quotations about beauty
Beauty is certainly a soft, smooth, slippery thing, and therefore of a nature which easily slips in and permeates our souls.
PLATO
Lysis
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
The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
HAVELOCK ELLIS
Impressions and Comments
Our world oft turns in gloom, and Life both many a perilous way,
Yet there's no path so desolate and thorny, cold and gray,
But Beauty like a beacon burns above the dark of strife,
And like an Alchemist aye turns all things to golden life.
GERALD MASSEY
"The Chivalry of Labour Exhorted to the Worship of Beauty"
Oft as by chance, a little while apart
The pall of empty, loveless hours withdrawn,
Sweet Beauty, opening on the impoverished heart,
Beams like a jewel on the breast of dawn.
ALAN SEEGER
"Sonnet VIII"
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 but a lease from nature.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
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 had this penalty -- it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life -- froze it. One forgot the little agitations; the flush, the pallor, some queer distortion, some light or shadow, which made the face unrecognisable for a moment and yet added a quality one saw for ever after. It was simpler to smooth that all out under the cover of beauty.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
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
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
Thus was beauty sent from heaven--the lovely mistress of truth and good in this dark world.
MARK AKENSIDE
The Pleasures of Imagination
Beauty has the more ardent, but worth the more discriminating lovers.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
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
Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover, Fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense.
JOSEPH ADDISON
Cato
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 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
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
LEO TOLSTOY
The Kreutzer Sonata
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