BEAUTY QUOTES III

quotations about beauty

Beauty quote

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


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


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


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


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


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


Beauty is best when it comes mixed with danger.

SHERRILYN KENYON & DIANNA LOVE

Blood Trinity


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

PLATO

Lysis


Among all the ugly mugs of the world we see now and then a face made after the divine pattern. Then, a wonderful thing happens to us; the Blue Bird sings, the golden Splendour shines, and for a queer moment everything seems meaningless save our impulse to follow those fair forms, to follow them to the clear Paradises they promise. Plato assures us that these moments are not (as we are apt to think them) mere blurs and delusions of the senses, but divine revelations; that in a lovely face we see imaged, as in a mirror, the Absolute Beauty--; it is Reality, flashing on us in the cave where we dwell amid shadows and darkness. Therefore we should follow these fair forms, and their shining footsteps will lead us upward to the highest heaven of Wisdom. The Poets, too, keep chanting this great doctrine of Beauty in grave notes to their golden strings. Its music floats up through the skies so sweet, so strange, that the very Angels seem to lean from their stars to listen. But, O Plato, O Shelley, O Angels of Heaven, what scrapes you do get us into!

LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH

Trivia


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


For admiration and personal love and youthful enjoyment, beauty of course is supreme; but as we cannot be always young nor always apt for pleasure, it is as well to provide for the days when the daughters of music shall be brought low and the years draw nigh which have no pleasure in them.

ELIZA LYNN LINTON

The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays


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

ELIZABETH GASKELL

Wives and Daughters


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

ALBERT CAMUS

"Helen's Exile"


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


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