BEAUTY QUOTES VIII

quotations about beauty


Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/b/includes/quoter_subj.php on line 27

Let us reflect, what most powerfully attracts the eyes of beholders, and seizes the spectator with rapturous delight; for if we can find what this is, we may perhaps use it as a ladder, enabling us to ascend into the region of beauty, and survey its immeasurable extent.

PLOTINUS
Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/b/includes/quoter_subj.php on line 37

"Concerning the Beautiful"


Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/b/includes/quoter_subj.php on line 63

Incapacity to appreciate certain types of beauty may be the condition sine qua non for the appreciation of another kind; the greatest capacity both for enjoyment and creation is highly specialized and exclusive, and hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant. The invectives of one school against another, perverse as they are philosophically, are artistically often signs of health, because they indicate a vital appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of them that has grown into a jealous passion.

GEORGE SANTAYANA

The Sense of Beauty


At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens -- that letting go -- you let go because you can.

TONI MORRISON

Tar Baby


The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

preface, Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence


Life deprived of beauty is not worthy of being called human.

LUIS BARRAGÁN

attributed, Artes de Mexico, 1994


In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.

EDWARD BULWER LYTTON

What Will He Do With It?


What can still that hunger of the heart which sickens the eye for beauty, and makes sweet-scented ease an oppression?

GEORGE ELIOT

Daniel Deronda


Beauty can pierce one like pain.

THOMAS MANN

Buddenbrooks


Though beauty is, with the most apt similitude, I had almost said with the most literal truth, called a flower that fades and dies almost in the very moment of its maturity; yet there is, methinks, a kind of beauty which lives even to old age; a beauty that is not in the features, but, if I may be allowed the expression, shines through them. As it is not merely corporeal it is not the object of mere sense, nor is it to be discovered but by persons of true taste and refined sentiment.

FULKE GREVILLE

Maxims


Judge nothing by the appearance. The more beautiful the serpent, the more fatal its sting.

WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY

Proverbs


It's important for all types of women to know that you don't have to fit a prototype of what one person thinks is beautiful in order to be beautiful or feel beautiful.... People think, Sexy, big breasts, curvy body, no cellulite. It's not that. Take the girl at the beach with the cellulite legs, wearing her bathing suit the way she likes it, walking with a certain air, comfortable with herself. That woman is sexy. Then you see the perfect girl who's really thin, tugging at her bathing suit, wondering how her hair looks. That's not sexy.

JENNIFER LOPEZ

Readers Digest, Aug. 2003


In spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.

JOHN KEATS

Endymion


Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world. All privilege is that of beauty; for there are many beauties; as, of general nature, of the human face and form, of manners, of brain, or method, moral beauty, or beauty of the soul.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

The Conduct of Life


Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

The Brothers Karamazov


To speak of beauty is to enter another and more exalted realm--a realm sufficiently apart from our everyday concerns as to be mentioned only with a certain hesitation. People who are always in praise and pursuit of the beautiful are an embarrassment, like people who make a constant display of their religious faith. Somehow, we feel such things should be kept for our exalted moments, and not paraded in company, or allowed to spill out over dinner.

ROGER SCRUTON

Beauty


The Beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of nature, which, without its presence, would never have been revealed.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe


Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.

EUDORA WELTY

On Writing


Beauty
Is the fume-track of necessity. This thought
Is therapeutic. If, after several
Applications, you do not find
Relief, consult your family physician.

ROBERT PENN WARREN

"Island of Summer"


Beautiful peaches are not always the best flavored; neither are handsome women the most amiable.

WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY

Proverbs


You think God will never forgive you, but the only God is beauty and beauty always forgives. It forgives with its infinite indifference.

GLEN DUNCAN

The Last Werewolf