quotations about beauty
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"
Were we to aim in every case at the kind of supreme beauty exemplified by Sta Maria della Salute, we should end with aesthetic overload. The clamorous masterpieces, jostling for attention side by side, would lose their distinctiveness, and the beauty of each of them would be at war with the beauty of the rest.
ROGER SCRUTON
Beauty
Beauty is certainly a soft, smooth, slippery thing, and therefore of a nature which easily slips in and permeates our souls.
PLATO
Lysis
Thus was beauty sent from heaven--the lovely mistress of truth and good in this dark world.
MARK AKENSIDE
The Pleasures of Imagination
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
The French girls would tell you, to believe that you were pretty would make you so.
ELIZABETH GASKELL
Wives and Daughters
Oft as by chance, a little while apart
The pall of empty, loveless hours withdrawn,
Sweet Beauty, opening on the impoverished heart,
Beams like a jewel on the breast of dawn.
ALAN SEEGER
"Sonnet VIII"
To me, merely and pretty were words that had nothing to do with each other. Pretty went with miraculously, and merely belonged in another paragraph entirely.
GAIL CARSON LEVINE
Fairest
Beauty is but a lease from nature.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
It's a good thing beauty is only skin deep, or I'd be rotten to the core.
PHYLLIS DILLER
The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes
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
Birds of fine plumage are not the best songsters; neither are comely women the most virtuous.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
Our world oft turns in gloom, and Life both many a perilous way,
Yet there's no path so desolate and thorny, cold and gray,
But Beauty like a beacon burns above the dark of strife,
And like an Alchemist aye turns all things to golden life.
GERALD MASSEY
"The Chivalry of Labour Exhorted to the Worship of Beauty"
The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
HAVELOCK ELLIS
Impressions and Comments
Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist--a master ... can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is ... and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be ... and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart ... no matter what the merciless hours have done to her.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Stranger in a Strange Land
We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her.
ALBERT CAMUS
"Helen's Exile"
Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.
ROGER SCRUTON
Beauty
It is one of the arts of a great beauty to heighten the effect of her charms by affecting to be sweetly unconscious of them.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Beauty has the more ardent, but worth the more discriminating lovers.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought