BEAUTY QUOTES IV

quotations about beauty

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 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


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


Old as I am, for ladies' love unfit,
The power of beauty I remember yet.

JOHN DRYDEN

Cymon and Iphigenia


It's amazing how lovely common things become, if one only knows how to look at them.

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT

Marjorie's Three Gifts


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


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


For admiration and personal love and youthful enjoyment, beauty of course is supreme; but as we cannot be always young nor always apt for pleasure, it is as well to provide for the days when the daughters of music shall be brought low and the years draw nigh which have no pleasure in them.

ELIZA LYNN LINTON

The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays


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


The French girls would tell you, to believe that you were pretty would make you so.

ELIZABETH GASKELL

Wives and Daughters


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"


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


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


Unexpected intrusions of beauty. That is what life is.

SAUL BELLOW

Herzog


The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

HAVELOCK ELLIS

Impressions and Comments


E'en Beauty mourns in her decaying bower,
That Time upon her angel brow should set
His crooked autograph, and mar the jet
Of glossy locks. Lo! how her chaplet green,
The hoar frost and the canker worm destroy.
Decay's dull film obscures those matchless eyes.

ISAAC MCLELLAN

"Musings"


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 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 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"


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