quotations about beauty
Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.
PETRARCH
De Remedies
The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being defeated.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Le Confiteor de l'artiste," Le Spleen de Paris
Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.
EUDORA WELTY
On Writing
Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world. All privilege is that of beauty; for there are many beauties; as, of general nature, of the human face and form, of manners, of brain, or method, moral beauty, or beauty of the soul.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Conduct of Life
Perhaps there is no gift of nature that requires as little exertion on the part of the owner as personal beauty. I am not certain but that it is this very absence of effort which excites our admiration.
BRET HARTE
"On a Pretty Girl at the Opera"
The only beautiful thing in the world whose beauty lasts for ever is a pure, fair soul.
BRAM STOKER
"The Rose Prince"
A woman who has never been pretty has never been young.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles,", The Writings of Madame Swetchine
Beauty can afford to laugh at distinctions: it is itself the greatest distinction.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Beauty is a simple passion,
but, oh my friends, in the end
you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.
ANNE SEXTON
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Brothers Karamazov
Life deprived of beauty is not worthy of being called human.
LUIS BARRAGÁN
attributed, Artes de Mexico, 1994
What is love at first sight but a proof of the powerful but silent language of physiognomy?
MARY CLEMMER AMES
attributed, Edge-tools of Speech
When I entreated Life to make me wise,
It drew aside Love's broidered veil of lies;
And perilous Beauty, undivined before,
Beckoned me from the mazes of his eyes.
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love
Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
ANNE CARSON
preface, Eros the Bittersweet
For one to admire a woman merely for her beauty, is to love the building for its exterior; but to love one for the greatness of her soul, is to appreciate the tenement for its intrinsic value.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
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
A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
The Architecture of Happiness
Only true love can keep beauty innocent.
U2
"A Man and a Woman"
Beauty for the most part, consists in objects of sight; but it is also received through the ears, by the skilful composition of words, and the consonant proportion of sounds; for in every species of harmony, beauty is to be found.
PLOTINUS
"Concerning the Beautiful"
He only can create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be rewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Anima Hominis", Per Amica Silentia Lunae