quotations about beauty
E'en Beauty mourns in her decaying bower,
That Time upon her angel brow should set
His crooked autograph, and mar the jet
Of glossy locks. Lo! how her chaplet green,
The hoar frost and the canker worm destroy.
Decay's dull film obscures those matchless eyes.
ISAAC MCLELLAN
"Musings"
Beauty walks in bravest dress,
And, fed with April's mellow showers,
The earth laughs out with sweet May-flowers,
That flush for very happiness.
GERALD MASSEY
"The Ballad of Babe Christabel"
There should be, methinks, as little merit in loving a woman for her beauty, as in loving a man for his prosperity; both being equally subject to change.
ALEXANDER POPE
"Thoughts on Various Subjects"
The kind of beauty I want is the hard-to-get kind that comes from within--strength, courage, dignity.
RUBY DEE
Woman's Day Magazine, Sep. 1, 2009
It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But ... it is better to be good than to be ugly.
OSCAR WILDE
The Picture of Dorian Gray
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
LEO TOLSTOY
The Kreutzer Sonata
Beauty, like male ballet dancers, makes some men afraid.
MORDECAI RICHLER
Son of a Smaller Hero
Beauty has the more ardent, but worth the more discriminating lovers.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
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
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"
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The pall of empty, loveless hours withdrawn,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"
Beauty is only two finger’s-breadth from goodness.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
"Montaigne," The Common Reader
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"
Beauty, of course, is an asset. But the girls who have greenbacks don't have to worry over not having pink faces.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs
Beauty requires contrast.
JOHN GARDNER
Grendel
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
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
Beauty is but a lease from nature.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
It has been said that the beauties of the mind are valuable because they are more lasting than those of the body; but I do not remember to have heard it said that the beauties of the mind are valuable because they make those of the body more lasting.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims
When beauty fires the blood, how love exalts the mind!
JOHN DRYDEN
Cymon and Iphigenia