Quotes about beauty
page 10

“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)

Country

“Puritans cannot destroy a beautiful thing, yet, by means of their extraordinary prurience, they can almost taint beauty for a moment. It is chiefly, I regret to say, through journalism that such people find expression. I regret it because there is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

The Critic as Artist (1891), Part I

People, Communication

“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to be assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1900s, "The Study of Mathematics" (November 1907)

Painting, Nature, Music, Truth

“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

Personality, Stupidity

“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)

Thinking, Soul

“Have you ever seen the coyote in the desert? Watching, tuned in, completely aware. Christ on the cross, the coyote in the desert — it’s the same thing, man. The coyote is beautiful. He moves through the desert delicately, aware of everything, looking around. He hears every sound, smells every smell, sees everything that moves. He’s in a state of total paranoia, and total paranoia is total awareness.”

Charles Manson (1934–2017) American criminal and musician

Rolling Stone interview (June 1970)

Christ

“Though human ingenuity may make various inventions which, by the help of various machines answering the same end, it will never devise any inventions more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than Nature does; because in her inventions nothing is wanting, and nothing is superfluous, and she needs no counterpoise when she makes limbs proper for motion in the bodies of animals. But she puts into them the soul of the body, which forms them that is the soul of the mother which first constructs in the womb the form of the man and in due time awakens the soul that is to inhabit it.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIV Anatomy, Zoology and Physiology

Soul, Time, Help, Nature

“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

People

“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.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Source: Miller, H. (1969). “Creation,” The Henry Miller Reader. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation. p.33.

Art, Thinking, Reality, World

“Beauty is a whore.”

Walker Percy book The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer (1961)

Whore

“If we take a survey of ages and of countries, we shall find the women, almost - without exception - at all times and in all places, adored and oppressed. Man, who has never neglected an opportunity of exerting his power, in paying homage to their beauty, has always availed himself of their weakness He has been at once their tyrant and their slave.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

Disputed, Women, Adored and Oppressed (1775)

Time, Country, Age, Women

“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

Business, Personality, Nature, World

“I wanted them to see the gloriousness of the California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah desert. So every chance we got, we stopped the bus and just absorbed that dead heat beauty and that terrain.”

John Lydon (1956) English singer, songwriter, and musician

Interview with Los Angeles Times, 2015

Chance, Dead

“Our home, pale blue dot in the vastness of universe's untouched beauty, a tiny spherical world, afloat in a immensity of space and time. Here for a moment, and then we're leaving for the eternity. In the school of mortality we learn to acrobat over the abyss.”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

From the book "Universal consciousness"

School, Home, Time, Learning

“Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession…”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Gay Science

The Gay Science (1882), Sec. 14

Love, Distant, Making love

“The sin is about our notion of what is right and what is wrong, and how we bend the truth based on we want and I think. In Catholicism, we tend to do this a lot, and I think it’s very interesting and very beautiful yet very disturbing at the same time. A miracle is about believing and having faith. I think that it these times, and in Mexico, we have been to the point where we have been loosing [sic] faith. It’s really important for me to remind myself that I must continue on having faith, in my people, in my nation, in the woman, and in all the beautiful things that my country represents.”

Lila Downs (1968) Mexican American singer-songwriter

On the notion of faith and how it might apply to Mexico and its peoples in “Q&A: Lila Downs, A Sin and A Miracle” https://remezcla.com/music/lila-downs-sin-miracle-pecados-milagros-interview/ in Remezcla (c. 2011) Heritage and indigenous peoples

Faith, Time, Country, People

“Coral reefs are farmers. They provide food, income and food security for hundreds of millions of people around the world. Coral reefs are security guards. The structures that they build protect our shorelines from storm surge and waves, and the biological systems that they house filter the water and make it safer for us to work and play. Coral reefs are chemists. The molecules that we're discovering on coral reefs are increasingly important in the search for new antibiotics and new cancer drugs. And coral reefs are artists. The structures that they build are some of the most beautiful things on planet Earth. And this beauty is the foundation of the tourism industry in many countries with few or little other natural resources.”

Kristen Marhaver American marine biologist

Source: How we're growing baby corals to rebuild reefs https://www.ted.com/talks/kristen_marhaver_how_we_re_growing_baby_corals_to_rebuild_reefs (October 2015)

Housing, Search, Food, Country

“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).

Life

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

W.B. Yeats book Michael Robartes and the Dancer

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

Change

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

Thomas Mann book Tonio Kröger

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

“Mathematicians have various ways of judging the merits of new theorems and constructions. One very important criterion is esthetic — some developments just “feel” right, fitting, and beautiful. Just as in other venues where beauty or esthetics are discussed, taste plays an important role in this, but I think I am not alone in being especially excited when apparently different fields suddenly meet in a new concept, a new understanding. It is often of the sparks of such encounters that our esthetic enjoyment of mathematics is born.
Another important criterion for according merit to some particular piece of mathematics is the extent to which it can be useful in applications; this is the criterion almost exclusively used by nonmathematicians.”

Ingrid Daubechies (1954) Belgian physicist and mathematician

(1995) Wavelets and Other Phase Space Localization Methods. In: Chatterji, S.D. (ed.). Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians. Birkhäuser, Basel. [10.1007/978-3-0348-9078-6_8]

Thinking, Mathematics, Understanding, Way

“One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.”

Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist

Friendship, Understanding, Friendship, Relationship

“Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

Imagination, Justice, Happiness, World

“Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world any more. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Tree, World

“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

Way, Life, Beauty, Business

“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.

Learning

“It is our duty to life, for the fact that we appeared in this beautiful world, to uphold the sanctity of every person's life.”

Zafar Mirzo (1972)

Life, Personality, Appearance, World

“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.

“You can see the beauty in things only after learning the meaning of the word 'beautiful'.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Learning

“The full experience of something beautiful or terrifying cannot be expressed in words.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“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

God, Joy

“If my heart could speak, it'd say that it is not necessary that the heart of a person who is pleasing to the eyes should also be beautiful, love the one who loves you, hold the hand that never leaves you. Love the one who wipes the tears and doesn't give.”

Shabdon Ka Jahan

Personality, Heart, Love, Tear

“Be your own artist, and always be confident in what you're doing. “A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. “I believe musicians have a duty, a responsibility to reach out, to share your love or pain with others.” “The true beauty of music is that it connects people.”

Dc Themmie

Confidence, Pain, People, Music

“Because we live in such a mind-dominated culture, most modern art, architecture, music, and literature are devoid of beauty, of inner essence, with very few exceptions.”

Eckhart Tolle book The Power of Now

Source: The Power of Now (1997)

Art, Music, Literature

“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

“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)

Peace, Justice, Hope, Education

“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.

Happiness

“All the misery on the planet arises due to a personalized sense of me or us. That covers up the essence of who you are. When you are unaware of that inner essence, in the end, you always create misery. It's as simple as that. When you don't know who you are, you create a mind-made self as a substitute for your beautiful, divine being and cling to that fearful and needy self. Protecting and enhancing that false sense of self then becomes your primary motivating force.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: Stillness Speaks (2003), Ch 5

Personality, Falseness, Motivation, Fear

“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

Problem, Thinking, Life, Feeling

“I don’t think of all the misery, but the beauty that still remains.”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

Thinking

“Just because you are having a nasty day, does not mean you live a grim life!

What keeps us going and determined is optimism – the doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.”

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

Optimism, Life

“Who likes wrinkles?
No one, however remember the laughter, happiness and joy
that created those beautiful marks.
Tell me…would you rather have smooth skin like a cold stone or to see ripples in it from years of happily sitting in a river of running water with the hot sun beating down upon it?”

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

Happiness, Water, Sun, Joy

“As I grow older,
I notice certain things that seemed non-existent before…
How did I miss these delicious and beautiful things in Life?
Every day is a journey and
we can never know where we will end up.”

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

Life

“I don't have to tell you

what your beautiful eyes

can already see.”

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

“If you say My Eyes are Beautiful….
…it is because They are Looking at You!”

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

“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)

Joy, Cry

“Beauty? What's that?”

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

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

“To find beauty in everyone you must see beauty in everyone, then announce that you see it, for in announcing it, you place it there in their reality. Make it your life's mission today to bring to the attention of another just how extraordinary they are. Say it. Say it. SAY it. Their heart is waiting to know that their own best thought about themselves can be believed.”

Neale Donald Walsch (1943) American writer

Waiting, Heart, Reality, Life

“Nature is the greatest healer, by reconnecting back to nature, we begin changing the world all around us. We begin living from the inside out, breathing in the beautiful 'Chi,' becoming peaceful, developing serenity within ourselves, and that will make this planet a much more harmonious place to live in.”

Ralph Smart

World, Change, Peace, Nature

“It's your gift, to see the beauty and the horror in ordinary things. It doesn't make you crazy, just different.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

“Or maybe it's just that beautiful things are so easily broken by the world.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Source: City of Fallen Angels

World

“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

“If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.”

William Gaddis book The Recognitions

Source: The Recognitions

“You were. You are
The brightest thing in the shop window
And the most beautiful seldom I ever saw”

Mary Jo Bang (1946) Poet

“What a beautiful name. I love to watch how it falls off the lips of those who love Him. I shudder as it falls off the lips of those who don't. Jesus.”

Beth Moore (1957) American evangelist

Love

“As they grew sloppier and less alert, the twins argued too loudly about whether Tiger Lily was ugly or beautiful, and finally agreed that she was "ugly beautiful".
Tiger Lily pretended she hadn't heard, but her heart slowed to absorb the blow.”

Jodi Lynn Anderson American children's writer

Source: Tiger Lily

Heart

“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

Feeling

“If you permit your thoughts to dwell on evil you yourself will become ugly. Look only for the good in everything so you absorb the quality of beauty.”

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) Yogi, a guru of Kriya Yoga and founder of Self-Realization Fellowship

Evil

“How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by
the often perverse wisdom of man!”

Umberto Eco book The Name of the Rose

Source: The Name of the Rose

Wisdom, Nature

“We're all damaged somehow."-A Great and Terrible Beauty”

Libba Bray (1964) American teen writer

“Pam: "Claude, the mouthwateringly beautiful asshole?”

Charlaine Harris Dead in the Family

Source: Dead in the Family

“To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.”

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

Source: Nature and Selected Essays

“It was a beautiful bright autumn day, with air like cider and a sky so blue you could drown in it.”

Diana Gabaldon book Outlander

Source: Outlander

Beauty, Autumn

“This story is for all the slightly broken people out there. I am one of you. You are not alone. You are all beautiful to me.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Slow Regard of Silent Things

Source: The Slow Regard of Silent Things

People

“She looked so irresistibly beautiful as she said those brave words that no man alive could have steel his heart against her.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

Heart

“A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty.”

Amelia Atwater-Rhodes (1984) Novelist

Painting

“There’s an undeniable pleasure in stepping into an open-top sports car driven by a beautiful woman. It feels like you’re climbing into a metaphor.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

Source: The Gun Seller (1996)

Pleasure, Cars, Feeling, Sport

“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

Evil, Heart

“Most beautiful, good things were done by women people scorn.”

Gillian Flynn book Gone Girl

Source: Gone Girl

Women, People

“There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset and it’s up to you to choose to be there for it,’ said my mother. 'Put yourself in the way of beauty.”

Cheryl Strayed book Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Good Morning, Way

“Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

Death

“Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Love, Truth, Knowledge

“You’re beautiful because when you were born, undiscovered planets lined up to peep over the rim of your cradle and lay gifts of gravity and light at your miniature feet”

Simon Armitage (1963) Poet, playwright, novelist

Light

“It was beautiful in a harsh I'm-going-to-gut-you-like-a-fish kind of way.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

Way, Fish

“But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its being and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.”

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) American sociologist, historian, activist and writer

World, Art, Music, Color

“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.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Gift from the Sea

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

Beauty

“People are like moths. First they are ugly and awkward, until they break out of their shell and become a beautiful butterfly.”

Drew Barrymore (1975) American actress, director and producer

People

“In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Marriage Plot

Source: The Marriage Plot

Life, People, Stupidity

“You stand for nothing. You respect nobody. The music you dance to is devoid of beauty, its lyrics empty of humor or cleverness.”

David Klass book You Don't Know Me

Source: You Don't Know Me

Music, Dance

“Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her children's beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth.”

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love

Source: Time Enough for Love

Children, Intelligence, Birth

“Is this what sadness is all about? Is it what comes over us when beautiful memories shatter in hindsight because the remembered happiness fed not just on actual circumstances but on a promise that was not kept?”

Bernhard Schlink book The Reader

Source: The Reader

Sadness, Memory, Happiness

“Live now. When you are eating, eat. When you are loving, love. when you are talking with someone, talk. When you are looking at a flower, look. Catch the beauty of the moment!”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

Love, Flowers

“When I see a beautiful shell like that I can't help feeling a regret about what's inside it.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

Feeling, Help

“Her vision of the world under the water represented a beautiful stillness, a version of heaven. It was the lost city of Lena, her alternate universe, the life she yearned for but didn't get to have.”

Ann Brashares book Sisterhood Everlasting

Source: Sisterhood Everlasting

Life, World, Universe, Water

“What every girl dreams of when she's dumped is - that the guy will someday feel regrest and come back and tell her all about it. And the beauty of it is you have no regrets whatsoever.”

Emily Giffin (1972) American writer

Dreams, Guy, Feeling, Girl

“Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.”

Pat Conroy The Lords of Discipline

Source: The Lords of Discipline

Happy, Nature, Happiness

“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

Intelligence

“Your face is marked with lines of life, put there by love and laughter, suffering and tears. It's beautiful.”

Lynsay Sands Canadian writer

Love, Life, Tear, Laughter