quotations about beauty
It's amazing how lovely common things become, if one only knows how to look at them.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Marjorie's Three Gifts
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"
At the unprovable cosmological fringes beauty swings it. Now mathematical models are like supermodels: They have grace, symmetry, elegance. It's hardly surprising. Modernity having done away with Absolute Moral Values and Objective Reality, there's only beauty left. What theory won't we espouse if it's beautiful? What atrocity won't we excuse?
GLEN DUNCAN
The Last Werewolf
Beauty, like male ballet dancers, makes some men afraid.
MORDECAI RICHLER
Son of a Smaller Hero
A fair face without a fair soul is like a glass eye that shines and sees nothing.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Day-book of John Stuart Blackie
An immortal instinct, deep within the spirit of man, is thus, plainly, a sense of the Beautiful. This it is which administers to his delight in the manifold forms, and sounds, and odors, and sentiments, amid which he exists. And just as the lily is repeated in the lake, or the eyes of Amaryllis in the mirror, so is the mere oral or written repetition of these forms, and sounds, and colors, and odors, and sentiments, a duplicate source of delight. But this mere repetition is not poetry. He who shall simply sing, with however glowing enthusiasm, or with however vivid a truth of description, of the sights, and sounds, and odors, and colors, and sentiments, which greet him in common with all mankind--he, I say, has yet failed to prove his divine title. There is still a something in the distance which he has been unable to attain. We have still a thirst unquenchable, to allay which he has not shown us the crystal springs. This thirst belongs to the immortality of Man. It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Poetic Principle"
Beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.
R. D. LAING
introduction, The Politics of Experience
Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.
CONFUCIUS
Ne'er boast; for beauty is a dream that fades.
THEOCRITUS
"A Countryman's Wooing"
The pageant of a former hour,
Is Beauty in the Grave.
WILLIAM B. TAPPAN
"Beauty in the Grave"
Unexpected intrusions of beauty. That is what life is.
SAUL BELLOW
Herzog
Much that is said about beauty and its importance in our lives ignores the minimal beauty of an unpretentious street, a nice pair of shoes or a tasteful piece of wrapping paper, as though those things belonged to a different order of value from a church by Bramante or a Shakespeare sonnet. Yet these minimal beauties are far more important to our daily lives, and far more intricately involved in our own rational decisions, than the great works of art which (if we are lucky) occupy our leisure hours. They are part of the context in which we live our lives, and our desire for harmony, fittingness and civility is both expressed and confirmed in them. Moreover, the great works of architecture often depend for their beauty on the humble context that these lesser beauties provide.
ROGER SCRUTON
Beauty
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
The kind of beauty I want is the hard-to-get kind that comes from within--strength, courage, dignity.
RUBY DEE
Woman's Day Magazine, Sep. 1, 2009
When beauty fires the blood, how love exalts the mind!
JOHN DRYDEN
Cymon and Iphigenia
All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.
EDWARD ABBEY
"Fire Lookout: Numa Ridge", The Journey Home
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
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
Beauty can never really understand itself.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Sense of Beauty