Quotes about beauty

„She's kind of a walking poem, she's this perfect beauty… but at the same time very deep, very smart.“

—  Johnny Depp American actor, film producer, and musician 1963

„Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.“

—  Confucius Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher -551 - -479 BC

„If you have ever seen the play Peter Pan you will remember how the pirate chief was always making his dying speech because he was afraid that possibly when the time came for him to die he might not have time to get it off his chest. It is much the same with me, and so, although I am not at this moment dying, I shall be doing so one of these days and I want to send you a parting word of goodbye.

Remember, it is the last you will ever hear from me, so think it over.

I have had a most happy life and I want each one of you to have as happy a life too.

I believe that God put us in this jolly world to be happy and enjoy life. Happiness doesn't come from being rich, nor merely from being successful in your career, nor by self-indulgence. One step towards happiness is to make yourself healthy and strong while you are a boy, so that you can be useful and so can enjoy life when you are a man.

Nature study will show you how full of beautiful and wonderful things God has made the world for you to enjoy. Be contented with what you have got and make the best of it. Look on the bright side of things instead of the gloomy one.

But the real way to get happiness is by giving out happiness to other people. Try and leave this world a little better than you found it and when your turn come to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate you have not wasted your time but have done your best. "Be Prepared" in this way, to live happy and to die happy - stick to your Scout promise always - even after you have ceased to be a boy - and God help you do it.“

—  Robert Baden-Powell lieutenant-general in the British Army, writer, founder and Chief Scout of the Scout Movement 1857 - 1941

„I have no advice for anybody; except to, you know, be awake enough to see where you are at any given time, and how that is beautiful, and has poetry inside. Even places you hate.“

—  Jeff Buckley American singer, guitarist and songwriter 1966 - 1997

„Venus de Milo.
To a child she is ugly.
When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness, even though, by physiologic standards, incomplete, she is beautiful.“

—  Charles Fort American writer 1874 - 1932

Source: The Book of The Damned (1919), Ch. 1, part 4 at resologist.net

„She thought of herself as an ugly duckling, but she walked in beauty in the ghettos of the world, bringing with her the reminder of her beloved St. Francis, "It is in the giving that we receive." And wherever she walked beauty was forever there.“

—  Adlai Stevenson mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN 1900 - 1965

Paying tribute to the late Eleanor Roosevelt in a speech to the Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, New Jersey (27 August 1964); as quoted in Adlai Stevenson (1966) by Lillian Ross, p. 28; reproduced in America's Political Dynasties: From Adams to Clinton https://books.google.com/books?id=fk3DCQAAQBAJ&pg=PA203&lpg=PA203&dq=%22she+thought+of+herself+as+an+ugly+duckling%22&source=bl&ots=zS_p_jcEUk&sig=VKkYj1KNceIA3Yf2oqV3h6-f8Go&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjP69yckJLTAhWDYyYKHaooC68Q6AEIITAB#v=onepage&q=%22she%20thought%20of%20herself%20as%20an%20ugly%20duckling%22&f=false (2015) by Stephen Hess, p. 203

„Beauty can be mask for ugliness.“

—  Michael Harrington, book The Other America

Source: The Other America (1962), Ch. 2

„"Forgive my body!" she said. She put her arms out to me, the tears flowing down her cheeks. "Think of my soul!" she said. "My soul is so beautiful, it can bring you so much! It is not ugly like my flesh!"“

—  John Fante, book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

„There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.“

—  Thomas Wolfe American writer 1900 - 1938

„When You've lost it all…. that's when you realize that Life is Beautiful.“

—  Nikki Sixx American musician 1958

Variant: When You've lost it all.... thats when you realize that Life is Beautiful.
Source: The Heroin Diaries: A Year In The Life Of A Shattered Rock Star

„Why do you sow where the field is eager to destroy the fruit? Where there are medicines of sterility? Where there is murder before birth? You do not even let a harlot remain a harlot, but you make her a murderess as well. Do you see that from drunkenness comes fornication, from fornication adultery, from adultery murder? Indeed, it is something worse than murder and I do not know what to call it; for she does not kill what is formed but prevents its formation. What then? Do you contemn the gift of God, and fight with His laws? What is a curse, do you seek as though it were a blessing? Do you make the anteroom of birth the anteroom of slaughter? Do you teach the woman who is given to you for the procreation of offspring to perpetrate killing? That she may always be beautiful and lovable to her lovers, and that she may rake in more money, she does not refuse to do this, heaping fire on your head; and even if the crime is hers, you are the cause. Hence also arise idolatries. To look pretty many of these women use incantations, libations, philtres, potions, and innumerable other things. Yet after such turpitude, after murder, after idolatry, the matter still seems indifferent to many men–even to many men having wives. In this indifference of the married men there is greater evil filth; for then poisons are prepared, not against the womb of a prostitute, but against your injured wife. Against her are these innumerable tricks, invocations of demons, incantations of the dead, daily wars, ceaseless battles, and unremitting contentions.“

—  John Chrysostom important Early Church Father 349 - 407

St. John Chrysostom, Homily 24 on the Epistle to the Romans [PG 60:626-27] https://www.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/2017/10/contraception-early-church-teaching-william-klimon.html

„For a chicken the most beautiful is chicken.“

—  Jacek Tylicki American artist 1951

Commentary on the 1987 project entitled "Chicken & Art", cited in: Leszek Brogowski. "Jacek Tylicki and the new ethos of Art," in Projekt Visual Art Magazine, nr. 202-203, 1995

„O God! If I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell
and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise.
But if I worship You for Your Own sake,
grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.“

—  Rabia Basri Muslim saint and Sufi mystic

as quoted in Khushwant Singh, The Freethinker's Prayer Book (2013), p. 35

„There is no man on earth who can give a final judgment on what the most beautiful shape may be. Only God knows.“

—  Albrecht Dürer German painter, printmaker, mathematician, and theorist 1471 - 1528

As quoted in Mathematics, Education and Philosophy: An International Perspective (1994) by Paul Ernest
This has also been quoted or misquoted as "There lives no man upon the earth who can give a final judgement upon what the most beautiful shape of man might be; God only knows that".

„In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.“

—  Thorstein Veblen, book The Theory of the Leisure Class

Source: The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), p. 23

„It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.
I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.“

—  Frank O'Hara, book Meditations in an Emergency (book)

Source: Meditations in an Emergency

„Paul's last words to Linda: "You're up on your beautiful Appaloosa stallion. It's a fine spring day. We're riding through the woods. The bluebells are all out, and the sky is clear-blue".“

—  Paul McCartney English singer-songwriter and composer 1942

„All writers, not ours alone but foreigners also, who have sought to represent Absolute Beauty, were unequal to the task, for it is an infinitely difficult one. The beautiful is the ideal; but ideals, with us as in civilized Europe, have long been wavering. There is in the world only one figure of absolute beauty: Christ. That infinitely lovely figure is, as a matter of course, an infinite marvel.“

—  Fyodor Dostoyevsky Russian author 1821 - 1881

Fyodor Dostoevsky in a letter to his Niece Sofia Alexandrovna, Geneva, January 1, 1868. Ethel Golburn Mayne (1879), Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoyevsky to His Family and Friends http://www.archive.org/stream/lettersoffyodorm00dostiala/lettersoffyodorm00dostiala_djvu.txt, Dostoevsky's Letters XXXIX, p. 136.

„So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?“

—  Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question

The Unanswered Question (1976)
Context: Einstein said that "the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious." So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?