Quotes about beauty
page 5

“Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world!”

Vladimir Nabokov book The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

Source: The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

God, World

“Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

Source: The Crucible

God

“I've found that there is always some beauty left — in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself; these can all help you. Look at these things, then you find yourself again, and God, and then you regain your balance. A person who's happy will make others happy; a person who has courage and faith will never die in misery!”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

7 May 1944
(1942 - 1944)
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

God, Faith, Courage, Nature

“Sometimes the most beautiful thing is precisely the one that comes unexpectedly and unearned.”

Anna Freud (1895–1982) Austrian-British psychoanalyst & essayist

“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things, then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from henceforth!”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Gay Science

Source: Gay Science

Love, Learning

“The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

"Leaving School—II", London Magazine (May 1963) http://www.thelondonmagazine.org/leaving-school-ii/ http://www.thelondonmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/May-1963-Cover.jpg

Hunger, Truth

“You could have had anything else in the world, and you asked for me."
She smiled up at him. Filthy as he was, covered in blood and dirt, he was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.
"But I don't want anything else in the world.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

World, Smile

“The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity; it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Love, Life, Death, Envy

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Beauty, Success

“The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. It is an immensely exciting experience to be born in the world, born in the universe, and look around you and realise that before you die you have the opportunity of understanding an immense amount about that world and about that universe and about life and about why we're here. We have the opportunity of understanding far, far more than any of our predecessors ever. That is such an exciting possibility, it would be such a shame to blow it and end your life not having understood what there is to understand.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

An Interview by Sheena McDonald (1995)

Life, World, Understanding, Universe

“Lighting new cigarettes,
pouring more
drinks.

It has been a beautiful
fight.

Still
is.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

Drink, Light, Fight

“Solemnity, I don't know what it's for. I mean, what is the point of it? The two most beautiful memorial services that I've ever attended both had a lot of humor. It somehow freed us all and made the services inspiring and cathartic. But solemnity, it serves pomposity. The self important always know at some level of their consciousness that their egotism is going to be punctured by humor. That's why they see it as a threat! And so, dishonestly, they pretend that their deficiency makes their views more substantial.”

John Cleese (1939) actor from England

Memory

“I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.”

Virginia Woolf book The Voyage Out

Source: The Voyage Out

World, Music, Feeling

“Christ did not die for the good and beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt.”

Shūsaku Endō book Silence

Source: Silence

Christ

“You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

World, Singing, Dance, Parting

“It is foolish to wish for beauty. Sensible people never either desire it for themselves or care about it in others. If the mind be but well cultivated, and the heart well disposed, no one ever cares for the exterior.”

Anne Brontë book Agnes Grey

Source: Agnes Grey

People, Heart

“In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

St. 5 Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), A Prayer For My Daughter http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1421/ Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats Context: In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned; Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned By those that are not entirely beautiful; Yet many, that have played the fool For beauty’s very self, has charm made wise. And many a poor man that has roved, Loved and thought himself beloved, From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

Learning, Heart

“I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity. I am at ease in my generation.”

Emile Zola (1840–1902) French writer (1840-1902)

"My Hates" (1866).

Life, Perfection

“Nefertiti, the most beautiful calico in the world, chose me as her own six short years ago.”

P. C. Cast (1960) American writer

World

“Oh, I don’t mean you’re handsome, not the way people think of handsome. Your face seems kind. But your eyes - they’re beautiful. They’re wild, crazy, like some animal peering out of a forest on fire.”

Charles Bukowski book Women

Source: Women

People, Way, Thinking, Animals

“How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

When You Are Old http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1756/, st. 1–3 The Rose (1893) Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats Context: p>When you are old and gray and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.</p

Love, Soul, Change, Falseness

“One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Source: The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Six, 1936-1941

Feeling

“A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful.”

Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) American illustrator and writer of children's books

Life, Books, Way, Lovers

“Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.”

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

World, Art

“I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.”

John Fowles book The Collector

Source: The Collector

Understanding, Thinking

“The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty and to someone else if she is plain.”

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

Algernon, Act I
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

Love, Making love, Way

“I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.”

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

Money, Sex, Nature

“But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“O! she doth teach the torches to burn bright
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear;
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.

- Romeo”

William Shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet

Source: Romeo and Juliet

Night

“Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women's husbands.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Women

“Though there were moments of beauty, Mariam knew for the most part that life had been unkind to her.”

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns

Life, Parting

“I'm not much to look at", replied Elizabeth, "but I'm beautiful inside.”

Edna Ferber (1885–1968) Novelist, playwright

Source: Half Portions

“But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know--from experience--how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and…”

Graham Greene book The Power and the Glory

Source: The Power and the Glory

Angels, Light

“I guess I’m just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.”

S.J. Perelman (1904–1979) American humorist, author, and screenwriter

"Captain Future, Block That Kick!," The New Yorker (20 January 1940) p. 23 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1940/01/20/captain-future-block-that-kick Published in book form under the same title in The Most of S. J. Perelman (1992) p. 71

Law, Girl, Waiting, Madness

“You have to believe it and you hate it. I don't have to and I think it's beautiful.”

Katherine Paterson book Bridge to Terabithia

Source: Bridge to Terabithia

Hate, Thinking

“The swan who goes on living in its parents' tree will die; this is why those who are beautiful and talented bear the burden of finding their own way in the world.”

Arthur Golden (1956) American novelist

World, Way, Parent, Tree

“I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction of costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don't know where. I only know it isn't where women think.”

Marguerite Duras book The Lover

Source: The Lover

Women, Problem, Thinking, Clothes

“Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.”

Virginia Woolf book Night and Day

Source: Night and Day

Winter

“The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

Love, World, Courage, Laughter

“In each little life, we can see great truth and beauty, and in each little life we glimpse the way of all things in the universe. If we alow ourselves to be enchanted by the beauty of the ordinary, we begin to see that all things extraordinary.”

Dean Koontz (1945) American author

Source: A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog

Life, Truth, Way, Universe

“Let your beauty manifest itself
without talking and calculation.
You are silent. It says for you: I am.
And comes in meaning thousandfold,
comes at long last over everyone.”

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

“I don’t want to get old.”
“You won’t get old. Life will pass over your face, that will be all, and it will become more beautiful. One is old only when one no longer feels.”
“No. When one no longer loves.”

Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) German novelist

Source: Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

Love, Life, Feeling

“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Source: The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

Wise, Life, Life, Courage

“The beauty of love.
The love of beauty.
The greener you are, the wiser you will be.”

Bob Marley (1945–1981) Jamaican singer, songwriter, musician

Love

“For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.”

Sam Levenson (1911–1980) American journalist

Deep, Beauty, Happy, Friendship

“Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

Life, Penalty

“Mathematics rightly viewed possesses not only truth but supreme beauty.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1900s, "The Study of Mathematics" (November 1907)
Context: Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to be assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement.

Truth, Mathematics

“It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.
I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.”

Frank O'Hara book Meditations in an Emergency (book)

Source: Meditations in an Emergency

Appearance, Reading

“It's so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won't be awake for another five hours, but I can't help feeling that we're sharing this clear and beautiful morning.”

Jonathan Safran Foer (1977) Novelist

Feeling, Sun, Help

“In difficult times carry something beautiful in your heart.”

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

Time, Heart

“Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Hope

“To be so lovely and so lost. To be all answerful with all that knowing trapped inside. To be beautiful and broken.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Slow Regard of Silent Things

Source: The Slow Regard of Silent Things

Love

“The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.”

Oscar Wilde book De Profundis

Source: De Profundis

People, Suffering

“One frequently only finds out how really beautiful a women is, until
after considerable acquaintance with her.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Women

“It's so freeing, it's beautiful in a way, to have a great failure, there's nowhere to go but up.”

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

Way, Failure

“One evening, I sat Beauty in my lap. — And I found her bitter. — And I cursed her.”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

Un soir, j'ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux. - Et je l'ai trouvée amère. Et je l'ai injuriée. Une Saison en Enfer http://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/Season.html (A Season in Hell) (1873)

“But there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere.”

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

“My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go. The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

World, Autumn, Nature, Water

“Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, to-day's civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

People, Age, World, Fear

“Look closely. The beautiful may be small.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

“Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart..”

Pablo Casals (1876–1973) Catalan cellist and conductor

Music, Way, Heart

“Whence arises all that order and beauty we see in the world?”

Isaac Newton book Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light

Source: Opticks

World

“With the possible exception of clothes, beauty salons and Frank Sinatra, there are few subjects all women agree upon.”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

Source: Memoirs Of A Mangy Lover

Women, Clothes

“It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them. How can we ever be satisfied without them until our feelings are deadened?”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Hunger, Feeling

“Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.”

Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993) American writer

Christmas, World, Christmas

“The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Victor Frankenstein in Ch. 5

Life, Health, Dreams, Feeling

“Forgetfulness heals everything and song is the most beautiful manner of forgetting, for in song man feels only what he loves.”

Ivo Andrič book The Bridge on the Drina

Source: The Bridge on the Drina

Love, Feeling, Forgetting

“I am no longer alone with myself, and I can only artificially recall the scary and beautiful feeling of solitude. This is the shadow side of the fortune of love.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Love, Feeling, Solitude

“If you have a beautiful face you don’t need fake boobs to get anyone’s attention”

Paris Hilton (1981) American socialite

“… the moon that hung over the garden like some great priceless pearl, flawed and blemished with grey shadowy ridges as only a very great beauty can risk being.”

Anita Desai (1937) Indian novelist

“If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.”

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

Source: Ariel: The Restored Edition

Smile

“I've not much interest in the important things of life. Only in the beautiful things. Just this lilac here makes me happy.”

Erich Maria Remarque book Three Comrades

Source: Three Comrades

Life, Happiness

“Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Life, People, World, Music

“A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Disappointment

“All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

“Fire Lookout: Numa Ridge”, p. 57
The Journey Home (1977)
Source: The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West

Love, Life, Art, Nature

“The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Source: Twilight of the Idols

Faith, Strong

“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius”

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

Inspirational, Attitude, Beauty, For women

“What more could you want? How about dominion over this 'beautiful place'? Beauty doesn't last. Friends and family decay. Power is the only thing that goes on forever."
Jack answered with his gut. "No, love goes on forever.”

P. C. Cast book Awakened

Source: Awakened

Love, Family

“I had on a beautiful red dress, but what I saw was even more valuable. I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me. I was like the wind.
-Lindo”

Amy Tan The Joy Luck Club

American Acheivement interview (1996)
Source: The Joy Luck Club
Context: Reading for me was a refuge. I could escape from everything that was miserable in my life and I could be anyone I wanted to be in a story, through a character. It was almost sinful how much I liked it. That's how I felt about it. If my parents knew how much I loved it, I thought they would take it away from me. I think I was also blessed with a very wild imagination because I can remember, when I was at an age before I could read, that I could imagine things that weren't real and whatever my imagination saw is what I actually saw. Some people would say that was psychosis but I prefer to say it was the beginning of a writer's imagination. If I believed that insects had eyes and mouths and noses and could talk, that's what they did. If I thought I could see devils dancing out of the ground, that's what I saw. If I thought lightning had eyes and would follow me and strike me down, that's what would happen. And I think I needed an outlet for all that imagination, so I found it in books.

Strong

“turn him into stars and form a constellation in his image. His face will make the heavens so beautiful that the world will fall in love with the night and forget about the garish sun.”

William Shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet

Source: Romeo and Juliet

Love, World, Star, Sun

“She is a peacock in everything but beauty!”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Art

“Because of your smile, you make life more beautiful.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Beauty, Cute, For Her, Life

“I think, that if I touched the earth,
It would crumble;
It is so sad and beautiful,
So tremulously like a dream.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

Sadness, Dreams, Thinking

“Live quietly in the moment and see the beauty of all before you. The future will take care of itself……”

Paramahansa Yogananda book Autobiography of a Yogi

Source: Autobiography of a Yogi

Beauty, Future

“This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.”

Isaac Newton book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica

Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), Scholium Generale (1713; 1726)
Source: The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
Context: This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. And if the fixed Stars are the centers of other like systems, these being form'd by the like wise counsel, must be all subject to the dominion of One; especially, since the light of the fixed Stars is of the same nature with the light of the Sun, and from every system light passes into all the other systems. And lest the systems of the fixed Stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other mutually, he hath placed those Systems at immense distances one from another.

Powerful, Intelligence, Sun

“I found myself staring at her, which was stupid since I'd seen her a billion times. Still, she seemed so much more mature. It was kind of intimidating. I mean, sure, she'd always been cute, but she was starting to be seriously beautiful.”

Rick Riordan book The Last Olympian

Source: The Last Olympian

Stupidity, Time

“the voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls”

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

Soul

“Once you realize that the road is the goal and that you are always on the road, not to reach a goal, but to enjoy its beauty and its wisdom, life ceases to be a task and becomes natural and simple, in itself an ecstasy.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Life, Wisdom, Nature

“How terrible this darkness was, how bewildering, and yet mysteriously beautiful!”

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) Austrian writer

Source: The Burning Secret and other stories

“I was trying to prove to them and to myself that I was still who I had always been. I was beautiful, if fat. I was smart, if loud. I was good, if ruined.”

Alice Sebold book Lucky

Source: Lucky

“You must find a boy your own age. Someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered. Someone whose fingers are a poem.”

Janet Fitch book White Oleander

Source: White Oleander

Age, Boy, Lovers

“Have regular hours for work and play; make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will bring few regrets, and life will become a beautiful success.”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Source: Little Women

Back To Work, Life, Youth, Understanding

“Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace'

One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand cafe in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups.

One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you.

One fine day.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919) American artist, writer and activist

Love, Coffee, Tree, Strong

“I can't listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

From a personal conversation, quoted from memory by Maxim Gorky in "V.I. Lenin" (1924) http://www.marxists.org/archive/gorky-maxim/1924/01/x01.htm  Attributions Context: I know of nothing better than the Appassionata and could listen to it every day. What astonishing, superhuman music! It always makes me proud, perhaps with a childish naiveté, to think that people can work such miracles! … But I can’t listen to music very often, it affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things, and pat the little heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. These days, one can’t pat anyone on the head nowadays, they might bite your hand off. Hence, you have to beat people's little heads, beat mercilessly, although ideally we are against doing any violence to people. Hm — what a devillishly difficult job!

People, Stupidity, Music, Hell