Quotes about beauty
page 43

Utah Phillips photo
Prem Rawat photo
Thomas Jefferson photo

“I, too, have made a wee-little book from the same materials, which I call the Philosophy of Jesus; it is a paradigma of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book, and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject. A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said nor saw. They have compounded from the heathen mysteries a system beyond the comprehension of man, of which the great reformer of the vicious ethics and deism of the Jews, were he to return on earth, would not recognize one feature.”

Letter to Charles Thomson (9 January 1816), on his The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=JefJesu.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all (the "Jefferson Bible"), which omits all Biblical passages asserting Jesus' virgin birth, miracles, divinity, and resurrection. Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-11_Bk.pdf, pp. 498–499
1810s

Jeffrey Tucker photo
Hans Arp photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“Which is the best,—
Beauty and glory, in a southern clime,
Mingled with thunder, tempest; or the calm
Of skies that scarcely change, which, at the least,
If much of shine they have not, have no storms?”

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

Erinna
The Golden Violet (1827)
Variant: Which is the best,—
Beauty and glory, in a southern clime,
Mingled with thunder, tempest; or the calm
Of skies that scarcely change, which, at the least,
If much of shine they have not, have no storms?

Arthur Machen photo
George William Russell photo
Stephen Fry photo

“Wit can be beautiful, because it expresses and distils an idea.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

On the subject of criteria he used to judge in The Most Beautiful Tweet contest, Hay Festival 2010[citation needed]
2010s

James Beattie photo

“And beauty immortal awakes from the tomb.”

James Beattie (1735–1803) Scottish poet, moralist and philosopher

The Hermit

Paul de Lagarde photo

“Our speech has ceased to speak, it shouts; it says cute, not beautiful, colossal, not great; it cannot find the right word any more, because the word is no longer the designation of an object, but the echo of some kind of gossip about the object.”

Paul de Lagarde (1827–1891) German polymath, biblical scholar and orientalist

“Zum Unterrichtsgesetze,” as cited in The Politics of Cultural Despair (1961), p. 31

John Muir photo
Richard Lovelace photo
Auguste Rodin photo
Ernest Barnes photo
Camille Paglia photo
John Muir photo
William Burges photo

“We now come to a third evil, namely, our very unsatisfactory, not to say ugly, furniture. It may be objected that it does not much matter what may be the exact curve of the legs of the chair a man sits upon, or of the table off which he eats his dinner, provided the said articles of furniture answer their respective uses; but, unfortunately, what we see continually before our eyes is likely, indeed is quite sure, to exercise a very great influence upon our taste, and therefore the question of beautiful versus ugly furniture does become a matter of very great importance. I might easily enlarge upon the enormities, inconveniences, and extravagances of our modern upholsterers, but that has been so fully done in a recent number of the "Cornhill Magazine" that I may well dispense with the task.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

Eastop & Gil commented that:
Burges held strong views about furniture, and protested at the "enormities, inconveniences, and upholsterers." (1865: 69) He advocated the use of the medieval style, because "not only did its duty as furniture, but spoke and told a story" (1865: 71).
Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 69: Partly cited in: Dinah Eastop, ‎Kathryn Gill (2012) Upholstery Conservation: Principles and Practice. http://books.google.com/books?id=2gf50OiP8lAC&pg=PA50 p. 47.

Elvis Costello photo

“What shall we do, what shall we do with all this useless beauty?”

Elvis Costello (1954) English singer-songwriter

All This Useless Beauty
Song lyrics, All This Useless Beauty (1996)

J.C. Ryle photo

“Assurance of hope is more than life. It is health, strength, power, vigor, activity, energy, manliness, beauty.”

J.C. Ryle (1816–1900) Anglican bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 16.

Vanna Bonta photo
Henry Suso photo
Steve Kilbey photo
James Weldon Johnson photo

“O black and unknown bards of long ago,
How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?
How, in your darkness, did you come to know
The power and beauty of the minstrels' lyre?”

James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) writer and activist

O Black and Unknown Bards, st. 1.
Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917)

Malcolm Muggeridge photo
Baba Amte photo
Joseph Addison photo

“Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover,
Fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense.”

Act I, scene iv.
Cato, A Tragedy (1713)

John C. Wright photo
Charles Lindbergh photo
Bhakti Tirtha Swami photo
Bell Hooks photo

“The more Lil' Kim distorted her natural beauty to become a cartoonlike caricature of whiteness, the larger her success.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Rock My Soul (2003)

Tom Robbins photo
Layal Abboud photo

“I may live in Beirut, but I think Egypt is beautiful and I feel like it’s my second country.”

Layal Abboud (1982) Lebanese pop singer

July 16, 2014; Interview by Insight Magazine http://www.insight-egypt.com/celebrities/layal-abboud/july-16/214
2014

Mata Amritanandamayi photo
Arthur Hugh Clough photo

“Thy duty do? rejoined the voice,
Ah, do it, do it, and rejoice;
But shalt thou then, when all is done,
Enjoy a love, embrace a beauty
Like these, that may be seen and won
In life, whose course will then be run;
Or wilt thou be where there is none?
I know not, I will do my duty.”

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) English poet

The Questioning Spirit http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/C/CloughArthurHugh/verse/poemsproseremains/questioningspirit.html, st. 2 (1847).

Harry Chapin photo
Stephenie Meyer photo
Artie Shaw photo
Macy Gray photo

“I saw a rainbow earlier today
Lately those rainbows be comin' round like everyday
Deep in the struggle I have found the beauty of me
God is watchin' and the Devil finally let me be
Here in this moment to myself”

Macy Gray (1967) American singer-songwriter and actress

"A Moment to Myself" (co-written with Jeremy Ruzumna, Miles Tackett. Mark Morales, and Damon Wimbley)
On How Life Is (1999)

Ritwik Ghatak photo
Sophia Loren photo

“Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.”

Sophia Loren (1934) Italian actress

As quoted in Morrow's International Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations (1982) by Jonathon Green, p. 340.

Sri Aurobindo photo

“Our first necessity, if India is to survive and do her appointed work in the world, is that the youth of India should learn to think,—to think on all subjects, to think independently, fruitfully, going to the heart of things, not stopped by their surface, free of prejudgments, shearing sophism and prejudice asunder as with a sharp sword, smiting down obscurantism of all kinds as with the mace of Bhima. (…) When there is destruction, it is the form that perishes, not the spirit—for the world and its ways are forms of one Truth which appears in this material world in ever new bodies…. In India, the chosen land, [that Truth] is preserved; in the soul of India it sleeps expectant on that soul's awakening, the soul of India leonine, luminous, locked in the closed petals of the ancient lotus of love, strength and wisdom, not in her weak, soiled, transient and miserable externals. India alone can build the future of mankind. (…) Ancient or pre-Buddhistic Hinduism sought Him both in the world and outside it; it took its stand on the strength and beauty and joy of the Veda, unlike modern or post-Buddhistic Hinduism which is oppressed with Buddha's sense of universal sorrow and Shankara's sense of universal illusion,—Shankara who was the better able to destroy Buddhism because he was himself half a Buddhist. Ancient Hinduism aimed socially at our fulfilment in God in life, modern Hinduism at the escape from life to God. The more modern ideal is fruitful of a noble and ascetic spirituality, but has a chilling and hostile effect on social soundness and development; social life under its shadow stagnates for want of belief and delight, sraddha and ananda. If we are to make our society perfect and the nation is to live again, then we must revert to the earlier and fuller truth.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

1910-1912
India's Rebirth

Thierry Henry photo

“Henry is a beautiful player and has got complete technique, I adore watching him. I respect him very much as a man and as a footballer. He reminds me of myself.”

Thierry Henry (1977) French association football player

Ronaldinho Barcelona chief declares interest in Henry http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id=352723&cc=5901, (20 December 2005)
About

Anthony Burgess photo
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti photo

“.. there is no longer any beauty except the struggle. Any work of art that lacks a sense of aggression can never be a masterpiece.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

In the 'First Futurist Manifesto,' Filippo Marinetti, 1909; as quoted in Critical Writings: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, New Edition, quoted in the text on the Back Cover, Macmillan, 7 Apr 2007
1900's

Georgia O'Keeffe photo
André Derain photo
Judah Loew ben Bezalel photo

“The beauty and glory are rerlated to the non-material.”

Judah Loew ben Bezalel (1512–1609) Czech rabbi

Chidushey Agadot Chulin, 59

Prem Rawat photo
Hesiod photo
Fernand Léger photo
Rāmabhadrācārya photo
Angela of Foligno photo

“An achieved poem is always beautiful in its own way, though such a way will many times strike people as harsh and repellent.”

Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) English poet and professor

A matter of timing: The Guardian, Saturday 21 September 2002 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview28/print

Warren Farrell photo
Theo van Doesburg photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Eric Temple Bell photo

“Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics.”

Eric Temple Bell (1883–1960) mathematician and science fiction author born in Scotland who lived in the United States for most of his li…

Source: The Development of Mathematics (1940), p. 9

“Landscapes are about beauty and death. The only way you can define beauty.... is to know that death is hiding behind it. This is what haunts you when you’re doing a so-called landscape painting.”

Per Kirkeby (1938–2018) Danish artist

as quoted in Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Drawings, Helaine Posner, exhibition catalogue (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1992
1965 - 1995

Björk photo
Gerhard Richter photo

“My works are not just rhetorical, except in the sense that all art is rhetorical. I believe in beauty.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

Grace Slick photo

“But we all do sort of the same thing and that is rearrange what you thought was real, and, uh, they remind you of the beauty of very simple things. You forget, because you're so busy going from A to Z, that there's, uh, 24 letters in between.”

Grace Slick (1939) American musician, writer and painter

Interview on the History Channel documentary Getting High - The History of LSD, 2001; sampled on Drop Out by Infected Mushroom

“Whether naïve on my part or not, it seemed worth taking the time to try to convince others that their lives possessed beauty and meaning worth preserving and honoring.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(p. xiv).
Book Sources, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry (2014)

Auguste Rodin photo

“I admit, of course, that the artist does not see nature as the vulgar do. His emotion reveals to him the inner truths that underlie appearance. But the only principle In art is to copy what one sees. Every other method is ruinous. No one can embellish Nature. It is simply and solely a question of seeing. Doubtless a mediocre man, when he copies will never produce a work of art. He looks without seeing. No matter how minutely he observes, the result will be flat and without character. But the artist's trade is not for mediocre men, and no amount of training can supply them with talent. The artist sees - he sees with his heart. He sees deep into the heart of Nature. To the artist everything in Nature is beautiful.
The vulgarian imagines that what looks to him ugly In Nature is not material for the artist. He would forbid us to represent what displeases and offends him. He makes a grave mistake. What is commonly called ugliness in Nature may become a great beauty in art.
In the realm of realities, people regard as ugly everything that is deformed and diseased and that suggests sickness, weakness and suffering. They regard as ugly everything that defies regularity, which is to them the symbol and condition of health and strength. A hump is ugly, bow-legs are ugly, misery in rags is ugly. Ugly, again, are the soul and conduct of the immoral, the vicious, the criminal man, the abnormal man who is an enemy of society; ugly is the soul of the parricide, the traitor, the unscrupulous slave of ambition. And it is right that the lives and the of which we can expect only evil should be given an odious epithet.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Rodin on realism, 1910

Isaac Rosenberg photo
Newton Lee photo

“Nature shows us its artistic beauty that sciences explain the hows and religions contemplate the whys.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Hayley Jensen photo
Stewart Lee photo
Albert Camus photo
Nora Perry photo

“They sat and combed their beautiful hair,
Their long, bright tresses, one by one,
As they laughed and talked in the chamber there,
After the revel was done.”

Nora Perry (1831–1896) American writer

After the Ball, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Paul Gauguin photo

“Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories, no efforts of memory, everything summed up in one moment. Complete art which sums up all the others and completes them. Like music, it acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses, the harmonious tones corresponding to the harmonies of sounds, but in painting, a unity is obtained which is not possible in music, where the accords follow one another, and the judgement experiences a continuous fatigue if one wants to reunite the end and the beginning. In the main, the ear is an inferior sense to the eye. The hearing can only grasp a single sound at one time, whereas the sight takes in everything and at the same time simplifies at its will.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

La peinture est le plus beau de tous les arts; en lui se résument toutes les sensations, à son aspect chacun peut, au gré de son imagination, créer le roman, d'un seul coup d'œil avoir l'âme envahie par les plus profonds souvenirs; point d'effort de mémoire, tout résumé en un seul instant. — Art complet qui résume tous les autres et les complète. — Comme la musique, il agit sur l'âme par l'intermédiaire des sens, les tons harmonieux correspondant aux harmonies des sons; mais en peinture on obtient une unité impossible en musique où les accords viennent les uns après les autres, et le jugement éprouve alors une fatigue incessante s'il veut réunir la fin au commencement. En somme, l'oreille est un sens inférieur à celui de l'œil. L'ouïe ne peut servir qu'à un seul son à la fois, tandis que la vue embrasse tout, en même temps qu'à son gré elle simplifie.
Quote of Gauguin from: Notes Synthéthiques (ca. 1884-1885), ed. Henri Mahaut, in Vers et prose (July-September 1910), p. 52; translation from John Rewald, Gauguin (Hyperion Press, 1938), p. 161.
1870s - 1880s

Mao Zedong photo

“The country is so beautiful, where so many heroes had devoted their lives into it. Sorry that the Qin Emperor or the Han Wu Emperor lacks a sense for literacy; while the founders of the Tang and Song dynasties came short in style. The great man, Genghis Khan, only knew how to shoot eagles with an arrow. The past is past. To see real heroes, look around you.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

Qinyuanchun ["Snow"] (沁园春•雪) (1936; first published in late 1945). Variant translation of the last stanza: "All are past and gone! / For truly great men / Look to this age alone."

Charles Dickens photo
John Gray photo
John Fletcher photo

“There's nothing that allays an angry mind
So soon as a sweet beauty.”

Act III, scene 5.
The Elder Brother (c. 1625; published 1637)

Frances Kellor photo
Manmohan Acharya photo
Nguyễn Du photo
Brigham Young photo
David Attenborough photo
Revilo P. Oliver photo
Paula Modersohn-Becker photo
Thomas Campbell photo

“There shall he love when genial morn appears,
Like pensive Beauty smiling in her tears.”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

Part II, line 95
Pleasures of Hope (1799)

Bill Russell photo
Basil of Caesarea photo
John Steinbeck photo
W.E.B. Du Bois photo
David Cameron photo
Gianni Agnelli photo

“I even believe aesthetics are like ethics. Something that is beautiful is ethical, and unethical things aren’t beautiful.”

Gianni Agnelli (1921–2003) Italian businessman

Agnelli: The Rules of the Game, Vanity Fair (1991)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Chuck Palahniuk photo