BEAUTY QUOTES VII

quotations about 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 spirit in man has been created in accordance with the image of beauty, so that whenever it either hears or sees anything beautiful, it may have a propensity towards it, and seek for communion with it.

MUHAMMAD AL-GHAZALI

The Alchemy of Happiness


Arguments out of a pretty mouth are unanswerable.

JOSEPH ADDISON

The Freeholder, Jan. 2, 1716


There is likely to be beauty wherever proportion exists.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought


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


Beauty rests on necessities. The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

The Conduct of Life


For one to admire a woman merely for her beauty, is to love the building for its exterior; but to love one for the greatness of her soul, is to appreciate the tenement for its intrinsic value.

WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY

Proverbs


All beautiful things bring sadness, nor alone
Sweet music, as our wisest Poet spake,
Because in us keen longings they awake.

RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH

"All Beautiful Things"


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


True love survives all shocks: an affection originally produced by admiration for unusual beauty may not only survive the loss of that beauty, but may become more intense if the beauty has changed into ugliness through causes that bind the lovers together in tender associations.

ARTHUR LYNCH

Moods of Life


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


Beauty is a simple passion,
but, oh my friends, in the end
you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.

ANNE SEXTON

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs


Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

ANNE CARSON

preface, Eros the Bittersweet


Beauty acts as a cause to produce love, because the being, the attributes and the works of God possess beauty, and every one loves that which is beautiful.

MUHAMMAD AL-GHAZALI

The Alchemy of Happiness


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

JOHN KEATS

Endymion


I was brought up imagining that cream rises to the top, merit wins out, the race is to the swift and riches to men of understanding, but it ain't necessarily so. The swift stand a better chance if they are also beautiful.

GARRISON KEILLOR

"Not Smart? Not a Problem," A Prairie Home Companion, Jun. 22, 2010


The only beautiful thing in the world whose beauty lasts for ever is a pure, fair soul.

BRAM STOKER

"The Rose Prince"


Beauty is like life itself: a dawn mist
the sun burns off. It gives no peace, no rest.

GREGORY ORR

The Caged Owl: New & Selected Poems


Women of no beauty may yet be flattered to believe they possess some; others of a moderate share that they have a great deal; but those of elegance and charm generally know the perfection of their external graces so well, that they seem to covet that flattery most which heightens the opinion of their wit and judgment.

NORMAN MACDONALD

Maxims and Moral Reflections


Beauty itself soon fades, and when a woman has beauty and nothing else, well, it's like putting all the goods in the shop window, isn't it? And the moment she loses her good looks--poor creature! what is she? Just a mere bit of faded finery to be thrown aside.

HENRY ARTHUR JONES

Her Tongue