quotations about beauty
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
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
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
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
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
The queen whose beauty does the gaze transfix,
Adorns herself with pallid crucifix.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Quest for God"
Old as I am, for ladies' love unfit,
The power of beauty I remember yet.
JOHN DRYDEN
Cymon and Iphigenia
We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her.
ALBERT CAMUS
"Helen's Exile"
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
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
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
Beauty and Genius must be kept afar if one would avoid becoming their slave.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
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
What is the beauty of bodies? It is something which at first view presents itself to sense, and which the soul familiarly apprehends and eagerly embraces, as if it were allied to itself. But when it meets with the deformed, it hastily starts from the view and retires abhorrent from its discordant nature.
PLOTINUS
"Concerning the Beautiful"
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
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"
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
Unexpected intrusions of beauty. That is what life is.
SAUL BELLOW
Herzog
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
There should be, methinks, as little merit in loving a woman for her beauty, as in loving a man for his prosperity; both being equally subject to change.
ALEXANDER POPE
"Thoughts on Various Subjects"