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Beauty may be said to be God's trademark in creation.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Beauty in woman is that potent alchemy which transforms men into asses.
ABRAHAM MILLER, Unmoral Maxims
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.
This is the essence of beauty--the possession of a quality which excites the human organism to functioning harmonious with its own nature.
ETHEL PUFFER HOWES, The Psychology of Beauty
Beauty and Genius must be kept afar if one would avoid becoming their slave.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
In images, beauty is the agency that causes visual pleasure in the beholder, and, since pleasure is the true occasion for looking at anything, any theory of images that is not grounded in the pleasure of the beholder begs the question of art's efficacy and dooms itself to inconsequence.
DAVE HICKEY, The Invisible Dragon
The Nature of Beauty is in the relation of means to an end; the means, the possibilities of stimulation in the motor, visual, auditory, and purely ideal fields; the end, a moment of perfection, of self-complete unity of experience, of favourable stimulation with repose. Beauty is not perfection; but the beauty of an object lies in its permanent possibility of creating the perfect moment. The experience of this moment, the union of stimulation and repose, constitutes the unique aesthetic emotion.
ETHEL PUFFER HOWES, The Psychology of Beauty
Beauty is objectified pleasure.
GEORGE SANTAYANA, The Sense of Beauty
While beauty made its own rules, it also created its own problems and disappointments.
MIA TYLER, Creating Myself
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, Characters, and Reflections
The Beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of nature, which, without its presence, would never have been revealed.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.
GEORGE SANTAYANA, The Sense of Beauty
The idea of Beauty has been greatly widened since the age of Plato. Then, it was only in order, proportion, unity in variety, that beauty was admitted to consist; today we hold that the moderns have caught a profounder beauty, the beauty of meanings, and we make it matter for rejoicing that nothing is too small, too strange, or too ugly to enter, through its power of suggestion, the realm of the aesthetically valuable; and that the definition of beauty should have been extended to include, under the name of Romantic, Symbolic, Expressive, or Ideal Beauty, all of the elements of aesthetic experience, all that emotionally stirs us in representation.
ETHEL PUFFER HOWES, The Psychology of 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?
Incapacity to appreciate certain types of beauty may be the condition sine qua non for the appreciation of another kind; the greatest capacity both for enjoyment and creation is highly specialized and exclusive, and hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant. The invectives of one school against another, perverse as they are philosophically, are artistically often signs of health, because they indicate a vital appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of them that has grown into a jealous passion.
GEORGE SANTAYANA, The Sense of Beauty
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
An essential quality of beauty is aloofness.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
Among all the ugly mugs of the world we see now and then a face made after the divine pattern. Then, a wonderful thing happens to us; the Blue Bird sings, the golden Splendour shines, and for a queer moment everything seems meaningless save our impulse to follow those fair forms, to follow them to the clear Paradises they promise. Plato assures us that these moments are not (as we are apt to think them) mere blurs and delusions of the senses, but divine revelations; that in a lovely face we see imaged, as in a mirror, the Absolute Beauty—; it is Reality, flashing on us in the cave where we dwell amid shadows and darkness. Therefore we should follow these fair forms, and their shining footsteps will lead us upward to the highest heaven of Wisdom. The Poets, too, keep chanting this great doctrine of Beauty in grave notes to their golden strings. Its music floats up through the skies so sweet, so strange, that the very Angels seem to lean from their stars to listen. But, O Plato, O Shelley, O Angels of Heaven, what scrapes you do get us into!
LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH, Trivia
It is part and parcel of every man's life to develop beauty in himself. All perfect things have in them an element of beauty.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
There is likely to be beauty wherever proportion exists.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
Beauty can never really understand itself.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Women of no beauty may yet be flattered to believe they possess some; others of a moderate share that they have a great deal; but those of elegance and charm generally know the perfection of their external graces so well, that they seem to covet that flattery most which heightens the opinion of their wit and judgment.
NORMAN MACDONALD, Maxims and Moral Reflections
The criterion of true beauty is, that it increases on examination; of false, that it lessens. There is something therefore in true beauty that corresponds with right reason, and is not merely a creature of fancy.
FULKE GREVILLE, Maxims, Characters and Reflections
Beauty is but for a day.
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