BEAUTY QUOTES III
quotations about 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
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
Beauty is best when it comes mixed with danger.
SHERRILYN KENYON & DIANNA LOVE
Blood Trinity
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
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
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
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"
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
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 is certainly a soft, smooth, slippery thing, and therefore of a nature which easily slips in and permeates our souls.
PLATO
Lysis
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 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
The young girl is often pretty but her prettiness is vague and uncertain, it inspires a sort of pitying admiration, but it suggests nothing; the very essence of the young girl's being is that she should have nothing to suggest, therefore the beauty of the young face fails to touch the imagination. No past lies hidden in those translucent eyes, no story of hate, disappointment, or sin.
GEORGE MOORE
Confessions of a Young Man