Quotes about beauty
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“Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?”

Germaine Greer (1939) Australian feminist author

Women

“The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with joy are goodness, beauty, and truth.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Beauty, Truth, Joy

“No one would think he'd make such a beautiful corpse.”

James Joyce book Dubliners

Source: Dubliners

Thinking

“No matter what a woman's appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize - as her personal problem - observations she makes about the beauty myth in society.”

Naomi Wolf (1962) American writer

Problem, Appearance, Personality

“The cafe windows wrapped all the way around the observation floor, which gave us a beautiful panoramic view of the skeleton army that had come to kill us.”

Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse

Source: The Titan's Curse

Way

“I’d thought I knew what beauty was in women; but she’d surpassed all the language I had for it.”

Anne Rice book The Queen of the Damned

Source: The Queen of the Damned

Women

“Angelic Sookie, vision of love and beauty, I am prostrate that the wicked evil maenad violated your smooth and voluptuous body, in an attempt to deliver a message to me. -Eric”

Charlaine Harris book Living Dead in Dallas

Source: Living Dead in Dallas

Love, Angels, Evil

“For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Life, Women, Men, Secret

“All human behavior, all human motivations, all man’s hopes and fears, were heavily colored and largely controlled by mankind’s tragic and oddly beautiful pattern of reproduction.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Stranger in a Strange Land

Source: Stranger in a Strange Land

Fear, Hope, Color, Behavior

“Beautiful. All this suffering at the moment of destruction.”

Naoko Takeuchi (1967) Japanese manga artist

Suffering

“Truth has been relegated to subjectivity; beauty has been subjugated to the beholder; and as millions are idiotized night after night, a global commune has been constructed with the arts enjoying a totalitarian rule.”

Ravi Zacharias (1946) Indian philosopher

1990s
Source: [Can Man Live Without God, 1994, 9780849939433, 12]

Truth, Art, Communication, Night

“I don't think I could love you so much if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.”

Borís Pasternak book Doctor Zhivago

Source: Doctor Zhivago

Love, Life, People, Thinking

“Avoid the flourish. Do not be afraid to be weak. Do not be ashamed to be tired. You look good when you’re tired. You look like you could go on forever. Now come into my arms. You are the image of my beauty.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

“She was indeed a girl of exquisite beauty. She was one of those languid women made of dark honey smooth and sweet and terribly sticky.”

Patrick Süskind (1949) German writer and screenwriter

Source: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Women, Girl

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet

Reality, Parting

“Thinking of death--strange, beautiful, terrible and a long way off--made me feel happier than ever.”

Dodie Smith book I Capture the Castle

Source: I Capture the Castle

Death, Way, Feeling, Thinking

“The real poetry and beauty in life comes from an intense relationship with reality in all its aspects. Realism is in fact the ideal we must aspire to, the highest point of human rationality.”

Robert Greene book The 50th Law

Source: The 50th Law

Life, Reality

“… The human perception of this energy first begins with a heightened sensitivity to beauty.”

James Redfield book The Celestine Prophecy

Source: The Celestine Prophecy

“And there I am, blushing and confused, made beautiful by Cinna’s hands, desirable by Peeta’s confession, tragic by circumstance, and by all accounts, unforgettable.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

“What do you think of that? It’s stopped raining."
I’m glad Jay." Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Thinking, Joy

“When a girl is beautiful, she gets to pick - she never has to wait for someone to choose her.”

Adriana Trigiani (1970) American film director

Girl, Waiting

“At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.”

Arthur Golden (1956) American novelist

Pain

“All beauty must have its imperfections, all happiness its share of sorrow.”

Susan Kay Phantom

Source: Phantom

Happiness

“It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power, the same way money is power, the same way a gun is power.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Invisible Monsters

Variant: It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.
Source: Invisible Monsters

Money, Way

“Aphrodite strikes again, huh? You're gonna be the best-dressed warrior in town, beauty queen.”

Rick Riordan book The Lost Hero

Source: The Lost Hero

“Once upon a time, Sleeping Beauty decided to take a nap from which she would never wake up.”

Rachel Cohn (1968) American writer

Source: You Know Where to Find Me

Sleep, Time

“Always, always, always believe in yourself, because if you don't, then who will, Sweetie? So keep your head high, keep your chin up, and most importantly, keep smiling, because life's a beautiful thing and there's so much to smile about.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

Heartbreaking, Inspirational, love, Life

“Beauty! Terrible Beauty!
A deathless Goddess-- so she strikes our eyes!”

Homér Iliad

Source: The Iliad

“One
man’s “ugly” is another man’s “beautiful.”

Sherry Argov (1977) American writer

Source: Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl—A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship

“Modesty answers not the crude how of femininity, but the beautiful why.”

Wendy Shalit (1975) American writer

Source: A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue

“because I have learned the hard way how deadly these beauties can be.”

Suzanne Collins (1962) American television writer and novelist

Way, Learning

“You're a beautiful drunk, daughter.
But you're a drunk.”

Raymond Carver (1938–1988) American short story author and poet

Daughters

“It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Beauty, For Parents, People, Parent

“The weather is here Wish you were beautiful.”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman

Weather

“Beauty without wit offers nothing but the enjoyment of its material charms, whilst witty ugliness captivates by the charms of the mind, and at last fulfils all the desires of the man it has captivated.”

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice

Source: The Story of My Life

“But maybe as I get older, I begin to see beauty where I least expected it before.”

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (1956) novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist

“To know I was beautiful in his eyes made me beautiful.”

Janet Fitch book White Oleander

Source: White Oleander

“If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in the beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains.”

L. Frank Baum book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Source: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
Context: The Scarecrow listened carefully, and said, "I cannot understand why you should wish to leave this beautiful country and go back to the dry, gray place you call Kansas."
"That is because you have no brains" answered the girl. "No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home."
The Scarecrow sighed.
"Of course I cannot understand it," he said. "If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in the beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains."

People

“Her beauty climbed the rolling slope, it came into the room, rustling ghost-like through the curtains…”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“Frighteningly Beautiful, Dangerously Strong, Breathtakingly Fast.
Face it Tally-wa you're special…”

Scott Westerfeld (1963) American science fiction writer

Source: The Uglies Trilogy

Strong

“For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone.”

Mark Helprin book Winter's Tale

Source: Winter's Tale

Justice, Imagination

“That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.”

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) British writer

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Sadness, Silence, Change, Heart

“The perception of beauty is a moral test.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

June 21, 1852
Journals (1838-1859)

Beauty

“The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to seekers after it.”

Agatha Christie book The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Hercule Poirot
Source: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
Context: Understand this, I mean to arrive at the truth. The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to seekers after it.

Truth

“I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.”

Markus Zusak (1975) Australian author

Books

“In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

“The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful anyway.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

God

“[…] falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage.”

Nick Hornby About a Boy

Source: About a Boy

Love, Feeling, Intelligence

“Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?”

Donna Tartt book The Goldfinch

Source: The Goldfinch

Life

“You never forget a beautiful thing that you have made,' [Chef Bugnard] said. 'Even after you eat it, it stays with you - always.”

Julia Child My Life in France

Source: My Life in France

Forgetting

“all girls are beautiful in their own way”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

Way, Girl

“True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

World, Study, Science

“There's the beautiful people and then there's the rest of us.”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

People

“I don't mind being burdened with being glamorous and sexual. Beauty and femininity are ageless and can't be contrived, and glamour, although the manufacturers won't like this, cannot be manufactured. Not real glamour; it's based on femininity.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

“Such beautiful scarlet hair…. Why don't we call you 'Erza Scarlet'? It's the color of your hair, that way, I won't forget it!"
-Jellal Fernandes”

Hiro Mashima (1977) Japanese manga artist

Color, Way, Forgetting

“As coal pressured into pearls by our weighty existence. Beauty that arose out of pain.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Pain

“I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.”

Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) British comic actor and filmmaker

Question, Patience

“To see the beauty of the world is to put your hands on lines that run uninterrupted through life and through death. Touching them is an act of hope, for perhaps someone on the other side, if there is another side, is touching them, too.”

Mark Helprin A Soldier of the Great War

Source: A Soldier of the Great War

Life, Death, World, Hope

“Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.”

Alain de Botton book The Architecture of Happiness

Source: The Architecture of Happiness

Love, Way, Feeling, Thinking

“She's got the kind of ethereal, unselfconscious beauty some young girls possess that breaks your heart. Or theirs.”

Ilsa J. Bick (1957) American writer

Source: Drowning Instinct

Girl, Heart

“A person with taste is merely one who can recognize the greatest beauty in the simplest things.”

Barbara Taylor Bradford (1933) British author

Source: Her Own Rules

Personality

“The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place.”

Rachel Carson (1907–1964) American marine biologist and conservationist

Sea

“Then I went to bed and cried into my pillow. I wasn't sad, not at all. It was just so beautiful to have an intense feeling and the right words at the same time.

What are we but our stories?”

James Patterson book Sam's Letters to Jennifer

Source: Sam's Letters to Jennifer

Sadness, Feeling, Time

“You're not pretty. Goddamn it, Dani. You're beautiful.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Feversong

“Life is beautiful, just very unfair.”

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

Survival Lessons

Life

“I looked at you… and saw your goodness, your hope, and your faith. Those are what make you beautiful. So, so beautiful.

So it was't my hair?”

Richelle Mead book Last Sacrifice

Variant: I looked at you... saw your goodness, your hope, and your faith. Those are what make you beautiful. So, so beautiful.
Source: Last Sacrifice

Faith, Hope

“The flowers were so beautiful, so delicate and unthreatening, but they choked everything around them.”

Scott Westerfeld book Uglies

Source: Uglies

Flowers

“Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it's a common mistake nonetheless.”

Charles Frazier book Cold Mountain

Source: Cold Mountain

Bird, Sense, Singing

“Pippa's laugh is bitter, tinged with tears. 'Ha! Why do girls think being beautiful will solve every problem? Being beautiful just creates problems. It's a misery. I wish I were someone else.”

Libba Bray A Great and Terrible Beauty

Source: A Great and Terrible Beauty

Girl, Problem, Thinking, Tear

“The human soul needs beauty more than bread.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Soul

“You’re so beautiful. I wish I’d seen you as a child. (Acheron)
You didn’t miss much. I had buck teeth and stringy hair. (Kat)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Devil May Cry

“What --- you don't believe in true love?" Petra asked. "The kind that can then be parlayed into awesome merchandising opportunities?"
- "Beauty Queens”

Libba Bray (1964) American teen writer

Source: Beauty Queens

Love

“I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.”

Ernest Hemingway book For Whom the Bell Tolls

Source: For Whom the Bell Tolls

Love, Art, Feeling

“In nature, nothing is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways and they're still beautiful.”

Alice Walker (1944) American author and activist

Beauty, Way, Nature, Tree

“A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

Life, Truth, Search, Success

“A guy who is crazily, madly in love with you. A guy who sees how incredible and amazing you are, even though you’re not the cheerleader or even close to the prettiest girl in the school. A guy who thinks you’re beautiful, just the way you are.”

Candace Bushnell book The Carrie Diaries

Source: The Carrie Diaries

Love, School, Way, Guy

“Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

Source: Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Way

“He was comparing you to the butterflies that you both adore and cherish, and he said you were special for the same reasons: you were rare, exotic and entirely you. He said you're beautiful exactly the way are now.”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: One Hundred Names

Way

“Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous possessive love that grabs at what it can.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Love, Life, Death

“You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?”

John Steinbeck book Sweet Thursday

Source: Sweet Thursday

Light, Time, Sun, Sea

“The earth here is beautiful. And it still belongs to the dead.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Dead

“If eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson The Rhodora

The Rhodora
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”

Jim Henson (1936–1990) American puppeteer

Beauty, Stupidity, Time

“Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.”

Maggie Nelson (1973) American writer

Source: Bluets

Sadness

“Maybe you don't need beauty sleep, but some of us aren't so lucky.”

Richelle Mead Shadow Kiss

Source: Shadow Kiss

Sleep

“Rejoice with your family in the beautiful land of life.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Family, Life, Family

“Beauty isn't made of sugar.”

Diana Wynne Jones book The Game

Source: The Game

“Never lose an opportunity for seeing something beautiful for beauty is God s handwriting.”

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

God

“When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Travels in Alaska http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/travels_in_alaska/ (1915), chapter 1: Puget Sound and British Columbia <br class="br">1910s

Star, Universe, Appearance, Singing