quotations about beauty
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
JOHN KEATS
"Ode on a Grecian Urn"
The creator and arbiter of beauty is the heart; to the male rattlesnake the female rattlesnake is the loveliest thing in nature.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
Beautiful peaches are not always the best flavored; neither are handsome women the most amiable.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Jack and Jill: A Village Story
Beauty can pierce one like pain.
THOMAS MANN
Buddenbrooks
The only beautiful thing in the world whose beauty lasts for ever is a pure, fair soul.
BRAM STOKER
"The Rose Prince"
Beauty in woman is that potent alchemy which transforms men into asses.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
This is the essence of beauty--the possession of a quality which excites the human organism to functioning harmonious with its own nature.
ETHEL PUFFER HOWES
The Psychology of Beauty
Love is the divine Fire, and Beauty its glowing reflection in the skies of Time.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
Much that is beautiful must be discarded
So that we may resemble a taller
Impression of ourselves.
JOHN ASHBERY
"Illustration"
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"
Beauty is objectified pleasure.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Sense of Beauty
The queen banishes Snow White because of her beauty. But the dwarves help Snow White because they're smitten by that very beauty. It teaches kids an important lesson: Nothing matters except for your looks.
CRAIG FERGUSON
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Jun. 1, 2012
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
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
To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.
JANE AUSTEN
Northanger Abbey
Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.
PETRARCH
De Remedies
The yoke of beauty is easy to bear
Since I need not lay it down.
KARLE WILSON BAKER
"The Marching Mountains", Burning Bush
In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.
EDWARD BULWER LYTTON
What Will He Do With It?
So audacious has Beauty become in these latter days, so proudly she walks abroad, making so superb an appeal to the desire of the eye, thighed like Artemis, and bosomed like Aphrodite, or at whiles a fairy creature of ivory and gossamer and fragrance, with a look in her eyes of secret gardens; and so much is the wide world at her feet, and one with her in the vanity of her fairness--that I sometimes fear an impending dies irae, when the dormant spirit of Puritanism will reassert itself, and some stern priests thunder from the pulpit of worldly vanities and the wrath to come.
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
"The Persecutions of Beauty", Vanishing Roads and Other Essays