BEAUTY QUOTES III

quotations about beauty

Beauty quote

The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

A Room of One's Own


Beauty is but for a day.

EDWARD COUNSEL

Maxims


We discern beauty in concrete objects and abstract ideas, in works of nature and works of art, in things, animals and people, in objects, qualities and actions. As the list expands to take in just about every ontological category (there are beautiful propositions as well as beautiful worlds, beautiful proofs as well as beautiful snails, even beautiful diseases and beautiful deaths), it becomes obvious that we are not describing a property like shape, size, or colour, uncontroversially present to all who can find their way around the physical world. For one thing: how could there be a single property exhibited by so many disparate types of thing?

ROGER SCRUTON

Beauty


In our time, at all events, Beauty has never walked the streets with so frank a radiance, so confident an air of security, and in her eyes and in her carriage, as in her subtly shaped and subtly scented garments, so conspicuous a challenge to the musty, outworn, proprieties to frown upon her all they please.

RICHARD LE GALLIENNE

"The Persecutions of Beauty", Vanishing Roads and Other Essays


Every man values every acquisition he makes in the science of beauty, above his possessions. The most useful man in the most useful world, so long as only commodity was served, would remain unsatisfied. But, as fast as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

The Conduct of Life


There are sometimes beauties in a character which would never have appeared but for a defect, and defects which would never have appeared but for a beauty.

FULKE GREVILLE

Maxims


Beauty is best when it comes mixed with danger.

SHERRILYN KENYON & DIANNA LOVE

Blood Trinity


I found a money back guarantee on a beauty cream. Rushed down to the store. They took one look at me and paid me in advance.

PHYLLIS DILLER

stand-up routine, 1978


Let a young maiden, who would preserve her beauty, preserve the purity of soul, those sweet qualities of the mind, those virtues, in short, by which she first drew her lover to her feet.

T. S. ARTHUR

"The Evening Before Marriage", Orange Blossoms


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 one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt in God.

JEAN ANOUILH

Becket


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


Where Beauty was, nothing ever ran quite straight, which, no doubt, was why so many people looked on it as immoral.

JOHN GALSWORTHY

The Forsyte Saga


Beauty is certainly a soft, smooth, slippery thing, and therefore of a nature which easily slips in and permeates our souls.

PLATO

Lysis


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 just keeps coming into the world and passing away, coming in and passing away. You can't blame beauty. Beauty doesn't know what else to do.

GLEN DUNCAN

By Blood We Live


The queen whose beauty does the gaze transfix,
Adorns herself with pallid crucifix.

EDWIN LEIBFREED

"The Quest for God"


We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her.

ALBERT CAMUS

"Helen's Exile"


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

ELIZABETH GASKELL

Wives and Daughters


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