quotations about beauty
A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
The Architecture of Happiness
I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.
THOMAS MANN
Death in Venice
Ah, ah, thy beauty! like a beast it bites,
Stings like an adder, like an arrow smites.
Ah sweet, and sweet again, and seven times sweet,
The paces and the pauses of thy feet!
Ah sweeter than all sleep or summer air
The fallen fillets fragrant from thine hair!
Yea, though their alien kisses do me wrong,
Sweeter thy lips than mine with all their song;
Thy shoulders whiter than a fleece of white,
And flower-sweet fingers, good to bruise or bite
As honeycomb of the inmost honey-cells,
With almond-shaped and roseleaf-coloured shells
And blood like purple blossoms at the tips
Quivering; and pain made perfect in thy lips
For my sake when I hurt thee; O that I
Durst crush thee out of life with love, and die,
Die of thy pain and my delight, and be
Mixed with thy blood and molten into thee!
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
"Anactoria"
A fair face without a fair soul is like a glass eye that shines and sees nothing.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Day-book of John Stuart Blackie
Thus was beauty sent from heaven--the lovely mistress of truth and good in this dark world.
MARK AKENSIDE
The Pleasures of Imagination
Beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.
R. D. LAING
introduction, The Politics of Experience
Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover, Fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense.
JOSEPH ADDISON
Cato
Beauty is but a lease from nature.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Beauty may be said to be God's trademark in creation.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
When beauty fires the blood, how love exalts the mind!
JOHN DRYDEN
Cymon and Iphigenia
At the unprovable cosmological fringes beauty swings it. Now mathematical models are like supermodels: They have grace, symmetry, elegance. It's hardly surprising. Modernity having done away with Absolute Moral Values and Objective Reality, there's only beauty left. What theory won't we espouse if it's beautiful? What atrocity won't we excuse?
GLEN DUNCAN
The Last Werewolf
Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.
CONFUCIUS
Ne'er boast; for beauty is a dream that fades.
THEOCRITUS
"A Countryman's Wooing"
One cannot grow beauty in the soil of hate and pain.
RICK REMENDER
Uncanny X-Force, Nov. 2011
The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own -- even more, one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
Ship of Fools
Remember that there are two kinds of beauty: one of the soul and the other of the body. That of the soul displays its radiance in intelligence, in chastity, in good conduct, in generosity, and in good breeding, and all these qualities may exist in an ugly man. And when we focus our attention upon that beauty, not upon the physical, love generally arises with great violence and intensity. I am well aware that I am not handsome, but I also know that I am not deformed, and it is enough for a man of worth not to be a monster for him to be dearly loved, provided he has those spiritual endowments I have spoken of.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
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
There is likely to be beauty wherever proportion exists.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
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
Much that is said about beauty and its importance in our lives ignores the minimal beauty of an unpretentious street, a nice pair of shoes or a tasteful piece of wrapping paper, as though those things belonged to a different order of value from a church by Bramante or a Shakespeare sonnet. Yet these minimal beauties are far more important to our daily lives, and far more intricately involved in our own rational decisions, than the great works of art which (if we are lucky) occupy our leisure hours. They are part of the context in which we live our lives, and our desire for harmony, fittingness and civility is both expressed and confirmed in them. Moreover, the great works of architecture often depend for their beauty on the humble context that these lesser beauties provide.
ROGER SCRUTON
Beauty