Quotes about beauty
page 4

“If you try to view yourself through the lenses that others offer you, all you will see are distortions; your own light and beauty will become blurred, awkward, and ugly. Your sense of inner beauty has to remain a very private thing.”

John O'Donohue (1956–2008) Irish writer, priest and philosopher

Source: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Sense, Light

“The kind of beauty I want most is the hard-to-get kind that comes from within - strength, courage, dignity.”

Ruby Dee (1922–2014) American actress

For women, Hope, Positive, Courage

“Dessert without cheese is like a beauty with only one eye”

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826) French lawyer, politician and writer

“The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion… open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony.”

Orhan Pamuk (1952) Turkish novelist, screenwriter, and Nobel Prize in Literature recipient

Source: My Name is Red

World, Color

“To tell a woman who is forty, "You look like sixteen," is boloney. The blarney way of saying it is "Tell me how old you are, I should like to know at what age women are the most beautiful.”

Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979) Catholic bishop and television presenter

Women, Age, Way

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.”

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

The Yosemite http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/the_yosemite/ (1912), chapter 15: Hetch Hetchy Valley <br class="br">1910s <br class="br">Variant: Everybody needs beauty... places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul alike.

Soul, Nature

“Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.”

William Shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet

Variant: O my love, my wife!
Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.
Source: Romeo and Juliet

Death

“You can pretend for a long time, but one day it all falls away and you are alone. We are alone in the most beautiful place in the world…”

Jean Rhys book Wide Sargasso Sea

Source: Wide Sargasso Sea

World, Time

“Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke (1960)
Rilke's Letters
Context: What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.

Dreams, Time, Joy, Happiness

“She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Women, Secret

“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.”

Saul Bellow book Herzog

Source: Herzog

Life

“Proportion is the heart of beauty.”

Ken Follett book The Pillars of the Earth

Source: The Pillars of the Earth

Heart

“Suppose someone were to say: 'Imagine this butterfly exactly as it is, but ugly instead of beautiful'?!”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Source: Zettel

Imagination

“By plucking her petals you do not gather the beauty of the flower.”

Rabindranath Tagore Stray Birds

Source: Stray Birds

Flowers

“There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

Time

“A beautiful object has no intrinsic quality that is good for the mind, nor an ugly object any intrinsic power to harm it. Beautiful and ugly are just projections of the mind. The ability to cause happiness or suffering is not a property of the outer object itself. For example, the sight of a particular individual can cause happiness to one person and suffering to another. It is the mind that attributes such qualities to the perceived object.”

Dilgo Khyentse (1910–1991) Bhutanese Buddhist Lama

Suffering, Personality, Happiness

“By cultivating the beautiful we scatter the seeds of heavenly flowers, as by doing good we cultivate those that belong to humanity.”

Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer

Flowers

“I am not pretty. I am not beautiful. I am as radiant as the sun.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Sun

“The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Beauty, Art, Gratitude

“The face staring back at me isn't beautiful but she isn't something that would scare the horses, either.”

Libba Bray A Great and Terrible Beauty

Source: A Great and Terrible Beauty

Horse

“Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.”

George Santayana book The Sense of Beauty

Pt. IV, Expression; § 67: "Conclusion.", p. 267
The Sense of Beauty (1896)

Feeling

“But memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.”

Ruth Ozeki book A Tale for the Time Being

Source: A Tale for the Time Being

Memory, Time

“A second floor window opened, and Kyle stuck his head and shoulders out so he could look down at us. “If you two are finished playing Cowboy and Indian out there, some of us would like to get their beauty sleep.”

I looked at Warren. “You heard ‘um Kemo Sabe. Me go to my little wigwam and get ‘um shut-eye.”

“How come you always get to play the Indian?” whined Warren, deadpan.

“Cause she’s the Indian, white boy,” said Kyle.”

Patricia Briggs book Iron Kissed

Source: Iron Kissed

Boy, Sleep

“We never believe we're beautiful, no matter how many times we hear it. We never believe it until someone says it in the right way.”

Francine Prose (1947) American writer

Way, Time

“It is a beautiful and delightful sight to behold the body of the Moon.”

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) Italian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer

Source: The Starry Messenger, Venice 1610: "From Doubt to Astonishment"

“To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.”

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)

Feeling, Reading

“Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.”

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

“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

Beauty, Youth, Happiness

“I hate slick and pretty things. I prefer mistakes and accidents. Which is why I like things like cuts and bruises - they're like little flowers. I've always said that if you have a name for something, like 'cut' or 'bruise,' people will automatically be disturbed by it. But when you see the same thing in nature, and you don't know what it is, it can be very beautiful.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor

Hate, People, Flowers, Nature

“For the world was changing, and sweetness was gone, and virtue too. Worry had crept on a corroding world, and what was lost- good manners, ease and beauty? Ladies were not ladies anymore, and you couldn't trust a gentleman's word.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Source: East of Eden

World, Change

“Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.”

Stephen Fry book Moab Is My Washpot

Source: Moab Is My Washpot

Depressing, Love, Death, World

“Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

“Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.”

Yukio Mishima book Forbidden Colors

Source: Forbidden Colors

“We have become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaid. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

People, Dreams, Hope

“The world is beautiful, but has a disease called man.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

World, Disease

“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner (1992)
Source: Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith

World

“There was a beautiful time…”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Time

“Human subtlety…will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Richter II p. 126 no. 837 books.google http://books.google.de/books?id=A7dUhbBfmzMC&pg=PA126 <br class="br">The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), I Prolegomena and General Introduction to the Book on Painting

Nature

“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 (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

The Gay Science (1882)

Love, Distant

“The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.”

P. C. Cast book Betrayed

Source: Betrayed

Beauty, Parting

“The sun is up, the sky is blue
It's beautiful, and so are you”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

Source: Beatles Lyrics

Good Morning, For Him, For Boyfriend, Sun

“He is outside of everything, and an alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

"Nathaniel Hawthorne" in Library of the World's Best Literature, vol. XII (1897), ed. Charles Dudley Warner.

Imagination, Autumn, Light

“It's a feeling which tells me that any woman can be beautiful in the eyes of a man who loves her.”

Joanne Harris book Five Quarters of the Orange

Source: Five Quarters of the Orange

Love, Feeling

“The more tranquil a man becomes, the greater is his success, his influence, his power for good. Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom.”

James Allen (1864–1912) British philosophical writer

As A Man Thinketh (1902), Serenity
Context: The calm man, having learned how to govern himself, knows how to adapt himself to others; and they, in turn, reverence his spiritual strength, and feel that they can learn of him and rely upon him. The more tranquil a man becomes, the greater is his success, his influence, his power for good.

Wisdom, Success

“Take rest; a field that has rested gives a beautiful crop.”

Ovid (-43–17 BC) Roman poet

“Just because something is beautiful doesn´t mean it´s good.”

Alex Flinn book Beastly

Source: Beastly

“Never forget the nine most important words of any family-

I love you.
You are beautiful.
Please forgive me.”

H. Jackson Brown, Jr. (1940) American writer

Love, Family, Forgiveness, Forgetting

“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.”

Tom Waits (1949) American singer-songwriter and actor

“You're all geniuses and you're all beautiful. You don't need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are. Get out there and get peace. Think peace, live peace, and breathe peace and you'll get it as soon as you like.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

Statement to the press in July 1969 after the release of the Plastic Ono Band's single "Give Peace a Chance", as quoted in The Beatles: An Oral History by David Pritchard and Alan Lysaght (1998) New York: Hyperion. ISBN: 0786864362. OCLC: 39093547. p. 285.
Context: It was just a gradual development over the years. Last year was "All You Need Is Love." This year it's "Give Peace a Chance." Remember love. The only hope for any of us is peace. Violence begets violence. If you want to get peace, you can get it as soon as you like if we all pull together. You're all geniuses and you're all beautiful. You don't need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are. Get out there and get peace. Think peace, live peace, and breathe peace and you'll get it as soon as you like. Okay?

Peace, Thinking

“Girls aren't beautiful, they're pretty. Beautiful is too heavy a word to assign to a girl. Women are beautiful because their faces show that they know they have lost something and picked up something else.”

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

Source: Smile, You're Traveling: Black Coffee Blues Part 3

Women, Girl

“If you feel lost, disappointed, hesitant, or weak, return to yourself, to who you are, here and now and when you get there, you will discover yourself, like a lotus flower in full bloom, even in a muddy pond, beautiful and strong.”

Masaru Emoto (1943–2014) Japanese writer

Source: Secret Life of Water

Disappointment, Feeling, Flowers, Strong

“You are Beautiful when you are happy”

Oscar Wilde An Ideal Husband

Source: An Ideal Husband

Happy, Beauty, For Wife, Good Morning

“Children must early learn the the beauty of generosity. They are taught to give what they prize most, that they may taste the happiness of giving.”

Charles Alexander Eastman (1858–1939) American scouting pioneer

Children, Learning, Happiness

“I'm with a man who's evolved enough to look at my body and see it as more beautiful because of the journey it has taken.”

Angelina Jolie (1975) American actress, film director, and screenwriter

“I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.”

Michael Cunningham book A Home at the End of the World

Source: A Home at the End of the World

Way

“He had been through a good deal in the course of the Great Quest — he had seen beautiful things and horrible things — but up until now he had not known that one and the same creature can be both, that beauty can be terrifying.”

Michael Ende book The Neverending Story

Source: The Neverending Story

“I always wished that I could find someone as beautiful as you, but in the process I forgot that I was special too.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

“Beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Love, Reality

“The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.”

Oscar Wilde book The Decay of Lying

The Decay of Lying (1889)

Art, Lying

“There is one purpose to life and one only: to bear witness to and understand as much as possible of the complexity of the world- its beauty, its mysteries, its riddles.”

Anne Rice book Servant of the Bones

Source: Servant of the Bones

Life, World, Understanding

“In my crazy world, above all others… you were the only one who was the ugliest. And you were the only one… who was the most beautiful…. This is the unspoken truth.”

Kaori Yuki Japanese manga artist

Truth, World

“He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

Dreams

“Beautiful things don't ask for attention.”

James Thurber book The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Source: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

“Nature is not primarily functional. It is primarily beautiful. Stop for a moment and let that sink in. We’re so used to evaluating everything (and everyone) by their usefulness that this thought will take a minute or two to begin to dawn on us. Nature is not primarily functional. It is primarily beautiful. Which is to say, beauty is in and of itself a great and glorious good, something we need in large and daily doses.”

Stasi Eldredge

Source: Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman's Soul

Nature

“No one in the world gets what they want and that is beautiful.”

Ernest Cline book Ready Player One

Source: Ready Player One

World

“It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.”

Katherine Paterson book Bridge to Terabithia

Source: Bridge to Terabithia

World

“Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.”

Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949) American author and journalist

Men

“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Life, Question, Hurt

“It is better to be beautiful then to be good, but it is better to be good then to be ugly.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Variant: It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.

“Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

Source: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.”

Jane Kenyon (1947–1995) American poet, translator

People, Truth, Way, Feeling

“All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim.”

Christopher Morley (1890–1957) American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet

Madness

“To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”

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

Widely attributed to Emerson on the internet, this actually originates with "What is Success?” http://www.cas.sc.edu/engl/emerson/Ephemera/Success.html by Bessie Anderson Stanley in Heart Throbs Volume Two (1911) edited by Joseph Mitchell Chapple. <br class="br">Misattributed

Life, Children, People, World

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Art

“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Motivational, Success, Deep, Inspirational

“If we give what we treasure most to a Being we love with all our hearts, if we can do that without expecting anything in return, then the world becomes a beautiful place.”

Orhan Pamuk book The Museum of Innocence

Source: The Museum of Innocence

Love, World, Heart

“Passion cannot be beautiful without excess; one either loves too much or not enough.”

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

Love, Passion

“My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. All I am I owe to my mother. I attribute my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education I received from her.”

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

Mother's Day, For Parents, For Mother, Life

“What you do, the way you think, makes you beautiful.”

Scott Westerfeld book Uglies

Variant: Yes. What you do, the way you think, makes you beautiful.
Source: Uglies

Beauty, Way, Thinking

“Beauty is where you find it.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

(Lyrics from Vogue).

“He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Source: Anna Karenina

Flowers

“A beautiful thing is precious, no matter the price. Those who do not know how to see the precious things in life will never be happy…”

Alex Flinn book Beastly

Source: Beastly

Life, Happiness

“Its a beautiful woman's fate to be the subject of conversation where ever she goes”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Fate

“… But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful…”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Life

“this woman is a genius in the day time and a beauty at night”

Oscar Wilde An Ideal Husband

Source: An Ideal Husband

Time, Night

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "The Land Ethic", p. 224-225.
Source: A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
Context: Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

Communication

“No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

“Yet, even amidst the hatred and carnage, life is still worth living. It is possible for wonderful encounters and beautiful things to exist.”

Hayao Miyazaki (1941) Japanese animator, film director, and mangaka

Life

“Physical beauty is passing - a transitory possession - but beauty of the mind, richness of the spirit, tenderness of the heart - I have all these things - aren't taken away but grow! Increase with the years!”

Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire

Source: A Streetcar Named Desire

Heart

“I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Pleasure, Soul, Imagination, Reading

“Genius lasts longer than beauty”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?”

Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953) American playwright, and Nobel laureate in Literature

Source: The Great God Brown and Other Plays

Love, Life, Music, Color

“Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

People

“Aesthetics have substantial political consequences. How one views oneself as beautiful or not beautiful or desirable or not desirable has deep consequences in terms of one’s feelings of self-worth and one’s capacity to be a political agent.”

Cornel West (1953) African-American philosopher and political/civil rights activist

Source: Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life

Feeling

“True friends are like diamonds – bright, beautiful, valuable, and always in style.”

Nicole Richie (1981) American television personality, musician, actress, and author

Birthday, Family, Friendship, Valentine's Day

“The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Touching Peace (1992), p. 1. Parallax Press ISBN 0-938077-57-0
Variant: The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.
Source: Touching Peace: Practicing the Art of Mindful Living

Peace, Water

“Life is beautiful if you are on the road to somewhere”

Orhan Pamuk book The New Life

Source: The New Life

Life

“You must let what happens happen. Everything must be equal in your eyes, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, foolish and wise.”

Michael Ende book The Neverending Story

Source: The Neverending Story

Evil

Quotes about beauty page 4

Quotes about beauty
page 4