quotations about beauty
To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.
JANE AUSTEN
Northanger Abbey
It's important for all types of women to know that you don't have to fit a prototype of what one person thinks is beautiful in order to be beautiful or feel beautiful.... People think, Sexy, big breasts, curvy body, no cellulite. It's not that. Take the girl at the beach with the cellulite legs, wearing her bathing suit the way she likes it, walking with a certain air, comfortable with herself. That woman is sexy. Then you see the perfect girl who's really thin, tugging at her bathing suit, wondering how her hair looks. That's not sexy.
JENNIFER LOPEZ
Readers Digest, Aug. 2003
Beauty is objectified pleasure.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Sense of Beauty
Beauty is as summer fruits, which are easy to corrupt, and cannot last; and for the most part it makes a dissolute youth, and an age a little out of countenance; but yet certainly again, if it light well, it maketh virtue shine, and vices blush.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Beauty", The Essays or Counsels
Beauty is indeed a good gift of God; but that the good may not think it a great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked.
ST. AUGUSTINE
City of God
Beautiful things may be admired, if not loved.
L. FRANK BAUM
The Tin Woodman of Oz
Tho' Beauty is generally the creature of fancy, yet are there some who will be Beauties in every eye.
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
Clarissa
In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
Travels in Philadelphia
The yoke of beauty is easy to bear
Since I need not lay it down.
KARLE WILSON BAKER
"The Marching Mountains", Burning Bush
Beauty is Nature's coin, must not be hoarded,
But must be current, and the good thereof
Consists in mutual and partaken bliss.
JOHN MILTON
Comus
You think God will never forgive you, but the only God is beauty and beauty always forgives. It forgives with its infinite indifference.
GLEN DUNCAN
The Last Werewolf
Beauty is only skin deep, and the world is full of thin skinned people.
RICHARD ARMOUR
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes
A beautiful face fires our imagination, and we see higher virtue and intelligence in it than we can detect in its owner's head or heart when we descend to calm inspection.
CHARLES READE
Foul Play
To speak of beauty is to enter another and more exalted realm--a realm sufficiently apart from our everyday concerns as to be mentioned only with a certain hesitation. People who are always in praise and pursuit of the beautiful are an embarrassment, like people who make a constant display of their religious faith. Somehow, we feel such things should be kept for our exalted moments, and not paraded in company, or allowed to spill out over dinner.
ROGER SCRUTON
Beauty
The idea of beauty is the fundamental idea of everything. In the world we see only distortions of the fundamental idea, but art, by imagination, may lift itself to the height of this idea. Art is therefore akin to creation.
LEO TOLSTOY
What Is Art?
Only true love can keep beauty innocent.
U2
"A Man and a Woman"
Love of beauty is really only the sex instinct, which nothing but complete union satisfies.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
Saint's Progress
Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Conduct of Life
The terrible predicament of a beautiful girl is that only an experienced womanizer, someone cynical and without scruple, feels up to the challenge. More often than not, she will lose her virginity to some filthy lowlife in what proves to be the first step in an irrevocable decline.
MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ
The Elementary Particles
Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever
Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom, why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"