Beauty

Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful or to discover something that is true. ~~ William Ralph Inge

It is our will
That thus enchaines us to permitted ill --
We might be otherwise -- we might be all
We dream of happy, high majestical.
Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek,
But in our mind? ~~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly. ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder. ~~ Laurence J. Peter

I slept and dreamed that life was beauty. I woke -- and found that life was duty. ~~ Ellen Sturgis Hooper

I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin deep. That's deep enough. What do you want -- an adorable pancreas? ~~ Jean Kerr

Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic … ~~ Herman Melville

Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them. ~~ David Hume

Make me a beautiful word for doing things tomorrow; for that surely is a great and blessed invention. ~~ George Bernard Shaw

If you don't look for beauty, you won't see it. If you don't seek joy, you won't find it. ~~ Dr. Christian Hageseth

Riches, like glory or health, have no more beauty or pleasure than their possessor is pleased to lend them. ~~ Michel de Montaigne

[On nouvelle cuisine:] It's so beautifully arranged on the plate -- you know someone's fingers have been all over it. ~~ Julia Child

Whatever you may look like, marry a man your own age -- as your beauty fades, so will his eyesight. ~~ Phyllis Diller

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness. ~~ Leo Tolstoy

To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy and a whole heart and a free mind. ~~ Pearl S. Buck

The great tragedy of Science -- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. ~~ Thomas Huxley

It isn't a matter of black is beautiful as much as it is white is not all that's beautiful. ~~ Bill Cosby

What is the use of such terrible diligence as many tire themselves out with, if they always postpone their exchange of smiles with Beauty and Joy to cling to irksome duties and relations? ~~ Helen Keller

I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them. ~~ Boris Pasternak

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. ~~ Susan Sontag

Our love of beauty does not lead to extravagance, and our love of wisdom does not make us soft. ~~ Pericles

Truth is beautiful. Without doubt; and so are lies. ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then rest afterward. ~~ Spanish proverb

A beautiful theory killed by a nasty, ugly little fact. ~~ T. H. Huxley

All beauteous things for which we live

By laws of space and time decay.

But Oh, the very reason why

I clasp them, is because they die. ~~ William Cory

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days? ~~ George Bernard Shaw

I don't think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains … My advice is: Go outside, to the fields, enjoy nature and the sunshine, go out and try to recapture happiness in yourself and in God. ~~ Anne Frank

I wanted to be a nun. I saw nuns as superstars … When I was growing up I went to a Catholic school, and the nuns, to me, were these superhuman, beautiful, fantastic people. ~~ Madonna

[In praise of cats:] You see the beauty of the world
Through the eyes of unalloyed content,
And in my study chair upcurled,
Move me to pensive wonderment.
I wish I knew your trick of thought,
The perfect balance of your ways;
They seem an inspiration, caught
From other laws in older days. ~~ Unattributed

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty is the child of love. ~~ Havelock Ellis

A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful. ~~ Karl Kraus

Though people with disabilities have become more vocal in recent years, we still constitute a very small minority. Yet the Beautiful People -- the slender, fair and perfect ones -- form a minority that may be even smaller. ~~ Debra Kent

To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in, was a mark of the Greek spirit which distinguished it from all that had gone before. It is a vital distinction. ~~ Edith Hamilton

I gave my beauty and my youth to men. I am going to give my wisdom and experience to animals. ~~ Brigitte Bardot

People are like birds: on the wing, all beautiful; up close, all beady little eyes. ~~ Mignon McLaughlin

Sexiness wears thin after a while and beauty fades, but to be married to a man who makes you laugh every day, ah, now that's a real treat. ~~ Joanne Woodward

Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. ~~ W. Somerset Maugham

The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is. ~~ Nadine Gordimer

All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable. ~~ Fran Lebowitz

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance … or change. ~~ Stephen King ["The Stand"]

I saw the most beautiful cat today ... sitting by the side of the road, its two front feet neatly and graciously together. Then it gravely swished around its tail to completely encircle itself. It was so fit and beautifully neat, that gesture … ~~ Anne Morrow Lingbergh

Do you love me because I'm beautiful, or am I beautiful because you love me? ~~ Oscar Hammerstein, II

A good woman inspires a man; a brilliant woman interests him; a beautiful woman fascinates him; and a sympathetic woman gets him. ~~ Helen Rowland

O, thou art fairer than the evening's air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars. ~~ Christopher Marlowe [Doctor Faustus (1604)]

Print it as it stands -- beautifully. ~~ Henry James [Terminations (1897)]

All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim. ~~ Christopher Morley

A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering. ~~ William S. Burroughs

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her as a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even better. ~~ Virginia Woolf

A civilized society is one that exhibits the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art and peace. ~~ Alfred North Whitehead

… that our nature and purpose is … to love and to make love, to take joy from the beauty of the world, to live with an awareness that the future is not as real a place for any one of us as are the present and the past. ~~ Dean Koontz [Fear Nothing]

My experience in government is that when things are non-controversial, beautifully coordinated, and all the rest, it must be that there is not much going on. ~~ John Fitzgerald Kennedy

I never allow myself to be bored, because boredom is aging. If you live in the past, you grow old, and dull, and dusty. It's very nice, of course, to be young and beautiful; but there are other qualities, thank God. ~~ Marie Tempest

I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own. ~~ Andy Warhol (see Said Who?)

There must be religion for religion's sake, morality for morality's sake, as there is art for art's sake… the beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, nor to what is good, nor to what is holy; it leads only to itself. ~~ Victor Cousin

[On why he still painted although he had arthritis of his hands:] The pain passes, but the beauty remains. ~~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The ideal woman which is in every man's mind is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist, her hand. The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement. Remember, all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree. ~~ William Faulkner

We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams. ~~ Jimmy Carter

What makes people the world over stand in line for Van Gogh is not that they will see beautiful pictures [but] that in an indefinable way they will come away feeling better human beings. And that is exactly what Van Gogh hoped for. ~~ John Russell

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects -- making it possible … to see a new beauty in what is vanishing. ~~ Susan Sontag

Photographs record the gamut of feelings written on the human face -- the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited; and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man. ~~ Edward Steichen

Plunge it in the depths: it comes up more beautiful. ~~ Horace

To understand the character of a cat, to respect her independence, to recognize and deplore her pitiless instincts, to be charmed by her gentler moods, to admire her beauty, to appreciate her intelligence, and to love her steadfastly without being loved in return -- these things are not often possible to the Anglo-Saxon nature. ~~ Agnes Repplier

Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical. ~~ Sophia Loren

A poet dares to be just so clear and no clearer; he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. ~~ E. B. White

The beautiful cat endures and endures. ~~ Grave Inscription (Thebes)

Time is a great healer, but a poor beautician. ~~ Lucille S. Harper

Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you -- gently, with love, and hand your life back to you. ~~ Tennessee Williams

Women sit or move to and fro, some old, some young. The young are beautiful -- but the old are more beautiful than the young. ~~ Walt Whitman ["Beautiful Women" (1871)]

I love all beauteous things,
I seek and adore them;
God hath no better praise,
And man in his hasty days
Is honored for them. ~~ Robert Bridges

It's essential that a part of you not grow up. Childhood wonder gives us our spark and beauty. ~~ Robin Quivers

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry. ~~ Gaston Bachelard

To the eyes of a miser a guinea is far more beautiful than the sun, and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. As a man is, so he sees. ~~ Blake

Sonya: I'm not beautiful

Elena Andreevna: You have lovely hair.

Sonya: No! No! When a woman isn't beautiful, people tell her. "You have lovely eyes, you have lovely hair." ~~ Anton Chekhov ["Uncle Vanya" (1897)]

For I am possessed of a cat, surpassing in beauty, for whom I take occasion to bless Almighty God. ~~ Christopher Smart

The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw. ~~ Havelock Ellis ["Impressions and Comments" (1914)]

If the central cores of light, beauty, love, reason, power, and order could -- as perhaps they can -- be presented in form to the human faculties, man would discern in them mere blackness, monstrosity, fatuity, weakness, terror, and chaos. The hideousness of some of the images worshiped by those among the ancients who best understood the gods was not without its meaning. ~~ Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all. ~~ Cecil Frances Alexander

[On the death of her mother, Judy Garland:] It wasn't suicide. It wasn't sleeping pills, it wasn't cirrhosis. I think she was just tired, like a flower that blooms and gives joy and beauty to the world and then wilts away. ~~ Liza Minelli

America today stands poised on a pinnacle of wealth and power, yet we live in a land of vanishing beauty, of increasing ugliness, of shrinking open space, and of an overall environment that is diminished daily by pollution and noise and blight. ~~ Stewart L. Udall

I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself. ~~ Marlene Dietrich

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful. ~~ Alice Walker

[The lover says:] "How beautiful you are, now that you love me." ~~ Marlene Dietrich

There is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, -- light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful. ~~ John Constable

The ever-present phenomenon ceases to exist for our senses. It was a city dweller, or a prisoner, or a blind man suddenly given his sight, who first noted natural beauty. ~~ Remy de Gourmont

When I was very young, I was disgracefully intolerant but when I passed the thirty mark I prided myself on having learned the beautiful lesson that all things were good, and equally good. That, however, was really laziness. Now, thank goodness, I've sorted out what matters and what doesn't. And I'm beginning to be intolerant again. ~~ G. B. Stern

Let the schools teach the nobility of labor and the beauty of human service: but the superstitions of ages past? Never! ~~ Peter Cooper

It is odd that, notwithstanding the extreme beauty of cats, their elegance of motion, the variety and intensity of their color, they should be so little painted by considerable artists. ~~ Philip Gilbert Hamerton

I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty. ~~ John Fitzgerald Kennedy

The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. ~~ Virginia Woolf

Once in a lifetime a really beautiful song comes along … Until it does, I'd like to do this one. ~~ Cliff Richard

The beautiful remains so in ugly surroundings. ~~ Chazal

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward. ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Cats are a tonic, they are a laugh, they are a cuddle, they are at least pretty just about all of the time and beautiful some of the time. ~~ Roger Caras

Beauty comes in all sizes -- not just size 5. ~~ Roseanne

Always remember that true beauty comes from within -- from within bottles, jars, compacts, and tubes. ~~ Peter's Almanac

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. ~~ Albert Einstein

With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. ~~ Desiderata

How beautiful the leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days. ~~ John Burroughs

Man makes holy what he believes, as he makes beautiful what he loves. ~~ Ernest Renan

His markings, month by month, became more beautiful, lines of autumn bracken colors with shapes which reminded me of currents on a quiet sea. True that at times his head, because of his youth, looked scraggy, even his body sometimes looked scraggy, but suddenly for some reason like the change of light, or of mood, he looked his potential. This was going to be a champion cat. ~~ Derek Tangye

Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty -- as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it. ~~ Florence King

The world is as good as you are. You've got to learn to like yourself first. I'm a little screwed up, but I'm beautiful. ~~ Steve McQueen