quotations about beauty
Beauty, when it first discloses the mellowing touches of age, affects us painfully. It is like the tints of sunset, or the beauty of autumn--a melancholy beauty--beauty in decline--upon which we cannot gaze without a feeling of sadness--of sadness that it is passing away.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
If you get simple beauty and nought else,
You get about the best thing God invents.
ROBERT BROWNING
Fra Lippo Lippi
The perfection of her face created a sense of emptiness--like a house with no curtains in the window.
JEFF ABBOTT
Black Jack Point
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
Trust a girl of sixteen for knowing well if she is pretty; concerning her plainness she may be ignorant.
ELIZABETH GASKELL
Mary Barton
While all is new, all is beautiful. That is a well-known song. Yes, and the next day the air changes into another one equally well known.
OCTAVE MIRBEAU
The Diary of a Chambermaid
An essential quality of beauty is aloofness.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
I am corrupted to the bone with the beauty of this forsaken world.
J. M. COETZEE
In the Heart of the Country
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
Your voice would have silenced merle and thrush,
And the rose outbloomed would have blushed to blush,
And Summer, seeing you, paused, and known
That the glow of your beauty outshone its own.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"My Winter Rose", Lyrical Poems
If I conceive of a woman so transcendingly beautiful that upon her beauty no improvement can be made, I do not conceive of the principle itself of beauty, but only of its incarnation. In the woman, and through her, I perceive that by virtue of which she becomes beautiful. When I see a beautiful woman, I see in her a more beautiful woman still; for in every person we find some fault, and by eliminating the fault, we attain nearer to perfection. But in and through that more beautiful woman still, I perceive that which gives the character of beauty. But this principle can never be perceived directly in itself; it can be perceived only when manifesting itself in some person or thing, and even then only as transcending.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
The Doctrine of Life
At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Myth of Sisyphus