The perfection of her face created a sense of emptiness--like a house with no curtains in the window.
- Small is the worth
- Of beauty from the light retired:
- Bid her come forth,
- Suffer herself to be desired,
- And not blush so to be admired.
EDMUND WALLER, Go, Lovely Rose
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?
Ne'er boast; for beauty is a dream that fades.
THEOCRITUS, "A Countryman's Wooing"
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
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
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
- The pageant of a former hour,
- Is Beauty in the Grave.
WILLIAM B. TAPPAN, "Beauty in the Grave"
What can still that hunger of the heart which sickens the eye for beauty, and makes sweet-scented ease an oppression?
GEORGE ELIOT, Daniel Deronda
If you admire yourself in the mirror, let it be in fear and not delight, because the only thing that beauty will bring to you is terror of losing it.
AMÉLIE NOTHOMB, Fear and Trembling
Birds of fine plumage are not the best songsters; neither are comely women the most virtuous.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY, Proverbs
True love survives all shocks: an affection originally produced by admiration for unusual beauty may not only survive the loss of that beauty, but may become more intense if the beauty has changed into ugliness through causes that bind the lovers together in tender associations.
ARTHUR LYNCH, Moods of Life
- The queen whose beauty does the gaze transfix,
- Adorns herself with pallid crucifix.
EDWIN LEIBFREED, "The Quest for God"
Much that is said about beauty and its importance in our lives ignores the minimal beauty of an unpretentious street, a nice pair of shoes or a tasteful piece of wrapping paper, as though those things belonged to a different order of value from a church by Bramante or a Shakespeare sonnet. Yet these minimal beauties are far more important to our daily lives, and far more intricately involved in our own rational decisions, than the great works of art which (if we are lucky) occupy our leisure hours. They are part of the context in which we live our lives, and our desire for harmony, fittingness and civility is both expressed and confirmed in them. Moreover, the great works of architecture often depend for their beauty on the humble context that these lesser beauties provide.
- Affect not to despise beauty: no one is freed from its dominion;
- But regard it not a pearl of price--it is fleeting as the bow in the clouds.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER, Proverbial Philosophy
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
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.
The beauty of a lovely woman is like music ... the rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more than their prettiness--by their close kinship with all we have known of tenderness and peace.
- 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"
A woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.
- The beauty that men seek is half a dream--
- Where'er we wander, yet it lies afar;
- It touches with its wand a setting star,
- It stirs the ripple of an ebbing stream.
- And though we run beyond the dawning gleam,
- Or kneel to worship at an altar bright,
- We may not know the soul of its delight,
- Or more than marvel at its palest beam.
KENNETH RAND, "The True Magic"
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
Choosing beauty over content (or choosing beauty as content) is always an act of sedition. If we accept the cant of official culture, we must believe that the beauty we steal from any man-made thing is stolen from its more virtuous and metaphysical backstory, wherein "real" beauty is said to reside.
DAVE HICKEY, The Invisible Dragon
Back to Beauty Quotes
