Quotes about beauty (5679 quotes, page 42)

“None of the free [ a. o. his first religious] imaginative pictures that I painted at this time [c.1909] or later, had any kind of model, or even a clearly conceived idea. It was quite easy for me to imagine a work right down to its smallest details, and in fact my preconceptions were usually far more beautiful than the painted outcome: I became the copyist of the idea. Therefore I liked to avoid thinking about a picture beforehand, all I needed was a vague idea of luminescences of colour. The work then developed of its own accord under my hands.”

Emil Nolde (1867–1956) German artist

Nolde's quote c. 1909; as cited by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism, de:Wolf-Dieter Dube; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 81
1900 - 1920

Imagination , Idea , Thinking , Time

“My old lip color could barely keep up with my busy schedule. In the time it takes to notice the wide discrepancy between my salary and that of my male peers, I'd have to reapply! In the seconds to count the number of women in high political office, seated on corporate executive boards and featured in film and television over the age of 40, my lip color would be as invisible as this glass ceiling only inches above my head! L'Oreal. Because I am worth it. And because holding myself to an impossible standard of beauty keeps me from starting a riot!”

Maria Bamford (1970) American actress and comedian

How to WIN! (2006)

Women , Age , Color , Business

“One change of attitude would change everything. If everyone realized that it could be a beautiful world and said let's not do these things anymore — let's have fun.”

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

McKenna interview (1992)

World , Change

“It would be pleasant to believe that the age of pessimism is now coming to a close, and that its end is marked by the same author who marked its beginning: Aldous Huxley. After thirty years of trying to find salvation in mysticism, and assimilating the Wisdom of the East, Huxley published in 1962 a new constructive utopia, The Island. In this beautiful book he created a grand synthesis between the science of the West and the Wisdom of the East, with the same exceptional intellectual power which he displayed in his Brave New World. (His gaminerie is also unimpaired; his close union of eschatology and scatology will not be to everybody's tastes.) But though his Utopia is constructive, it is not optimistic; in the end his island Utopia is destroyed by the sort of adolescent gangster nationalism which he knows so well, and describes only too convincingly.
This, in a nutshell, is the history of thought about the future since Victorian days. To sum up the situation, the sceptics and the pessimists have taken man into account as a whole; the optimists only as a producer and consumer of goods. The means of destruction have developed pari passu with the technology of production, while creative imagination has not kept pace with either.
The creative imagination I am talking of works on two levels. The first is the level of social engineering, the second is the level of vision.”

Dennis Gabor (1900–1979) Nobel Prize-winning physicist and inventor of holography

In my view both have lagged behind technology, especially in the highly advanced Western countries, and both constitute dangers.
Source: Inventing the Future (1963), p. 18-19

Wisdom , Books , Age , World

“I then made some observations to the general on the beautiful weather we were having, and the satisfaction I experienced at seeing him in a position requiring so much judgment and forbearance, and that our co-operation so far had been of such a pleasant nature that I should always look back to this time with the most delightful recollections, as there could not by any possibility be any mis-understanding between the army and navy, their duties being so distinct from each other, and the only chance of their clashing would be through the stupid blunder of an irresponsible officer.”

David Dixon Porter (1813–1891) United States Navy admiral

Source: 1880s, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (1885), pp. 256–257

Stupidity , Understanding , Nature , Chance

“A child that knows nothing of God’s earth, of green fields, or sparkling brooks, of breezy hill and springy heather, and whose mind is stored with none of the beauties of nature, but knows only the drunkenness prevalent in the hideous slum it is forced to live in, and whose walks abroad have never extended beyond the corner public-house and the pawnshop, cannot be benefited by education. Such children grow up to depraved, and become a danger and terror to the State; wealth-destroyers instead of wealth-producers.”

William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme (1851–1925) English industrialist, philanthropist, and politician

"Land for House," 1898

God , Children , Education , Nature

“God, but you're beautiful, aren't you?
Feel your warm hand walking around.
I won't pull away.
My passion always wins.
So keep on a-moving in.
So keep on a-tuning in.
Synchronise rhythm now.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Kick Inside (1978)

God , Feeling , Passion

“Light like this does not exist, but we wish it did. We wish the sun could make us young and beautiful, we wish our clothes could glisten and ripple against our skins, most of all, we wish that everyone we knew could be brightened simply by our looking at them.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Girl, Interrupted (1994)

Light , Sun , Clothes

“Bush, and Blair, and the prime minister of Japan, and Berlusconi, these people are criminals, and they are responsible for mass murder in the world, for the war, and for the occupation, through their support for Israel, and through their support for a globalized capitalist economic system, which is the biggest killer the world has ever known. It has killed far more people than Adolf Hitler. It has killed far more people than George Bush. The economic system which these people support, which leaves most of the people in the world hungry, and without clean water to drink. So we're going to put them on trial, the leaders, when they come. They think they're coming for a holiday in a beautiful country called Scotland; in fact, they're coming to their trial.”

George Galloway (1954) British politician, broadcaster, and writer

Interview on Abu Dhabi TV http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP91805, June 1, 2005

War , People , World , Drink

“Truth does not require your painting, brother; it is itself beauty. Unfold it, and men will be captivated. Take your brush to set off the rainbow, or give a new tinge of splendor to the setting sun, but keep it away from the "Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley."”

David Thomas (born 1813) (1813–1894) 19th-century Welsh preacher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 606.

Men , Truth , Sun , Painting

“Thus, it is established that Adam is the human race, by whatever names he was called. Since it is clear that he became manifest in the form of a man, naturally on every plane he is fallible. But God is not his partner in any errors. For, he taught him beauty and ugliness and truth and falsehood, and he learned good and evil. But his kingship is a result of the divine decree. And if he remains continually in his position or steps down, or is deposed from it, in each case it is the result of the divine decree. His cause is exalted with God. Whenever he is a temporal ruler, his leadership is like that of any other. If he is among the prophets, his commands and prohibitions are from God, and his kingship is by God’s command, and he is the leader of the people as long as he lives. After their deaths, some hold that they must continue to be obeyed, and others mention them with their lips, and love for them is continual.”

Subh-i-Azal (1831–1912) Persian religious leader

Treatise on Kingship

Love , Death , God , People

“Mahmood having reached Tahnesur before the Hindoos had time to take measures for its defence, the city was plundered, the idols broken, and the idol Jugsom was sent to Ghizny to be trodden under foot…Mahmood having refreshed his troops, and understanding that at some distance stood the rich city of Mutra [Mathura], consecrated to Krishn-Vasdew, whom the Hindoos venerate as an emanation of God, directed his march thither and entering it with little opposition from the troops of the Raja of Delhy, to whom it belonged, gave it up to plunder. He broke down or burned all the idols, and amassed a vast quantity of gold and silver, of which the idols were mostly composed. He would have destroyed the temples also, but he found the labour would have been excessive; while some say that he was averted from his purpose by their admirable beauty. He certainly extravagantly extolled the magnificence of the buildings and city in a letter to the governor of Ghizny, in which the following passage occurs: "There are here a thousand edifices as firm as the faith of the faithful; most of them of marble, besides innumerable temples; nor is it likely that this city has attained its present condition but at the expense of many millions of deenars, nor could such another be constructed under a period of two centuries."…The King tarried in Mutra 20 days; in which time the city suffered greatly from fire, beside the damage it sustained by being pillaged. At length he continued his march along the course of a stream on whose banks were seven strong fortifications, all of which fell in succession: there were also discovered some very ancient temples, which, according to the Hindoos, had existed for 4000 years. Having sacked these temples and forts, the troops were led against the fort of Munj…The King, on his return, ordered a magnificent mosque to be built of marble and granite, of such beauty as struck every beholder with astonishment, and furnished it with rich carpets, and with candelabras and other ornaments of silver and gold. This mosque was universally known by the name of the Celestial Bride. In its neighbourhood the King founded an university, supplied with a vast collection of curious books in various languages. It contained also a museum of natural curiosities. For the maintenance of this establishment he appropriated a large sum of money, besides a sufficient fund for the maintenance of the students, and proper persons to instruct youth in the arts and sciences…The King, in the year AH 410 (AD 1019), caused an account of his exploits to be written and sent to the Caliph, who ordered it to be read to the people of Bagdad, making a great festival upon the occasion, expressive of his joy at the propagation of the faith.”

Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) Sultan of Ghazni

Tarikh-i-Firishta, translated by John Briggs under the title History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, first published in 1829, New Delhi Reprint 1981, Vol. I, pp. 27-37.
Quotes from Muslim medieval histories

Money , God , People , Books

“A lady richly clad as she,
Beautiful exceedingly.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Christabel

Part I
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Christabel

“We are still very much annoyed by out-of-date notions of time. Please, would you throw away your watches! At least toss aside the minutes and hours. Obviously we all realize that we are not everlasting. Our fear of death has inspired the creation of beautiful works of art. And this was a fine thing, too. However, our only eternal possession will be change.”

Jean Tinguely (1925–1991) Swiss painter and sculptor

reprinted in 'Zero', ed. Otto Piene and Heinz Mack, Cambridge, Mass; MIT Press 1973, p. 120
Quotes, 1960's, untitled statements in 'Zero 3', (1961)

Death , Fear , Art , Change

“I've just finished reading Shakespeare's Sonnets, that is, I've read and understood them for the first time. One passionate, desolate lament - immeasurable and inconsolable - for the waning, wasting and passing of beauty. At the same time there's something disturbingly un-Christian here - the utterly heathen, desperate keening of the dirges, the grisly dances of death, danses macabres, in which death is nothing but the end, finality - destruction, not transition.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights p. 38 Diaries 1951

Death , Passion , Time , Reading

“For me Ruisdael is the true man of poetry, the real poet. There is a world of sad, serious and beautiful thoughts in his paintings. They possess a soul and a voice that sounds deep, sad and dignified. They tell melancholic stories, speak of gloomy things and are witnesses of a sad spirit. I see him wander, turned in on himself, his heart opened to the beauties of nature, in accordance with his mood, on the banks of that dark gray stream that rustles and splashes along the reeds. And those skies!... In the skies one is completely free, untied, all of himself.... what a genius he is! He is my ideal and almost something perfect. When it storms and rains, and heavy, black clouds fly back and forth, the trees whiz and now and then a strange light breaks through the air, and falls down here and there on the landscape, and there is a heavy voice, a grand mood in nature; that is what he paints; that is what he [Ruysdael] is imaging.”

Gerard Bilders (1838–1865) painter from the Netherlands

(version in original Dutch / citaat van Bilders' brief, in het Nederlands:) Ruisdael is voor mij de ware man der poezië, de echte dichter. Daar is een wereld van droevige, ernstige schone gedachten in zijn schilderijen. Ze hebben een ziel en een stem, die diep, treurig, deftig klinkt. Zij doen weemoedige verhalen, spreken van sombere dingen, getuigen van een treurige geest. Ik zie hem dwalen, in zichzelf gekeerd, het hart geopend voor de schoonheden der natuur, in overeenstemming met zijn gemoed, aan de oevers van die donkere grauwe stroom die ritselt en plast langs het riet. En die luchten!.. .In de luchten is men geheel vrij, ongebonden, geheel zichzelf.. ..welke een genie is hij [Ruisdael]! Hij is mijn ideaal en bijna iets volmaakts.Als het stormt en regent, en zware, zwarte wolken heen en weer vliegen, de bomen suizen en nu en dan een wonderlijk licht door de lucht breekt en hier en daar op het landschap neervalt, en er een zware stem, een grootse stemming in de natuur is, dat schildert hij, dat geeft hij weer.
Source: 1860's, Vrolijk Versterven' (from Bilders' diary & letters), pp. 51+52, - quote from Bilders' diary, 24 March 1860, written in Amsterdam

World , Sadness , Soul , Mood

“I have discovered in the Hebrew Bible teachings of righteousness, humaneness, and human dignity—at the source of my parents' teachings of mentschlichkeit—undreamt of in my prior philosophizing. In the idea that human beings are equally God-like, equally created in the image of the divine, I have seen the core principle of a humanistic and democratic politics, respectful of each and every human being, and a necessary correction to the uninstructed human penchant for worshiping brute nature or venerating mighty or clever men. In the Sabbath injunction to desist regularly from work and the flux of getting and spending, I have discovered an invitation to each human being, no matter how lowly, to step outside of time, in imitatio Dei, to contemplate the beauty of the world and to feel gratitude for its—and our—existence. In the injunction to honor your father and your mother, I have seen the foundation of a dignified family life, for each of us the nursery of our humanization and the first vehicle of cultural transmission. I have satisfied myself that there is no conflict between the Bible, rightly read, and modern science, and that the account of creation in the first chapter of Genesis offers "not words of information but words of appreciation," as Abraham Joshua Heschel put it: "not a description of how the world came into being but a song about the glory of the world's having come into being"—the recognition of which glory, I would add, is ample proof of the text's claim that we human beings stand highest among the creatures. And thanks to my Biblical studies, I have been moved to new attitudes of gratitude, awe, and attention. For just as the world as created is a world summoned into existence under command, so to be a human being in that world—to be a mentsch—is to live in search of our summons. It is to recognize that we are here not by choice or on account of merit, but as an undeserved gift from powers not at our disposal. It is to feel the need to justify that gift, to make something out of our indebtedness for the opportunity of existence. It is to stand in the world not only in awe of its and our existence but under an obligation to answer a call to a worthy life, a life that does honor to the special powers and possibilities—the divine-likeness—with which our otherwise animal existence has been, no thanks to us, endowed.”

Leon R. Kass (1939) American academic

Looking for an Honest Man (2009)

Life , Men , God , World

“He looked around the landscape. Drenched in the golden haze of late afternoon it seemed wonderfully tranquil and beautiful, though permeated with a sense of remoteness and even melancholy, like a scene remembered from one’s youth.”

Jack Vance book Space Opera

Source: Space Opera (1965), Chapter 13 (p. 130)

Youth , Sense

“Legenda Aurea. To think that there's no Catholic edition of this most Catholic book!… Richard Benz sees it as epic and myth of the Middle Ages, exact parallel to the Gothic cathedrals. Sunk into oblivion with the epoch, rediscovered through the history of art, in the countless painters inspired by the Legend. Wonderful, costly and beautiful - but belonging utterly to the past, monument, museum: venerable, interesting, imposing - tout à fait passé.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1957-59

Books , Age , Art , History

“Rama Rama Rama Rama Sita Rama you chant
Do with devotion, and get the release you want…
As those Yama hordes arrive, to bid you to come
Spirit tries to escape the throat, Hari’s name will not come
Body systems cease working and our relative are bemoaning
Name of the Ocean-daughter’s lord will it come to your asking?
When your breath is blocked by phlegm in your throat
Vasudev Krishna’s name will be of no use then to shout
When you beautiful body breaks down and falls apart
As your eyes get blurred and dead, Ranga’s name will not depart
When your body juices mix up and collect down below
As the elements disintegrate, uttering God’s name will it allow.
Having born as a wicked and done many a cruel deed
As soul departs, Puranadara Vittala’s name will not proceed.”

Purandara Dasa (1484–1564) Music composer

Here Dasa explains the agony of the last stages of death and advices taking the name of god at the time, as quoted here.[Narayan, M.K.V., Lyrical Musings on Indic Culture: A Sociology Study of Songs of Sant Purandara Dasa, http://books.google.com/books?id=-r7AxJp6NOYC&pg=PA79, 1 January 2010, Readworthy, 978-93-80009-31-5, 81-82]

God , Soul , Daughters , Dead

“Youth suffers but for a season; the bowed but unbroken spirit resumes its elasticity; the future, unknown and beautiful, wins the present to itself, and the past waits for that dark and overwhelming influence which sooner or later will darken our whole horizon.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Other Gift Books

Youth , Suffering , Waiting , Past

“There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt.”

Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet

Torvald Helmer, Act I
A Doll's House (1879)

Life , Home , Freedom , Dependency

“Heart-hidden from the outer things I rose;
The spirit woke anew in nightly birth
Unto the vastness where forever glows
The star-soul of the earth.
There all alone in primal ecstasy,
Within her depths where revels never tire,
The Olden Beauty shines: each thought of me
Is veined through with its fire.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

"Night"
By Still Waters (1906)

Soul , Star , Birth , Heart

“Great thinkers build their edifices with subtle consistency. We do our intellectual forebears an enormous disservice when we dismember their visions and scan their systems in order to extract a few disembodied “gems”—thoughts or claims still accepted as true. These disarticulated pieces then become the entire legacy of our ancestors, and we lose the beauty and coherence of older systems that might enlighten us by their unfamiliarity—and their consequent challenge—in our fallible (and complacent) modern world.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"A Tale of Three Pictures", p. 437–438
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

World

“[When asked about the word "hike":] I don't like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains — not hike! Do you know the origin of that word saunter? It's a beautiful word. Away back in the middle ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, 'A la sainte terre,' 'To the Holy Land.' And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them.”

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

statement by Muir as remembered by Albert W. Palmer in The Mountain Trail and its Message http://books.google.com/books?id=odROAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA28 (1911), pages 27-28
1910s

People , Age , Mountain

“I find it funny to praise myself, but I think I am beautiful, just like Chandramukhi.”

Madhuri Dixit (1967) Indian actress

Quote, When personality comes first.....

Thinking

“With white tails smoking free,
Long streaming manes, and arching necks, they show
Their kinship to their sisters of the sea –
And forward hurl their thunderbolts of snow.
Still out of hardships bred,
Spirits of power and beauty and delight
Have ever on such frugal pastures fed
And loved to course with tempests through the night.”

Roy Campbell (poet) (1901–1957) South African poet

"Horses on the Camargue," lines 41-48
Adamastor (1930)

Love , Sister , Sea , Night

“He thought it happier to be dead,
To die for Beauty, than live for bread.”

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

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

Dead

“One can do such lovely things with so little. Subjects that are too beautiful end by appearing theatrical – take Switzerland, for example. Think of all the beautiful little things Corot did at Gisors; two willows, a little water, a bridge, like the picture in the Universal Exhibition. What a masterpiece!... Everything is beautiful, all that matters is to be able to interpret.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

In a letter to his son Lucien, 26 July 1892, as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock - , Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 146
Quote of Pissarro, referring to a willow-painting of his former art-teacher Camille Corot
1890's

Love , Thinking , Universe , Water

“And rustic life and poverty
Grow beautiful beneath his touch.”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

Ode to the Memory of Burns
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Life

“And he waves the pages of the papers, black and white the way space was when the galaxies were being formed, and crammed—as space was then—with isolated corpuscles, surrounded by emptiness, containing no destination or meaning. And I think how beautiful it was then, through that void, to draw lines and parabolas, pick out the precise point, the intersection between space and time where the event would spring forth, undeniable in the prominence of its glow; whereas now events come flowing down without interruption, like cement being poured, one column next to the other, one within the other, separated by black and incongruous headlines….”

Italo Calvino book Cosmicomics

Pages 92-93, "How Much Shall We Bet?"
Cosmicomics (1965)

Way , Spring , Thinking , Time

“I know of nothing useful in life except what is beautiful or creates beauty.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mr. Wharton in Ch. IV
Esther: A Novel (1884)

Life

“When things are exquisitely beautiful and rare, they shouldn't be privately owned.”

Kshama Sawant (1973) American politician and economist

Quoted in Sarah Stuteville, " You might be a socialist if… An interview with Kshama Sawant http://www.seattleglobalist.com/2012/10/30/you-might-be-a-socialist-if-an-interview-with-kshama-sawant", The Seattle Globalist (October 30, 2012).

“I saw Stay as You Are and Tess only. I didn't ask her if she saw every movie I did. I could never think about that. Why do I have to see every movie she did? Why? Sometimes she did movies with people I was bored by. I don't care about this or that director. So if she is so beautiful in a movie, it is because of her, not a director. So why should I see the movie then? As long as I am not blind, I don't need a dog to see. If I am blind, maybe I would like the dog to lead me. I am not blind. I don't have to see her movies. I know my child.”

Klaus Kinski (1926–1991) German actor

On his daughter, Nastassja, as quoted in Denise Worrell (1989), Icons: Intimate Portraits.

People , Dogs , Thinking

“Stars more beautiful to the eyes than the telescope that robs them of their illusions.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Star

“Love makes a woman beautiful –
but beauty does not have such power, beauty cannot make a woman worthy of love.”

Walther von der Vogelweide (1170–1230) Middle High German lyric poet

Liebe machet schoene wîp:
desn mac diu schoene niht getuon, sin machet niemer lieben lîp.
"Herzeliebez vrowelîn", line 17; translation from Frederick Goldin German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages (New York: Anchor, 1973) p. 121.

Love

“I wanted to look young in this role, it was a needed thing. She’s 14. This role I really needed to feel 14, I had to be 14 in every way possible, so I hung out with my 14 year-old cousin for a month. She had a retainer and pigtails and all that. There’s something in their eyes, between age 10 and 15 I think, it’s just that sort of ‘anything is possible’ look. For me, the most beautiful thing you could ever see is like a child’s eyes. I wanted to really make sure that I captured her spirit, that youthful spirit. For me it’s all about dreaming. What does she look like when she walks? What’s the look in her eye? It’s not about, ‘Oh, on this move, I’m going to put my arm like that.’ It’s just the whole spirit, so that any way that I would move would be right.”

Alison Lohman (1979) American actress

On her role in Matchstick Men.
Interview with Rebecca Murray

Youth , Age , Dreams , Way

“The trouble with taxonomic boxes is… that that they tend to be empty, however beautiful they are on the outside.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1980s, Illustrating Economics: Beasts, Ballads and Aphorisms, 1980, p. 75 as cited in: R. Harper, L. Palen, A. Taylor (2005) The Inside Text: Social, Cultural and Design Perspectives on SMS. p. 79

Box

“All the wild world is beautiful, and it matters but little where we go, to highlands or lowlands, woods or plains, on the sea or land or down among the crystals of waves or high in a balloon in the sky; through all the climates, hot or cold, storms and calms, everywhere and always we are in God's eternal beauty and love. So universally true is this, the spot where we chance to be always seems the best.”

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

June 1890, page 299
John of the Mountains, 1938

Love , God , World , Universe

“Among the mouldering bones there was the head of a flaxen haired girl. One side of her face was well preserved, almost mummified. She must have been a beauty. But the other side of her face was all bone and a horrifying sight, not the sort of thing one likes to think about after.”

Christopher Vokes (1904–1985) Canadian general

Italy, p. 164
Vokes - My Story (1985)

Girl , Thinking

“In our thrifty populations of merchants, manufacturers, politicians, and professional men, there is little sense for beauty, little pure thought, little genuine culture; but they are prosperous and self-satisfied.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 24

Men , Sense

“The changing seasons of the Midwest – the intense heat in summer, bitter cold in winter, and unsurpassable beauty and invigorating weather of fall and spring – is what makes it an interesting place to live. Only robust and virile people can live in such a climate and enjoy it.”

Nile Kinnick (1918–1943) College football player

Journal entry (January 6, 1942)

People , Spring , Winter , Change

“Fame's but a hollow echo; gold, pure clay;
Honour, the darling but of one short day,
Beauty—th' eye's idol—but a damasked skin;
State, but a golden prison to live in
And torture free-born minds.”

Walter Raleigh (1554–1618) English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, spy, and explorer

"A Farewell to the Vanities of the World" http://www.bartleby.com/331/467.html, lines 3–7. Author uncertain. Attributed to Henry Wotton and to Raleigh.
Attributed

“A religious spirit animates the infancy of our literature, and must continue to gloe in its maturity. The public taste calls for this quality, and would relish no work in which it might be supplanted by a principle of infidelity. Our best authors have written under the influence of Christian feeling; but had they been destitute of this sentiment, they would have found it necessary to accommodate themselves to the opinions of the people, and follow Christian precedents. The beneficent influence of religion on literature, is like that of our evening sun, when it awakens in the clouds those beautiful and burning tints, which clothe the firmament in gold and purple. It constitutes the heart of learning - the great source of its moral power. Religion addresses itself to the highest and holiest of our sentiments - benevolence and veneration, and their excitement stirs up the imagination, strengthens the undeerstanding, and purifies the taste. Thus, both in the mind of the author and the reader, Christianity and literature act and react on each other, with the effect of elevating both, and carrying the human character to the highest perfection which it is destined to reach. Learning should be proud of this companionship, and exert all her wisdom to render it perpetual.”

Daniel Drake (1785–1852) American physician and writer

Daniel Drake (1834). Discourse on the History, Character, and Prospects of the West: Delivered to the Union Literary Society of Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, at Their Ninth Anniversary, September 23, 1834. Truman and Smith. p. 31

Wisdom , People , Religion , Feeling

“For myself I make no secret, I look forward with eager desire to seeing the matchless beauty of Christ’s body in the heavenly light.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

Sermon (23 November 1879)
Letters, etc

Secret , Light , Christ

“Nature has a million answers. Even as I observe tree trunks, roots, branches, idling in some corner, to be burnt down as wood, it affords an excellent laboratory to the mind. It is exciting, sensuous and intoxicating. If one submits oneself to the form and the raw energy of the tree even when it can no longer bear fruit and leaves, one can see great poetry and lyricism in its intertwining branches and roots. The functional sculptures and paintings are a result of this experiment. The process takes over thereafter, but it is just an ode to nature's beauty.”

Manav Gupta (1967) Indian artist

As quoted in "Indian Design and Interiors" IDI Magazine (October 2006)
2000s

Nature , Tree , Painting

“It's the best proposal that we ought to have because it's flatter, it's fairer, it's finite, it's family friendly. And instead, we've had a Congress that spent money like John Edwards at a beauty shop.”

Mike Huckabee (1955) Arkansas politician

Republican presidential candidate debate, Johnston, Iowa, 2007-12-12
regarding the FairTax proposal
Republican Debates

Money , Family

“Really surrender yourself. Really let yourself flow so that all this can pour into you, all this can help you. Because you know what satsang really does? It just makes us stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger. So if you want to get strong, here is your vitamins. You know? And you just got to take them. And take them as prescribed. And take the right vitamins and you’ll get strong. And you are getting stronger. So just let yourself flow in this beautiful, beautiful river of satsang, and just experience what’s really happening.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Kansas City, Missouri, USA, January 21, 1978<.small>
1970s

Strong , Help

“Nothing—so it seems to me…is more beautiful than the love that has weathered the storms of life. … The love of the young for the young, that is the beginning of life. But the love of the old for the old, that is the beginning of—of things longer.”

Jerome K. Jerome (1859–1927) English humorist

"The Passing of the Third Floor Back" (1908).

Love , Life , Weather

“So long as colonies and immigrant sections exist, with their inferior housing, sanitation, and care, Americanization will fail. It matters not at all that we satisfy our conscience by saying that immigrants prefer to live this way or that they lived this way in their own country. To say this is to forget that the crowded dwelling in Italy through which permeated the beauty and art, the religion, tradition, and association of the old country, is vastly different from the huts across the railroad track filled with strangers to whom the shop and saloon are the centers of gravity.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Religion , Art , Way , Housing

“I recognised that I was (and I confessed) in that attitude of the mind wherein men admit mortality; something had already passed from me—I mean that fresh and vigorous morning of the eyes wherein the beauty of this land had been reflected as in a tiny mirror of burnished silver. Youth was gone out apart; it was loved and regretted, and therefore no longer possessed.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

Source: The Four Men: A Farrago (1911), p. 159

Love , Men , Youth

“It is Vesalius' Anatomy of Birth -- a book of drawings and diagrams of human anatomy. Beautiful drawings but -- as the pages turn -- terrible in their frankness…”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Prospero's Books

Books , Birth , Drawing

“Snow had fallen and from the museum [in Pittsburgh, The ] you had a beautiful view of a valley with a railway, through some sheds, etc. But I could not finish it, and today, Sunday, I went back there again, but then the snow was already so far away that I could not make anything of it any more. It is a pity. Otherwise I could have sold something. [The painting was sold to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1934] (translation from the original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek)”

George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923) Dutch painter and photographer

version in original Dutch (citaat van Breitner's brief, in het Nederlands:) Er was namelijk sneeuw gevallen en uit het museum [in Pittsburgh, Breitner nam deel aan een jury en maakte vanuit een raam aan de achterzijde van het Carnegie Institute enkele schetsen en begon aan een schilderij] had men een prachtig gezicht op een dal met een spoorweg, door wat loodsen, enz. Maar ik kon 't niet afkrijgen, en vandaag, zondag, was ik er weer heengegaan, maar toen was de sneeuw al zoo ver dat ik [er] niets meer van kon maken. Het is wel jammer. Anders had ik nog wat kunnen verkoopen misschien. [Het schilderij is in 1934 verkocht aan het Stedelijk museum Amsterdam.]
In Breitner' letter to his wife, 1909, from Pittsburgh; as cited in George Hendrik Breitner in Amsterdam, J. F. Heijbroek, Erik Schmitz; uitgeverij THOTH, Bussum, 2014, p. 22
Breitner took part in an art-jury in Pittsburgh in 1909. He started to make some sketches from a window at the back-side of the Carnegie Institute and later the painting]
1900 - 1923

Painting

“[T]his is the goal of all living, that the cosmos may be known, and admired, and that it may be crowned with further beauties. Nowhere and at no time, so far as we can tell, at least within our own galaxy, has the adventure reached further than in ourselves. And in us, what has been achieved is but a minute beginning. But it is a real beginning.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XV: The Last Men; Section 4, “Cosmology” (p. 231)

Time

“Strange, but when he closed his eyes he had an image of the hotel above them restored to its former grandeur. A concierge and porter in the lobby. Someone behind the desk waiting to take his key. Sintra in an evening gown. They’d be about to take a motored vehicle to the opera. The streets would be busy with merchants and people coming home from work. The buildings, the storefronts, would be bright and cheery with lights. Like it had been in those mayfly beautiful moments between wars, before the Rising.”

Jeff VanderMeer book Finch

Source: Finch (2009), p. 325

War , People , Home , Business

“She, though in full-blown flower of glorious beauty,
Grows cold even in the summer of her age.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Act IV, scene i.
Œdipus (1679)

Age , Flowers , Summer

“I love what I've learned from my parents, and what I continue here – wandering, Sunday trips out of town, mindfulness with which you can look at plants and animals. I am not interested in that professionally and I have no ambition to classify flora and fauna, but I am enthusiastic about amateur love for nature. Light, air, clouds, landscapes only seem harsh. A lot of beauty can be found in this rawness.”

Tomasz Vetulani (1965) Polish artist

Tomasz Vetulani o Holandii, niskim kraju http://www.nto.pl/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110605/REPORTAZ01/762330357, nto.pl, 5 June 2011 (in Polish)

Love , Nature , Parent , Light

“As on a lake limpid like a mirror blooms a beautiful lotus and spreads it's fragrance around, so does this Lotus of the East rise in the midst of our people. This news is undoubtedly of great joy to us. Who can tell of what use it will be, where the fragrance of the Lotus will reach, if we do what is in our power to do! Man cannot live without companionship and no companionship can flourish without language.”

Bruno de Souza

Editorial in Udetenchem Sallok, a Konkani weekly in 1889. Translated from its original text in Konkani and quoted by Manohar Rai Sardessai in History of Konkani Literature: From 1500 to 1992, p. 102.

People , Joy

“For the man sound in body and serene of mind there is no such thing as bad weather; every sky has its beauty, and storms which whip the blood do but make it pulse more vigorously.”

George Gissing book The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

Winter § I, p. 213
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903)

Weather

“The lecture concludes with a demonstration showing that a free body in hyperbolic non Euclidean space may be so fashioned as in real time to carry out the actual motions of the top. The form of such a body and the forces to actuate it are specified. Klein lays great stress on the beauty of this generalization. …The full geometry of this case is not carried out in these lectures, however, and Klein regrets that the development of the automorphic functions has recently fallen into abeyance.”

Carl Barus (1856–1935) U.S. physicist

"The Mathematical Theory of the Top" (April 8, 1898)

Fashion , Time

“Few women's merit lasts as long as their beauty.”

François de La Rochefoucauld book Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

Il y a peu de femmes dont le mérite dure plus que la beauté.
Maxim 474.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Women

“I received a draft of a beautiful Tree penciled on a large sheet of white paper bearing ripe fruit I saw it plainly it looked very singular and curious to me. I have since learned that this tree grows in the Spirit Land. Afterwards the spirit showed me plainly the branches, leaves, and fruit presented or drawn upon paper. The leaves were checked or (unreadable) and the same color you see here. I entreated Mother Ann to tell me the name of this tree which she did Oct 1st 4th hour PM by moving the hand of a medium to write twice over Your Tree is the Tree of Life.”

Hannah Cohoon (1781–1864) American artist

Hand printed below Hannah Cohoon's painting of "The Tree of Life" dated July 3, 1854

Life , Color , Tree , Learning

“There is always something about our feeling for beautiful things which can neither be described nor communicated, which is unshared and unshareable.”

Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) British Conservative politician and statesman

Theism and humanism

Feeling , Communication

“I deliberately disregarded the right angle and rationalist architecture designed with ruler and square to boldly enter the world of curves and straight lines offered by reinforced concrete.… This deliberate protest arose from the environment in which I lived, with its white beaches, its huge mountains, its old baroque churches, and the beautiful suntanned women.”

Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012) Brazilian architect

The Curves of Time: The Memoirs of Oscar Niemeyer (2000), p. 62.

Women , World , Mountain

“This beautiful head [of Valentine Godé-Darel], this whole body, like a Byzantine empress on the mosaics of Ravenna - and this nose, this mouth - and the eyes, they too, those wonderful eyes - all these the worms will eat. And nothing will remain, absolutely nothing!”

Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) Swiss artist

Quote from Hodler's letter to de:Hans Mühlestein, c. late 1914; as cited by Anya Silver in: 'Valentine Godé-Darel (1873–1915): Five Paintings by Ferdinand Hodler' https://thegeorgiareview.com/spring-2013/valentine-gode-darel-1873-1915-five-paintings-by-ferdinand-hodler/, April 2013
In 1908, Hodler met Valentine Godé-Darel who became his mistress. She was diagnosed with cancer in 1913 and died in January 1915; Hodler painted five oils the day after her death

“(Whilst having his makeup done) This is the makeup process. I’ve been here since half past five this morning. So would you say you’re bringing out a beauty that’s already there? How does it work? How do we hide the bald patch?”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

Past

“Oh, for that matter you must look carefully how in every region of our country the map looks completely different. Not only the pastures have different shades, but the cows are different, yes even the people have, as it were, adopted the character of the soil [where] they were born and raised. That is so evident, that when I still stayed with Roelofs in Brussels [early 1860's] and we used to go to Holland to make our studies in the beautiful part of the season, coming home Roelofs didn't have to tell me where he had been. I recognized it in his work and one by one I called him the spots of our homeland [The Netherlands], where he had made sketches of the countryside and its residents during his study trip.”

Paul Gabriël (1828–1903) painter (1828-1903)

translation from the Dutch original: Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch / citaat van Paul Gabriël, in Nederlands: O, wat dat betreft, dan moet ge maar eens goed opletten, hoe in ieder gewest van ons land het plattegrond er geheel anders uitziet; niet alleen het weiland heeft een andere tint, maar de koeien zijn anders, ja de menschen hebben als 't ware het karakter aangenomen van den grond zij zijn geboren en getogen. Dat is zoo sterk, dat toen ik met Roelofs nog in Brussel woonde [vroege 1860's] en wij in 't mooie gedeelte van het seizoen naar Holland plachten te gaan om studies te maken, Roelofs wanneer hij thuis kwam, mij niet behoefde te zeggen waar hij geweest was. Ik zag het aan zijn werk en één voor één noemde ik hem de plekjes van ons vaderland, waar hij op studietocht van het land en de bewoners schetsen had gemaakt.
Quote of Gabriël, in a talk to W. C. Nakken, c. 1880; published in Elsevier's geïllustreerd maandschrift: verzameling van Nederlandsche letterkundige kunstwerken geïllustreerd door Nederlandsche kunstenaars, W. C. Nakken, June/July 1898; taken from the excerpt https://rkd.nl/explore/excerpts/365 in the Collection RKD Letters, Manuscripts and small Archives], The Hague
1880's + 1890's

People , Home , Study , Parting

“Philosophers and aestheticians may offer elegant and profound definitions of art and beauty, but for the painter they are all summed up in this phrase: To create a harmony”

Gino Severini (1883–1966) Italian painter

Quoted in: Clint Brown (1998) Artist to Artist, p. 32

Art

“Whereas the chemico-chemists always find in industry a beautiful field of gold-laden soil, the physico-chemists stand somewhat farther off, especially those who seek only the greatest dilution, for in general there is little to make with watery solutions.”

Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff (1852–1911) Dutch physical and organic chemist

“There is a beautiful tale among the Australian aborigines which says that the bow and arrow were not man's invention, but an ancestor God turned himself into a bow and his wife became the bowstring, for she constantly has her hands around his neck, as the bowstring embraces the bow. So the couple came down to earth and appeared to a man, revealing themselves as bow and bowstring, and from that the man understood how to construct a bow. The bow ancestor and his wife then disappeared again into a hole in the earth. So man, like an ape, only copied, but did not invent, the bow and arrow. And so the smiths originally, or so it seems from Eliade's rather plausible argument, did not feel that they had invented metallurgy; rather, they learned how to transform metals on the basis of understanding how God made the world.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Creation Myths (1972), Deus Faber

God , World , Feeling , Understanding

“I was well on the way to forming my present attitude toward politics as it is practiced in the United States; it is a beautiful fraud that has been imposed on the people for years, whose practitioners exchange gelded promises for the most valuable thing their victims own: their votes. And who benefits the most? The lawyers.”

Shirley Chisholm (1924–2005) American politician

Source: Unbought and Unbossed (1970), p. 37.

People , Way , Fraud

“Mr Hearn began really to count as a writer only when his Hellenic qualities of mind, stunted at first by the conditions of life in North America, were at last developed among a people distinguished by somewhat of that instinctive feeling for beauty which formed an incomparable element in the genius of ancient Greece. His æsthetic sense luxuriated in a land where fineness of taste is still a common characteristic. Through the gate of their art he entered, not only into the ways of life of the Japanese, but into their moods and their religion.”

Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) writer

Edward Wright, [The Romance of the Outlands, The Quarterly Review, 203, 47–72, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044092529163;view=1up;seq=77] July 1905, p. 63
Criticism

Life , People , Religion , Art

“I seem to be able to only see the positive things in life and the beautiful things in life and when I see, for instance, garbage or ugliness, then I turn my back or I seem to be able to skip it.”

Imelda Marcos (1929) Former First Lady of the Philippines

Quoted in "Imelda (2003).

Life

“He deliberately rejects the classic beauty of the form for the sake of fragility, transience or simply greater sensitivity to what is present. His work has a mockery and ironic character. He looks critically and with great apprehension at Poland, he does it from the perspective of an emigrant, from culturally and socially different Netherlands, which became a new homeland for him.”

Tomasz Vetulani (1965) Polish artist

Fred Gijbels, Curatorial text accompanying exhibition Multi-Kulti http://dom-norymberski.com/multi-kulti-wystawa/, 2018

“When you think that you are beautiful, you are liable to think that you are more beautiful than others, and such a thought is not a beautiful thought. To recognize or criticise ugliness and inferiority in others is to create the inferior and the ugly in yourself, and what you create in yourself will sooner or later be expressed through your mind and personality.”

Christian D. Larson (1874–1962) Prolific author of metaphysical and New Thought books

Source: Your Forces and How to Use Them (1912), Chapter 7, p. 115–116

Thinking , Personality

“Both these men are in love with Natasha, Count Rostov's younger daughter, and in her Tolstoy has created the most delightful girl in fiction. Nothing is so difficult as to portray a young girl who is at once charming and interesting. Generally the young girls of fiction are colorless (Amelia in Vanity Fair), priggish (Fanny in Mansfield Park), too clever by half (Constantia Durham in The Egoist), or little geese (Dora in David Copperfield), silly flirts or innocent beyound belief. It is understandable that they should be an awkward subject for the novelist to deal with, for at that tender age the personality is undeveloped. Similarly a painter can only make a face interesting when the vicissitudes of life, thought, love and suffering have given it character. In the portrait of a girl the best he can do is to represent the charm and beauty of youth. But Natasha is entirely natural. She is sweet, sensitive, and sympathetic, willful, childish, womanly already, idealistic, quick-tempered, warm-hearted, headstrong, capricious and in everything enchanting. Tolstoy created many women and they are wonderfully true to life, but never another who wins the affection of the reader as does Natasha.”

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer

Leo Tolstoy and War and Peace
Great Novelists and Their Novels

Love , Life , Women , Men

“Christ does not dress up a moral picture, and ask you to observe its beauty. He only tells you how to live; and the most beautiful characters the world has ever seen, have been those who received and lived these precepts without once conceiving their beauty.”

Horace Bushnell (1802–1876) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 140.

World , Christ

“A beauty is a woman you notice; a charmer is one who notices you.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

As quoted in The Stevenson Wit (1965) edited by Bill Adler

“When works of art are presented like rare butterflies on the walls, they're decontextualized. We admire their beauty, and I have nothing against that, per se. But there is more to art than that…”

Hans Haacke (1936) conceptual political artist

1990s, Portraits: Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre, and Elsewhere, 1998

Art

“I'm a real woman with a real heart and I have to live with a beautiful body and a pretty face which is not nearly as easy as it sounds.”

Loni Anderson (1945) actress

Quoted in the New York Post November 4, 1980

Heart

“On stage and off, we care what happens to a beautiful woman, whether she can act well or not.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

“Like Machiavelli would say, little Jovana was five months old, and I was prepared to write even "I saw Feldmarshall Göring three times", just to slip away from the barracks for two days and see my little girl and her beautiful mother.”

Đorđe Balašević (1953) Serbian songwriter

Balašević on songs "Računajte na nas" and "Triput sam video Tita" ("Dodir svile", page 85).

Girl , Time

“Just like his wife before she freezed on him,
Just like his wife when she was beautiful.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Never for Ever (1980)

“The Southwest was spectacular, but I have no interest in moving there. North Carolina is beautiful in spring and fall. But I can say I didn't find anyplace I'd rather live than Maine.”

Angus King (1944) United States Senator from Maine

Bowdoin Academic Spotlight interview (2011)

Spring

“Don't aim at any impossible heroisms. Strive rather to be quiet in your own sphere. Don't live in the cloudland of some transcendental heaven; do your best to bring the glory of a real heaven down, and ray it out upon your fellows in this work-day world. Seek to make trade bright with a spotless integrity, and business lustrous with the beauty of holiness.”

William Morley Punshon (1824–1881) English Nonconformist minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 313.

World , Business

“San Francisco is a mad city—inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people, whose women are of a remarkable beauty.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

American Notes— At the Golden Gate http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/AmericanNotes/goldengate.html (1891).
Other works

Women , People , Parting , Madness

“So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

"The Heroism of Vision", p. 85
On Photography (1977)

World , Success

“Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.”

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

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Nominalist and Realist

Life , Money , Law

“Hosting the Oscars is like making love to a beautiful woman — it's something I only get to do when Billy Crystal's out of town.”

Steve Martin (1945) American actor, comedian, musician, author, playwright, and producer

Hosting the 2001 Academy Awards

Love , Making love

“To be with child does not diminish beauty, but changes the shape of beauty.”

Edmund Cooper book A Far Sunset

A Far Sunset (1967)

Change

“I feel my most beautiful when I am truly myself. Meaning, when I accept exactly where I am in time and space, and I’m not judging myself in any way, and I feel that I have the peace that comes with loving yourself and all of your flaws, I see so much now how beauty really does, as cliché as it sounds, emanate from within.”

Gwyneth Paltrow (1972) American actress, singer, and food writer

Response to People magazine named Paltrow the World’s Most Beautiful Woman for 2013 http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/24/showbiz/celebrity-news-gossip/gwyneth-paltrow-people-worlds-most-beautiful/ (April 24, 2013)

Love , Peace , Way , Feeling

“At my age [74], you realize that some things have caught you. You can see that as a positive or a negative. On the negative side: Are you in a routine, unconsciously adapting to things that work well?.... The black Masonite [board, Kirkeby used to underlayment for his painting].... by not painting them black and instead making them beautiful, I’ve wondered if I have sold that particular idea. Edvard Munch, as he got older, sat at his home and painted like a wild man. Those works were not very popular and have come to be considered the 'wrong' Munch. But that’s how you need to be when you get old. I call it the arrogance of age: You don’t need recognition. You just don’t care.”

Per Kirkeby (1938–2018) Danish artist

1995 and later, interview in Kirkeby’s home studio, Copenhagen (2012)

Age , Home , Idea , Painting

“A woman is not complimentary to a man, but she embodies his lack (which is why Lacan can say that a beautiful woman is a perfect incarnation of man's castration).”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

194
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Perfection

“I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want—an adorable pancreas?”

Jean Kerr (1922–2003) Irish-American author and playwright

"Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, I Don't Want to Hear One Word Out of You"
The Snake Has All the Lines (1960)

“"Why don't we change our clothes and watch TV or something over at your house?" He felt like hugging her. "I'll make us some coffee," he said joyfully. "Yuk," she said smiling and began to run for the old Perkins place, that beautiful, graceful run of hers that neither mud nor water could defeat.”

Katherine Paterson book Bridge to Terabithia

Jesse Aarons and Leslie Burke (the last time they see each other)
Bridge to Terabithia (1977)

Smile , Coffee , Water , Change

“And the ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity—beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge—and to check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men. To do the latter is to do the former; the two things are inseparable. And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness, and cowardice and feebleness were saved from the accomplishment of their desires, the method that has only one alternative, the method that must in some cases still be called in to the help of man, is death. In the new vision death is no inexplicable horror, no pointless terminal terror to the miseries of life, it is the end of all the pain of life, the end of the bitterness of failure, the merciful obliteration of weak and silly and pointless things.”

H. G. Wells book Anticipations

Anticipations (1902)

Life , Death , Men , Pain

“Witch, n. (1) An ugly and repulsive old woman, in a wicked league with the devil. (2) A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the devil.”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

“President Zuma‚ from being a child‚ never had a chance‚ because of the situation in this country‚ even to go to school. But he was educated the ANC way. … President Zuma‚ out of the top six positions‚ [was the only person to occupy] most of those positions – deputy secretary general‚ national chairperson‚ deputy president and now president. … It shows love‚ respect and adoration. [Zuma's leadership within the ANC was] a long‚ beautiful history but spoiled at the last moment. [The transition is peaceful, but painful also, ] because this is telling somebody [that] your time is up when [he] should have known by himself that his time is up.”

Tokyo Sexwale (1953) South African politician

Commenting on the departure of Jacob Zuma on 12 February 2018, as quoted by Penwell Dlamini in The life and times of Jacob Zuma, by Tokyo Sexwale https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2018-02-12-the-life-and-times-of-jacob-zuma-by-tokyo-sexwale/, TimesLive, 12 February 2018

Love , Pain , Education , School

“thank you, o can opener, for this can which you are about to open. you are truly a beautiful can opener, and though I am not worthy of you, I love you.”

Darby Conley (1970) American cartoonist

groovitude, page 217
Bucky Katt

Love

“The Catholic writer understands the necessary relationship between truth and beauty, which is not mere social convention or cultural accident but an essential form of human knowledge--intuitive, holistic, and experiential. Art is a form of knowing--distinct and legitimate--rooted in feeling and delight--that discovers, in the words of Jacques Maritain, "The splendor of the secrets of being radiating into intelligence.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

34
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

Truth , Secret , Art , Feeling

Quotes about beauty page 42

Quotes about beauty
page 42