quotations about beauty
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
Beauty walks in bravest dress,
And, fed with April's mellow showers,
The earth laughs out with sweet May-flowers,
That flush for very happiness.
GERALD MASSEY
"The Ballad of Babe Christabel"
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
We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her.
ALBERT CAMUS
"Helen's Exile"
Beauty is only two finger’s-breadth from goodness.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
"Montaigne," The Common Reader
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
It's amazing how lovely common things become, if one only knows how to look at them.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Marjorie's Three Gifts
The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own -- even more, one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
Ship of Fools
There is likely to be beauty wherever proportion exists.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
If you dear little girls would only learn what real beauty is, and not pinch and starve and bleach yourselves out so, you'd save an immense deal of time and money and pain. A happy soul in a healthy body makes the best sort of beauty for man or woman.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Eight Cousins
I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.
THOMAS MANN
Death in Venice
The criterion of true beauty is, that it increases on examination; of false, that it lessens. There is something therefore in true beauty that corresponds with right reason, and is not merely a creature of fancy.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims
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
A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
The Architecture of Happiness
Beauty and Genius must be kept afar if one would avoid becoming their slave.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
The queen whose beauty does the gaze transfix,
Adorns herself with pallid crucifix.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Quest for God"
Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.
SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents
Old as I am, for ladies' love unfit,
The power of beauty I remember yet.
JOHN DRYDEN
Cymon and Iphigenia
Beauty requires contrast.
JOHN GARDNER
Grendel
Beauty, like male ballet dancers, makes some men afraid.
MORDECAI RICHLER
Son of a Smaller Hero