Quotes about beauty
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Diego Rivera photo

“Your engineers are your great artists and these highways are the most beautiful things I have seen in your beautiful country…Out of them and the machine will issue the style of tomorrow.”

Diego Rivera (1886–1957) Mexican painter, muralist, Communist

On being enchanted by engineers in “Diego Rivera: A Man and His Murals” http://teachersinstitute.yale.edu/curriculum/units/1999/2/99.02.06.x.html (Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute)

Oscar Wilde photo
Bertrand Russell photo
Hedy Lamarr photo

“When you see a very beautiful face, it’s stunning, and you yourself become stupefied. So you project your own stupidity onto the person you’re looking at.”

Hedy Lamarr (1914–2000) Austrian-American actress and co-inventor of an early technique for spread spectrum communications and freq…

Lisa Heiserman Perkins NYTimes http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/science/01angier.html?_r=0
About

Paul Valéry photo

“It is therefore reasonable to think that the creations of man are made either with a view to his body, and that is the principle we call utility, or with a view to his soul, and that is what he seeks under the name of beauty.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

But, further, since he who constructs or creates has to deal with the rest of the world and with the movement of nature, which both tend perpetually to dissolve, corrupt or upset what he makes, he must recognize and seek to communicate to his works a third principle, that expresses the resistance he wishes them to offer to their destiny, which is to perish. So he seeks solidity or lastingness.
Socrates, pp. 128–9
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

Charles Manson photo
Leonardo Da Vinci photo
Vincent Van Gogh photo

“Find things beautiful as much as you can, most people find too little beautiful.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

1870s

Henry Miller photo
Walker Percy photo

“Beauty is a whore.”

The Moviegoer (1961)

Thomas Paine photo
George Washington photo

“Tis true, I profess myself a Votary to Love — I acknowledge that a Lady is in the Case — and further I confess, that this Lady is known to you. — Yes Madam, as well as she is to one, who is too sensible of her Charms to deny the Power, whose Influence he feels and must ever Submit to. I feel the force of her amiable beauties in the recollection of a thousand tender passages that I coud wish to obliterate, till I am bid to revive them. — but experience alas! sadly reminds me how Impossible this is. — and evinces an Opinion which I have long entertaind, that there is a Destiny, which has the Sovereign controul of our Actions — not to be resisted by the strongest efforts of Human Nature.
You have drawn me my dear Madam, or rather have I drawn myself, into an honest confession of a Simple Fact — misconstrue not my meaning — ’tis obvious — doubt it not, nor expose it, — the World has no business to know the object of my Love, declard in this manner to — you when I want to conceal it — One thing, above all things in this World I wish to know, and only one person of your Acquaintance can solve me that, or guess my meaning.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

but adieu to this, till happier times, if I ever shall see them.

Letter to https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-06-02-0013#GEWN-02-06-02-0013-fn-0002 Mrs. George William Fairfax (Sally Cary Fairfax) (12 September 1758)
1750s

John Lydon photo
Alexis Karpouzos photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Lila Downs photo
Millie Bobby Brown photo

“The day I shaved my head was the most empowering moment of my whole life. The last strand of hair cut off was the moment my whole face was on show and I couldn't hide behind my hair like I used to. As I looked in the mirror I realised I had one job to do. Inspire ... Shaving your head is so empowering. You don't need hair to be beautiful. You are beautiful with or without. I learnt that too.”

Millie Bobby Brown (2004) British actress

"Millie Bobby Brown admits tension with her Stranger Things co-stars" https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-5546137/Millie-Bobby-Brown-admits-theres-tension-Stranger-Things-stars.html. dailymail.co.uk. (26 March 2018).

W.B. Yeats photo

“All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.”

St. 1
Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), Easter, 1916 http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1477/

Thomas Mann photo

“I admire the proud and cold who go adventuring on the paths of great and demoniac beauty, and scorn "man"”

but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet out of a man of letters, it is this plebeian love of mine for the human, living, and commonplace. All warmth, all goodness, all humor is born of it, and it almost seems to me as if it were that love itself, of which it is written that a man might speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and yet without it be no more than sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.
Source: Tonio Kröger (1903), Ch. 9, as translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan

Ingrid Daubechies photo
Seneca the Younger photo
Blaise Pascal photo
Albert Schweitzer photo

“There Is Nothing More Beautiful Than Someone Who Goes Out Of Their Way To Make Life Beautiful For Others”

Alireza Kohany (1993) Musician, Actor, Entrepreneur

Source: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Business_In_Simple_Language/aiXfDwAAQBAJ

Pope Gregory I photo

“Holy Scripture presents a kind of mirror to the eyes of the mind, so that our inner face may be seen in it. There we learn our own ugliness, there our own beauty.”

Pope Gregory I (540–604) Pope from 590 to 604

Morals in the Book of Job, 553d, as translated in Cultural Performances in Medieval France (2007), p. 129
Original: (la) Scriptura sacra mentis oculis quasi quoddam speculum opponitur, ut interna nostra facies in ipsa videatur. Ibi etenim foeda, ibi pulchra nostra cognoscimus.

Zafar Mirzo photo
Syed Ahmed Khan photo

“India is a beautiful bride and Hindus and Muslims are her two eyes. ... If one of them is lost, this beautiful bride will become ugly.”

Syed Ahmed Khan (1820–1898) Indian educator and politician

Quoted in Shirali, Aresh (10 August 2017). "The Enigma of Aligarh" https://openthemagazine.com/freedom-issue-2017/freedom-issue-2017-dispatches-from-history/the-enigma-of-aligarh/. Open Magazine.
Variant: "India is like a bride which has got two beautiful and lustrous eyes—Hindus and Mussulmans. If they quarrel against each other that beautiful bride will become ugly and if one destroys the other, she will lose one eye." Writings and Speeches of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan https://books.google.com/books?id=ausHAAAAMAAJ, p. 160.

Frithjof Schuon photo

“The beauty of the sacred is a symbol or a foretaste of, and sometimes a means for, the joy that God alone procures.”

Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher

[2012, Echoes of Perennial Wisdom, World Wisdom, 38, 978-1-93659700-0]
God, Beauty

Eckhart Tolle photo
Sappho photo

“To have beauty is to have only that,
but to have goodness
is to be beautiful
too.”

Sappho (-630–-570 BC) ancient Greek lyric poet

http://books.google.com/books?id=btVfAAAAMAAJ&q=%22To+have+beauty+is+to+have+only+that+but+to+have+goodness+is+to+be+beautiful+too%22&pg=PA29#v=onepage
Suzy Q. Groden translations, Beauty

Pope Francis photo

“In education dwells the seed of hope: hope for peace and justice, hope for beauty and goodness; hope for social harmony.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

2020s, 2021
Source: Cited in Pope Francis: Art creates brotherhood and friendship https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2021-12/pope-francis-art-creates-brotherhood-and-friendship.html in the Vatican News. (15 December 2021)

Abdul Hamid photo

“It is our sacred duty to give the new generation a safe, happy, beautiful and prosperous Bangladesh.”

Abdul Hamid (1944) Current President of Bangladesh

Source: Abdul Hamid (2022) cited in: " President urges all to work together on basic issues https://thefinancialexpress.com.bd/national/president-urges-all-to-work-together-on-basic-issues-1642340257" in The Financial Express, 16 January 2022.

Eckhart Tolle photo
Prevale photo

“Don't think that life no longer holds anything beautiful for you: face the problems and enjoy the moments, focusing your attention exclusively on what makes you feel alive.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) Non pensare che la vita non riservi più nulla di bello per te: affronta i problemi e goditi gli attimi, concentrando la tua attenzione esclusivamente su ciò che ti fa sentire vivo.
Source: prevale.net

Dmitry Yazov photo

“I cry only for joy. I can see something beautiful and cry. And I'm not ashamed of it. After all, crying from joy is much better than from weakness.”

Dmitry Yazov (1924–2020) Soviet minister of defence

"Дмитрий Язов рассказал "РГ" о жизни маршала на пенсии" https://rg.ru/2013/12/05/marshal.html (4 December 2013)

Larry Wall photo

“Beauty? What's that?”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199710221937.MAA25131@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

Neale Donald Walsch photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Holly Black photo

“It's the flaw that brings out the beauty.”

Holly Black (1971) American children's fiction writer

Variant: Crippled things are always more beautiful. It's the flaw that brings out beauty.
Source: Valiant

Alice Hoffman photo

“It was the sort of beauty you feel so deeply it becomes contagious and somehow makes you feel beautiful too.”

Alice Hoffman (1952) Novelist, young-adult writer, children's writer

Source: Local Girls

Paramahansa Yogananda photo
Umberto Eco photo
Libba Bray photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Diana Gabaldon photo
Patrick Rothfuss photo
Wilkie Collins photo
Hugh Laurie photo
Gaston Bachelard photo

“A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.”

Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French writer and philosopher

A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (1988)

“But those with an evil heart seem to have a talent for destroying anything beautiful which is about to bloom.”

Cynthia Rylant (1954) American author of children's books and librarian

Source: Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Cheryl Strayed photo
George Bernard Shaw photo
Simon Armitage photo
W.E.B. Du Bois photo
Anne Morrow Lindbergh photo

“One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.”

Variant: One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can only collect a few. One moon shell is more impressive than three. There is only one moon in the sky.
Source: Gift from the Sea (1955), p. 114

Drew Barrymore photo
Jeffrey Eugenides photo
David Klass photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo
Bernhard Schlink photo
Leo Buscaglia photo
F. Scott Fitzgerald photo
Ann Brashares photo
Pat Conroy photo
Edna St. Vincent Millay photo

“Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet

Variant: Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned

Jean Genet photo
Bob Dylan photo
Jodi Picoult photo

“Even the most beautiful things can be toxic.”

Source: The Storyteller

Colum McCann photo
Lois McMaster Bujold photo
Howard Thurman photo

“A beautiful thing is precious no matter the price”

Source: Beastly

Rick Riordan photo
Drew Barrymore photo