BEAUTY QUOTES VIII

quotations about beauty

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

JOHN KEATS

Endymion


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


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


Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world. All privilege is that of beauty; for there are many beauties; as, of general nature, of the human face and form, of manners, of brain, or method, moral beauty, or beauty of the soul.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

The Conduct of Life


What is love at first sight but a proof of the powerful but silent language of physiognomy?

MARY CLEMMER AMES

attributed, Edge-tools of Speech


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


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


Though beauty is, with the most apt similitude, I had almost said with the most literal truth, called a flower that fades and dies almost in the very moment of its maturity; yet there is, methinks, a kind of beauty which lives even to old age; a beauty that is not in the features, but, if I may be allowed the expression, shines through them. As it is not merely corporeal it is not the object of mere sense, nor is it to be discovered but by persons of true taste and refined sentiment.

FULKE GREVILLE

Maxims


The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being defeated.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

"Le Confiteor de l'artiste," Le Spleen de Paris


Judge nothing by the appearance. The more beautiful the serpent, the more fatal its sting.

WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY

Proverbs


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


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


Ask me where beauty is, I'll say
'Tis in sweet maiden's witchery;
Amid the beams of her flashing eye
When pleasure's cup is sparkling high,
And new-born love's first artless glances
Illume her brow,
And joy within her young heart dances
For the first vow;
When she knows not of blighting care,
And all is bright, and fresh, and fair;
And fancy's banner is unfurled,
Tinting with rose her future world;
Nor cloud, nor mist dims in her eye
The sunshine of life's morning sky,
That, with such gay and golden beams,
Colours her happy youth with dreams.

C. B. LANGSTON

"Where Is Beauty?"


A woman who has never been pretty has never been young.

MADAME SWETCHINE

"Airelles,", The Writings of Madame Swetchine


Life deprived of beauty is not worthy of being called human.

LUIS BARRAGÁN

attributed, Artes de Mexico, 1994


The Nature of Beauty is in the relation of means to an end; the means, the possibilities of stimulation in the motor, visual, auditory, and purely ideal fields; the end, a moment of perfection, of self-complete unity of experience, of favourable stimulation with repose. Beauty is not perfection; but the beauty of an object lies in its permanent possibility of creating the perfect moment. The experience of this moment, the union of stimulation and repose, constitutes the unique aesthetic emotion.

ETHEL PUFFER HOWES

The Psychology of Beauty


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


The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely.

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT

Jack and Jill: A Village Story


The beauty that men seek is half a dream--
Where'er we wander, yet it lies afar;
It touches with its wand a setting star,
It stirs the ripple of an ebbing stream.
And though we run beyond the dawning gleam,
Or kneel to worship at an altar bright,
We may not know the soul of its delight,
Or more than marvel at its palest beam.

KENNETH RAND

"The True Magic"


When I entreated Life to make me wise,
It drew aside Love's broidered veil of lies;
And perilous Beauty, undivined before,
Beckoned me from the mazes of his eyes.

ELSA BARKER

"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love