Beauty quotes

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Source: Cutting for Stone

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

Source: Bluebeard's Egg

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), p. 43

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

Source: Seriously... I'm Kidding

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

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

Source: Scenes from a Writer's Life

Source: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Of Beauty
Essays (1625)

Source: Sister Mine

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.

Source: Critique of Pure Reason

Source: The Beauty Myth

Source: The World As I See It

Source: Time and Chance

June 21, 1852
Journals (1838-1859)

Source: Walden

Source: Vampire Academy

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.

Source: Doctor Zhivago

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

Source: The Bell Jar

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.

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

Source: Love

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

Source: The Bell Jar

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Barrayar (1991)

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.

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

Source: Vampire Academy

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

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

Source: The Ambassadors

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.

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

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."

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

Source: The Great Gatsby

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.

Beauty
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)

Source: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

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.

Source: The Book of Tea

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

Source: North of Beautiful

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?

Source: Beastly

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

Source: Seriously... I'm Kidding

Source: The Complete Poems