualities of the mind, those virtues, in short, by which she first drew her lover to her feet.
T. S. ARTHUR
"The Evening Before Marriage", Orange Blossoms
T
he 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