quotations about beauty
Were part of the human race to be arrayed in that splendor of beauty which beams from the statues of gods, universal consent would acknowledge the rest of mankind naturally formed to be their slaves.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
Beauty is certainly a soft, smooth, slippery thing, and therefore of a nature which easily slips in and permeates our souls.
PLATO
Lysis
If you dear little girls would only learn what real beauty is, and not pinch and starve and bleach yourselves out so, you'd save an immense deal of time and money and pain. A happy soul in a healthy body makes the best sort of beauty for man or woman.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Eight Cousins
Old as I am, for ladies' love unfit,
The power of beauty I remember yet.
JOHN DRYDEN
Cymon and Iphigenia
Beauty and Genius must be kept afar if one would avoid becoming their slave.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
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
T
he 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
Birds of fine plumage are not the best songsters; neither are comely women the most virtuous.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.
ROGER SCRUTON
Beauty
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
Where Beauty was, nothing ever ran quite straight, which, no doubt, was why so many people looked on it as immoral.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
The Forsyte Saga
The French girls would tell you, to believe that you were pretty would make you so.
ELIZABETH GASKELL
Wives and Daughters
When we are young, the beauty of women has a supreme attraction beyond all other possessions or qualities; and there are self-evident reasons why it should be so. It is only as we grow older that we know the value of brains, and, while still admiring beauty--as indeed who does not?--admire it as one passing by on the other side--as a grace to look at, but not to hold, unless accompanied by something more lasting.
ELIZA LYNN LINTON
The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays
There isn't any way that one can get rid of the guilt of having a nice body by saying that one can serve society with it, because that would end up with oneself as what? There simply doesn't seem to be any moral place for flesh.
MARGARET DRABBLE
A Summer Bird-Cage
The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
HAVELOCK ELLIS
Impressions and Comments
Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Philosophy of Composition", The Works of Edgar Allan Poe
The pageant of a former hour,
Is Beauty in the Grave.
WILLIAM B. TAPPAN
"Beauty in the Grave"
Beauty is only two finger’s-breadth from goodness.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
"Montaigne," The Common Reader
Unexpected intrusions of beauty. That is what life is.
SAUL BELLOW
Herzog
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.
ROGER SCRUTON
Beauty