Quotes about beauty
page 12

“In God's eyes all children are beautiful but here on earth we have higher standards.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

God, Children

“People Die…
Beauty Fades…
Love Changes…
And You Will Always Be Alone”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Night World, No. 3

Love, People, Change

“Living was a dangerous past-time, and often quite painful—but there was also such joy in living, such beauty, things that one would otherwise never see, never experience, never know. The risk of pain and loss was a part of living.”

Jim Butcher Captain's Fury

Source: Captain's Fury

Pain, Loss, Time, Past

“A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory.”

James Joyce book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Life, Youth, Angels, Way

“Not into older guys, huh?" asked Adrian once we were alone.
"You're imagining things," I said. "Clearly, my stunning beauty has clouded your mind.”

Richelle Mead book Frostbite

Source: Frostbite

Guy, Imagination

“The questioners had that beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death without being in any danger of it.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Farewell to Arms

Source: A Farewell to Arms

Death, Men, Justice, Question

“Watching you walk out of my life does not make me bitter or cynical about love. But rather makes me realize that if I wanted so much to be with the wrong person, how beautiful it will be when the right person comes along.”

Nicholas Sparks book Dear John

Source: Dear John

Love, Life, Personality

“Yes, just like those flowers. There's something strained, but there's beauty in that. Something like that”

Koushun Takami book Battle Royale

Source: Battle Royale

Flowers

“Beauty is not caused. It is.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

“She said she usually cried at least once each day not because she was sad, but because the world was so beautiful & life was so short.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Life, World, Sadness

“It was so risky and so scary, and yet at the same time, so beautiful. Maybe the truth was, it shouldn't be easy to be amazing. Then everything would be. It's the things you fight for and struggle with before earning that have the greatest worth.”

Sarah Dessen book Along for the Ride

Source: Along for the Ride

Truth, Time, Fight

“I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!”

Dorothea Mackellar (1885–1968) Poet

Source: The Poems of Dorothea Mackellar

Love, Mountain, Sea, Country

“Happiness has got to be paid for. You're paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World

Variant: One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr. Watson - paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty.
Source: Brave New World

Truth, Happiness

“The beauty of our system is that it isolates everybody. Each person is sitting alone in front of the tube, you know. It's very hard to have ideas or thoughts under those circumstances. You can't fight the world alone.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

World, Idea, Fight, Personality

“He smelled the garden, the yellow shield of light smote his eyes, and he whispered, "Life is so beautiful."
…
Yes, he thought, if I can die saying, "Life is so beautiful," then nothing else is important.”

Mario Puzo The Godfather

Source: The Godfather

Life, Light

“If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

"The Beauty of Life," a lecture before the Birmingham Society of Arts and School of Design (19 February 1880), later published in Hopes and Fears for Art: Five Lectures Delivered in Birmingham, London, and Nottingham, 1878 - 1881 (1882).

Housing

“until only infinity remained of beauty”

John Ashbery (1927–2017) poet from the United States

Source: Some Trees

“It's [Los Angeles] mostly full of nonsense and delusion and egomania. They think they'll be young and beautiful forever, even though most of them aren't even young and beautiful now.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Angels, Thinking

“Had you but seen it, I promise you, your high-minded principles would have melted like candle wax. Never would you have wished such beauty away.”

Jennifer Donnelly book Revolution

Source: Revolution

“Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

Pg 82
Identity (1998)

Love, People, World

“It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“i shall imagine life
is not worth dying, if
(and when)roses complain
their beauties are in vain

but though mankind persuades
itself that every weed's
a rose, roses(you feel
certain)will only smile”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Source: Complete Poems, 1904-1962

Life, Smile, Feeling, Imagination

“She padded toward Han, barefoot, like a faerie startled out of a forest bower, bewitching mix of clan and flatland beauty.”

Cinda Williams Chima (1952) Novelist

Source: The Crimson Crown

“I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, (1963)
Source: I Have A Dream

Faith, Dreams, Hope, Girl

“We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.”

Ray Bradbury book The Martian Chronicles

Source: The Martian Chronicles

Men

“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

Beauty, War

“Having eyes, but not seeing beauty; having ears, but not hearing music; having minds, but not perceiving truth; having hearts that are never moved and therefore never set on fire. These are the things to fear, said the headmaster.”

Tetsuko Kuroyanagi (1933) Japanese actress

Source: Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window

Truth, Fear, Music, Heart

“If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?”

Lily Tomlin (1939) American actress, comedian, writer, and producer

Contributions of Jane Wagner

Truth

“I also remembered that you were beautiful."
"Memory does play tricks on us."
"No. Your face is the same, but I don't remember what beautiful means anymore.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Game

Source: Ender's Game

Memory

“There is a beautiful transparency to honest disciples who never wear a false face and do not pretend to be anything but who they are.”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

Falseness

“That Jem makes beautiful things and I destroy them. That it really ought to be me dying and not him. I mean, what's the point of living if you can't even enjoy it? Yet Jem enjoys all the life he's got. It's not fair.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Life

“… which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider's, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?”

Louise Erdrich (1954) writer from the United States

Source: The Painted Drum

World

“The most beautiful makeup of a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy.”

Yves Saint Laurent (1936–2008) fashion designer

Variant: The most beautiful make-up of a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy.

For women, Passion

“If we cover and obliterate man’s faults and consider the beauty and dignity of God’s image in him, then we shall be induced to love and embrace him (Heb 12:16; Gal 6:10; Isa 58:7; Matt 5:44; Luke 17:3-4)”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Page 38.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)
Source: Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 Vols

Love, God

“I covet truth; beauty is unripe childhood's cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth.”

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

Source: Prose and Poetry

Truth, Youth, Game, Childhood

“I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful?”

E.M. Forster book A Room with a View

Variant: No, he is not tactful, yet have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet, at the same time, beautiful?
Source: A Room with a View

People, Time

“You lethargic, waiting upon me,
waiting for the fire and I
attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty

Shaken by your beauty
Shaken.”

William Carlos Williams book Paterson

Source: Paterson

Waiting

“Kalos Kai Agathos, the singular balance of the good and the beautiful.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

“I was a newborn vampire, weeping at the beauty of the night.”

Anne Rice book Interview with the Vampire

Source: Interview with the Vampire

Night

“You're beautful. Yes you are, you're very very beautiful. Extremely beautiful.”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

“I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being defeated.”

Charles Baudelaire book Le Spleen de Paris

L'étude du beau est un duel où l'artiste crie de frayeur avant d'être vaincu. <br class="br">III: "Le Confiteor de l'artiste" http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Petits_Po%C3%A8mes_en_prose_-_III._Le_Confiteor_de_l%27artiste <br class="br">Le Spleen de Paris (1862) <br class="br">Source: Twenty Prose Poems

Study

“A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Disease, Tree

“Beauty breeds beauty, truth triggers truth. The cure for writer's block is therefore to read.”

Matt Haig (1975) British writer

Source: The Humans

Truth, Reading

“Nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great ever came out of imitations. The thing that is really hard and really amazing is to give up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.”

Anna Quindlen (1952) journalist, Novelist

Perfection

“O, with what freshness, what solemnity and beauty, is each new day born; as if to say to insensate man, "Behold! thou hast one more chance! Strive for immortal glory!" There is no speech nor language where this voice is not heard; but the bold, bad man heard it not. He woke with an oath and a curse. What to him was the gold and purple, the daily miracle of morning!”

Harriet Beecher Stowe book Uncle Tom's Cabin

Ch 36 Emmeline and Cassy
Source: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)

Chance

“The Night World isn't a place. It's all around us. The creatures of Night World are beautiful and deadly and irresitable to humans. Your best friend could be one-so could your crush.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

World, Night

“I don't understand beauty.”

Douglas Coupland book Eleanor Rigby

Eleanor Rigby

Understanding

“The really magical things are the ones that happen right in front of you. A lot of the time you keep looking for beauty, but it is already there. And if you look with a bit more intention, you see it.”

Vik Muniz (1961) Brazilian artist

Time

“Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a 'universal' without patriotism, without home who has found his people everywhere.”

Chaim Potok (1929–2002) American rabbi

People, World, Way, Home

“They confused beauty with innocence and harmlessness.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

“Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud…”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi (2001), Chapter 1, p. 6
Context: The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity — it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.

Love, Life, Death

“And medecine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love: these are what we stay alive for.”

Tom Schulman (1950) American film director, screenwriter

Source: Dead Poets Society

Love, Life, Law, Business

“… for we are all amateurs at life, but if we do not focus too much on our mistakes, a miraculous picture emerges. And we learn that it's not the beauty of the image that warrants our gratitude--it's the chance to paint.”

Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer

Source: Finding Noel

Life, Learning, Chance, Painting

“Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life — and travel — leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks — on your body or on your heart — are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.”

Anthony Bourdain book The Nasty Bits

The Nasty Bits (2006)

Life, World, Travel, Change

“Her hair is smoldering. Her face was smudged with soot. She had a cut on her arms, her dress was torn, and she was missing a boot. Beautiful.”

Rick Riordan book The Lost Hero

Source: The Lost Hero

“But beauty is about finding the right fit, the most natural fit, To be perfect, you have to feel perfect about yourself --- avoid trying to be something you're not. For a goddess, that's especially hard. We can change so easily.
-Aphrodite”

Rick Riordan book The Lost Hero

Source: The Lost Hero

Feeling, Nature, Change, Perfection

“Their beauty had always seemed to him like the beauty of pressed flowers-lovely, but dead.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Love, Flowers, Dead

“The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Truth, Books, Way, Thinking

“It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.”

Jeannette Walls book The Glass Castle

Source: The Glass Castle

Tree

“Harry: The most beautiful words in the English language aren't "I love you" but "it's benign."”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Deconstructing Harry (1997)

Love

“You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.”

Elizabeth Gilbert (1969) American writer

Beauty, Life

“That's what it feels like when I write, like I have this beautiful world in my head, but when I try to remember it in order to write it down, I change it, and I can't ever get it back.”

Ruth Ozeki book A Tale for the Time Being

Source: A Tale for the Time Being

World, Feeling, Change

“And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Pain, Feeling

“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Beauty
Essays (1625)

Beauty

“The heads of strong old age are beautiful / Beyond all grace of youth”

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) American poet

Youth, Age, Strong

“I don't know the first thing about holding together a family, especially one that resembles an heirloom vase, shattered but glued back together for its beauty, and no one mentions that you can see the cracks as plain as day.”

Jodi Picoult book Songs of the Humpback Whale

Source: Songs of the Humpback Whale

Family

“ahhh the beauty of annihilation. There's nothing like it.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

“Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?”

D.H. Lawrence book Women in Love

Source: Women in Love

People, World, Grass

“Fiona has the same glacial beauty of an iceburg, but unlike the iceburg she has absolutely nothing below the surface.”

Roald Dahl book Matilda

Source: Matilda

“Somehow the bright beauty had gone from April afternoon and from her heart as well and the sad sweetness of remembering was as bitter as gall.”

Margaret Mitchell book Vom Winde verweht (1937 German edition)

Source: Gone with the Wind

Sadness, Heart

“He built a small house, called a cocoon, around himself. He stayed inside for more than two weeks. Then he nibbled a hole in the cocoon, pushed his way out and…

he was a beautiful butterfly!”

Eric Carle book The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Source: The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Way, Housing

“People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve. (Bernard Mickey Wrangle, p 99)”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker

People

“I am sailing with thee through the dizzy sky!
How beautiful thou art!”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Source: Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

Art

“Love has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest.”

Kay Redfield Jamison (1946) American bipolar disorder researcher

Source: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

Love, Life, Sadness

“I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand”

Andrew Solomon book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Source: The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: Jayber Crow

World, Peace, Thinking

“You're beautiful, Roza. So beautiful it hurts me.”

Richelle Mead Vampire Academy

Last Sacrifice
Variant: You're so beautiful, it hurts sometimes.
Source: Vampire Academy

Hurt

“A gentle boy with a gentle soul, but every soul contains its own opposite, and the opposite of gentleness was ruthlessness—the beautiful wreckage of mercy.”

Cassandra Clare book Lady Midnight

Source: Lady Midnight

Soul, Boy

“He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.”

James Joyce book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Sadness, Music, Cry

“Beauty is often spoken of as though it only stirs lust or admiration, but the most beautiful people are so in a way that makes them look like destiny or fate or meaning, the heroes of a remarkable story.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

Source: A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Fate, People, Way

“That's when I see him. Peter Kavinsky, walking down the hallway. Like magic. Beautiful, dark-haired Peter. He deserves background music, he looks so good.”

Jenny Han book To All the Boys I've Loved Before

Source: To All the Boys I've Loved Before

Music

“When I was your age… I wish I'd known that I already had everything I needed within myself to be happy, instead of looking for happiness at beauty counters.”

Ilene Beckerman (1935) American journalist

Beauty, Age, Happiness

“She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon… and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune.”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

Love, Health, Jealousy, Help

“I am fascinated by what is beautiful, strong, healthy, what is living. I seek harmony.”

Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003) German film director, photographer, actress and dancer

Strong

“Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

Life, Passion

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

Nalo Hopkinson (1960) Jamaican Canadian writer

Source: Sister Mine

Beauty, Time, Perfection

“One day soon you'll be in the world, and you'll have so many options you won't know what to do with them. Everyone will fall in love with you, because you're so beautiful and so charming, and you'll look back on high school as such a tiny blip.”

Jenny Han book P.S. I Still Love You

Source: P.S. I Still Love You

Love, World, School

“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.

Beauty, World, Travel

“We are liars. We are beautiful and privileged. We are cracked and broken.”

E. Lockhart book We Were Liars

Source: We Were Liars

“Men love a submissive woman, Damon said simply. Even when they say the don't. There's just something about a beautiful, soft woman looking to them to protect and take care of them that inspires a man to greatness.”

Maya Banks (1964) Author

Source: Sweet Surrender

Love, Men

“For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

People, Youth

“Renee was beautiful, but she was my friend now. On the other hand, Annette was my friend, but now she was beautiful. makes about as much sense as anything ever does with girls”

Jordan Sonnenblick (1969) American writer

Source: Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie

Girl, Sense

“Warriors of the light are not perfect. Their beauty lies in accepting this fact and still desiring to grow and to learn.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

(1997)
Source: Warrior of the Light

Light, Learning, Perfection

“You aren't a hero and I'm not beautiful and we probably won't live happily ever after " she said. "But we're alive and together and we're going to be all right.”

Philip Reeve Mortal Engines

Source: Mortal Engines

“He is dangerous, he is beautiful, I could drown in his understanding.”

Orson Scott Card book Speaker for the Dead

Source: Speaker for the Dead

Understanding

“Beautiful music plays, but not everyone with ears can hear it.”

Danielle Trussoni book Angelology

Source: Angelology

Music

“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

Source: Critique of Pure Reason

Beauty, Pain, Pleasure, Imagination

“Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow- beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.”

Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper

Variant: Love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow — beautiful while it’s there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink.
Source: My Sister's Keeper

Love, Time

Quotes about beauty page 12

Quotes about beauty
page 12