Beauty quotes
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John Muir photo

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”

The Cruise of the Corwin http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/cruise_of_the_corwin/default.aspx (1917), chapter 3: Siberian Adventures <!-- Terry Gifford, LLO, page 738 -->
(Echoing William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, iii, 3: "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.")
1910s
Variant: One touch of nature makes all the world kin.
Source: Our National Parks

Drew Barrymore photo
Ernest Hemingway photo

“The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.”

Variant: The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
Source: For Whom the Bell Tolls

Jonathan Safran Foer photo
Leo Tolstoy photo

“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”

Variant: What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
Source: The Kreutzer Sonata

Remy de Gourmont photo
Ellen DeGeneres photo

“True beauty is about who you are as a human being, your principles, your moral compass.”

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

Source: Seriously... I'm Kidding

George Gordon Byron photo
James Russell Lowell photo

“Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Literary Essays, vol. II (1870–1890), Rousseau and the Sentimentalists

Winston S. Churchill photo

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Attribution debunked by Langworth.
Misattributed
Source: Published by Richard Langworth online: https://richardlangworth.com/quotes

Ruskin Bond photo

“When all the wars are over, a butterfly will still be beautiful.”

Ruskin Bond (1934) British Indian writer

Source: Scenes from a Writer's Life

Mindy Kaling photo

“Sometimes you just have to put on lip gloss and pretend to be psyched.”

Source: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

E.E. Cummings photo
Elizabeth Gilbert photo
Francis Bacon photo
Nalo Hopkinson photo

“Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time.”

Nalo Hopkinson (1960) Jamaican Canadian writer

Source: Sister Mine

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Art
Variant: Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
Source: Emerson's Essays
Context: Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation from the work of art of human character, — a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attributes.

Immanuel Kant photo
Naomi Wolf photo
Helen Keller photo
Henry Van Dyke photo
Albert Einstein photo

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: The World As I See It

Ansel Adams photo
Albert Einstein photo
Maya Angelou photo
Henry David Thoreau photo

“The perception of beauty is a moral test.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

June 21, 1852
Journals (1838-1859)

Alice Walker photo
Jim Henson photo
Dorothy Parker photo

“Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist
Henry David Thoreau photo
Albert Einstein photo
Richelle Mead photo
Carl Sagan photo

“The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.”

44 min 50 sec
Source: Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Blues For a Red Planet [Episode 5]
Context: The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. Information distilled over 4 billion years of biological evolution. Incidentally, all the organisms on the Earth are made essentially of that stuff. An eyedropper full of that liquid could be used to make a caterpillar or a petunia if only we knew how to put the components together.

Borís Pasternak photo
Karl Kraus photo

“A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.”

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) Czech playwright and publicist

Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)

Sylvia Plath photo
Albert Einstein photo
John Keats photo

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness”

Bk. I, l. 1
Endymion (1818)
Context: A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Thich Nhat Hanh photo
Leo Buscaglia photo

“To love others you must first love yourself.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

Source: Love

George Meredith photo

“A witty woman is a treasure; a witty beauty is a power.”

Ch. 1 http://books.google.com/books?id=pDlxjZ-z-woC&q=%22A+witty+woman+is+a+treasure+a+witty+beauty+is+a+power%22&pg=PA2#v=onepage.
Source: Diana of the Crossways http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4470/4470.txt (1885)

Frank Lloyd Wright photo

“The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.”

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American architect (1867-1959)

Quoted in A Living Architecture : Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin Architects (2000) by John Rattenbury
Context: Human beings can be beautiful. If they are not beautiful it is entirely their own fault. It is what they do to themselves that makes them ugly. The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.

Neil deGrasse Tyson photo

“Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

At an interview with Stephen Colbert at Montclair Kimberley Academy on January 29th, 2010.
2010s

Richelle Mead photo
Marilyn Monroe photo
Marcus Aurelius photo

“Very little is needed to make a happy life.”

ἐν ὀλιγίστοις κεῖται τὸ εὐδαιμόνως βιῶσαι
VII, 67
Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VII

Tom Robbins photo

“Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.”

Variant: Live the beauty or your own reality.
Source: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

David Hume photo

“Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them”

David Hume (1711–1776) Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian
Gertrude Stein photo

“This is the place of places and and it is here.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays
David Hume photo

“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”

Part I, Essay 23: Of The Standard of Taste
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741-2; 1748)
Source: Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays
Context: Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others.

Nathaniel Hawthorne photo

“I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

1842
Source: Notebooks, The American Notebooks (1835 - 1853)

Jane Austen photo

“To sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.”

Mansfield Park (1814)
Works, Mansfiled Park
Context: "I shall soon be rested," said Fanny; "to sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure, is the most perfect refreshment."

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo

“Familiar acts are beautiful through love.”

The Earth, Act IV, l. 403
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

Wendell Berry photo
Anne Brontë photo

“But he, that dares not grasp the thorn
Should never crave the rose.”

Anne Brontë (1820–1849) British novelist and poet

The Narrow Way (1848)
Context: On all her breezes borne
Earth yields no scents like those;
But he, that dares not grasp the thorn
Should never crave the rose.

Maya Angelou photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Beauty
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)

Emily Dickinson photo
Henry Miller photo

“The world is not to be put in order. The world is order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Source: Miller, H. (1969). “Creation,” The Henry Miller Reader. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation. p.33.
Context: Through art then, one finally establishes contact with reality: that is the great discovery. Here all is play and invention; there is no solid foothold from which to launch the projectiles which will pierce the miasma of folly, ignorance and greed. The world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order, to know what is the world order in contradistinction to the wishful-thinking orders which we seek to impose on one another. The power which we long to possess, in order to establish the good, the true and the beautiful, would prove to be, if we could have it, but the means of destroying one another. It is fortunate that we are powerless.

George Gordon Byron photo

“I love not man the less, but nature more”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Kakuzo Okakura photo
Robert J. Sawyer photo

“Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.”

Source: Calculating God (2000), Chapter 14 (p. 137)

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo

“O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

St. V
Source: Ode to the West Wind (1819)
Context: Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Andy Warhol photo
Marilyn Monroe photo

“To all the girls that think you're fat because you're not a size zero you're the beautiful one it's society who's ugly.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

Attributed to Monroe in self-help books and on social media, this quotation is of unknown origin and date.
Misattributed

Ellen DeGeneres photo
John Keats photo

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Source: The Complete Poems

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo