quotations about beauty
The French girls would tell you, to believe that you were pretty would make you so.
ELIZABETH GASKELL
Wives and Daughters
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 comes from a life well lived. If you've lived well, your smile lines are in the right places, and your frown lines aren't too bad.
JENNIFER GARNER
Woman's Day Magazine, Sep. 1, 2009
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
Beauty is but a lease from nature.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
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
Among all the ugly mugs of the world we see now and then a face made after the divine pattern. Then, a wonderful thing happens to us; the Blue Bird sings, the golden Splendour shines, and for a queer moment everything seems meaningless save our impulse to follow those fair forms, to follow them to the clear Paradises they promise. Plato assures us that these moments are not (as we are apt to think them) mere blurs and delusions of the senses, but divine revelations; that in a lovely face we see imaged, as in a mirror, the Absolute Beauty--; it is Reality, flashing on us in the cave where we dwell amid shadows and darkness. Therefore we should follow these fair forms, and their shining footsteps will lead us upward to the highest heaven of Wisdom. The Poets, too, keep chanting this great doctrine of Beauty in grave notes to their golden strings. Its music floats up through the skies so sweet, so strange, that the very Angels seem to lean from their stars to listen. But, O Plato, O Shelley, O Angels of Heaven, what scrapes you do get us into!
LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
Trivia
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"
We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her.
ALBERT CAMUS
"Helen's Exile"
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
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
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 soon grows familiar to the lover, Fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense.
JOSEPH ADDISON
Cato
Beauty and Genius must be kept afar if one would avoid becoming their slave.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
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"
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
The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
HAVELOCK ELLIS
Impressions and Comments
It's amazing how lovely common things become, if one only knows how to look at them.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Marjorie's Three Gifts
Birds of fine plumage are not the best songsters; neither are comely women the most virtuous.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs