BEAUTY QUOTES III
quotations about beauty
Beauty, n. The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
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, 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
While beauty made its own rules, it also created its own problems and disappointments.
MIA TYLER
Creating Myself
Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Conduct of Life
Ah, ah, thy beauty! like a beast it bites,
Stings like an adder, like an arrow smites.
Ah sweet, and sweet again, and seven times sweet,
The paces and the pauses of thy feet!
Ah sweeter than all sleep or summer air
The fallen fillets fragrant from thine hair!
Yea, though their alien kisses do me wrong,
Sweeter thy lips than mine with all their song;
Thy shoulders whiter than a fleece of white,
And flower-sweet fingers, good to bruise or bite
As honeycomb of the inmost honey-cells,
With almond-shaped and roseleaf-coloured shells
And blood like purple blossoms at the tips
Quivering; and pain made perfect in thy lips
For my sake when I hurt thee; O that I
Durst crush thee out of life with love, and die,
Die of thy pain and my delight, and be
Mixed with thy blood and molten into thee!
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
"Anactoria"
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 best when it comes mixed with danger.
SHERRILYN KENYON & DIANNA LOVE
Blood Trinity
Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt in God.
JEAN ANOUILH
Becket
The French girls would tell you, to believe that you were pretty would make you so.
ELIZABETH GASKELL
Wives and Daughters
Every man values every acquisition he makes in the science of beauty, above his possessions. The most useful man in the most useful world, so long as only commodity was served, would remain unsatisfied. But, as fast as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Conduct of Life
The young girl is often pretty but her prettiness is vague and uncertain, it inspires a sort of pitying admiration, but it suggests nothing; the very essence of the young girl's being is that she should have nothing to suggest, therefore the beauty of the young face fails to touch the imagination. No past lies hidden in those translucent eyes, no story of hate, disappointment, or sin.
GEORGE MOORE
Confessions of a Young Man
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
Beauty is certainly a soft, smooth, slippery thing, and therefore of a nature which easily slips in and permeates our souls.
PLATO
Lysis
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
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
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
Beauty is but a lease from nature.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Birds of fine plumage are not the best songsters; neither are comely women the most virtuous.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
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