quotations about beauty
Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt in God.
JEAN ANOUILH
Becket
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 of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Philosophy of Composition", The Works of Edgar Allan Poe
Beauty just keeps coming into the world and passing away, coming in and passing away. You can't blame beauty. Beauty doesn't know what else to do.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
There isn't any way that one can get rid of the guilt of having a nice body by saying that one can serve society with it, because that would end up with oneself as what? There simply doesn't seem to be any moral place for flesh.
MARGARET DRABBLE
A Summer Bird-Cage
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
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
If we consider all the hypotheses, which have been formed either by philosophy or common reason, to explain the difference betwixt beauty and deformity, we shall find that all of them resolve into this, that beauty is such an order and construction of parts, as either by the primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul. This is the distinguishing character of beauty, and forms all the difference betwixt it and deformity, whose natural tendency is to produce uneasiness.
DAVID HUME
A Treatise of Human Nature
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
Were part of the human race to be arrayed in that splendor of beauty which beams from the statues of gods, universal consent would acknowledge the rest of mankind naturally formed to be their slaves.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
Old as I am, for ladies' love unfit,
The power of beauty I remember yet.
JOHN DRYDEN
Cymon and Iphigenia
It's amazing how lovely common things become, if one only knows how to look at them.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Marjorie's Three Gifts
Beauty requires contrast.
JOHN GARDNER
Grendel
When we are young, the beauty of women has a supreme attraction beyond all other possessions or qualities; and there are self-evident reasons why it should be so. It is only as we grow older that we know the value of brains, and, while still admiring beauty--as indeed who does not?--admire it as one passing by on the other side--as a grace to look at, but not to hold, unless accompanied by something more lasting.
ELIZA LYNN LINTON
The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays
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
Birds of fine plumage are not the best songsters; neither are comely women the most virtuous.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover, Fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense.
JOSEPH ADDISON
Cato
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
LEO TOLSTOY
The Kreutzer Sonata
Beauty is only two finger’s-breadth from goodness.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
"Montaigne," The Common Reader
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