Quotes about beauty
page 6

“Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“If you think you are big, you become small. If you know you are nothing, you become unlimited. That’s the beauty of being a human being.”

Sadhguru (1957) Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian

Source: Pebbles Of Wisdom

Thinking

“I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Way, Sleep, Tree

“Battle scars from the war of good versus evil have a unique beauty all their own.”

P. C. Cast book Hunted

Source: Hunted

War, Evil

“True beauty springs from the heart and dwells in the eyes.”

Judith McNaught (1944) American writer

Spring, Heart

“There is a certain standard of grace and beauty which consists in a certain relation between our nature… and the thing which pleases us.”

Blaise Pascal Pensées

Source: Pensées

Nature

“Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be happy," said my father as he watched the three beauties. "But it seems only idiots are ever happy. How can we explain this?”

Orhan Pamuk book The Museum of Innocence

Source: The Museum of Innocence

Life, Intelligence, Personality, Happiness

“I don't know when we'll see each other again or what the world will be like when we do. We may both have seen many horrible things. But I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

World, Thinking, Time

“You are more to me than any of them has any idea; you are the atmosphere of beauty through which I see life; you are the incarnation of all lovely things… I think of you day and night. ~ Letter to Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Love, Life, Idea, Thinking

“Whatever the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth -whether it existed before or not”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Truth, Imagination

“Every development of truths which relate to human nature, and more especially its active manifestations, is attended with a wish to see worked out in practice what theory has shown us to be just and good. To man, whose mind is seldom satisfied with the calmly beneficent influence of abstract ideas, this desire is perfectly natural, and it increases in liveliness with the spirit of benevolent sympathy in social happiness and well-being. But, however natural in itself, and however noble in its origin, this desire has not unfrequently led to hurtful consequences,—nay, often to greater evils than the colder indifference, or (as from the very opposite cause the same effect may follow) the glowing enthusiasm, which, comparatively heedless of reality, delights only in the pure beauty of ideas.”

Wilhelm Von Humboldt (1767–1835) German (Prussian) philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the University of Berlin

Source: The Limits of State Action (1792), Ch. 16

Truth, Idea, Nature, Reality

“Oh, I love London society! It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what society should be.”

Oscar Wilde An Ideal Husband

Mabel Chiltern, Act I
An Ideal Husband (1895)

Love

“When the Statue of Liberty emerged from the mists I gazed at it with an awe close to the sublime. It seemed to me to be the embodiment of all the beauty and magnificence with which I had invested America in my dreams. I had been a little bit afraid that America wouldn't be what I had dreamed--and here was a dream come triumphantly true.”

Antonio Moreno (1887–1967) Spanish-American film actor and director

Dreams

“The prince says that the world will be saved by beauty! And I maintain that the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky book The Idiot

...князь утверждает, что мир спасет красота! А я утверждаю, что у него оттого такие игривые мысли, что он теперь влюблен.
The Idiot (1868–9)

Love, World, Idea

“May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.”

W.B. Yeats book Michael Robartes and the Dancer

St. 3 Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), A Prayer For My Daughter http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1421/

Nature, Heart

“The one piece of advice I would give to any actor is, if you want to go out on the street without being recognised, without even being looked at, go out with a 6ft 8in beautiful transsexual. No one gives you a second glance. Especially when you're 5ft 5in.”

Daniel Radcliffe (1989) English actor

Guardian interview, Saturday 4 July 2009 http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jul/04/daniel-radcliffe-harry-potter-jk-rowling

“The character I have in view when I say "smug vulgarian" is, thus, not the part-time philistine, but the total type, the genteel bourgeois, the complete universal product of triteness and mediocrity. He is the conformist, the man who conforms to his group, and he also is typified by something else: he is a pseudo-idealist, he is pseudo-compassionate, he is pseudo-wise. The fraud is the closest ally of the true philistine. All such great words as "Beauty," "Love," "Nature," "Truth," and so on become masks and dupes when the smug vulgarian employs them. … The philistine likes to impress and he likes to be impressed, in consequence of which a world of deception, of mutual cheating, is formed by him and around him.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lectures on Russian Literature

Lectures on Russian Literature (1982)

Love, Truth, World, Fraud

“Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare.”

Mark Twain book Following the Equator

Source: Following the Equator (1897), Ch. XLI

“I admire Tebaldi's tone; it's beautiful — also some beautiful phrasing. Sometimes, I actually wish I had her voice.”

Maria Callas (1923–1977) American-born Greek operatic soprano

Discussing rival soprano Renata Tebaldi, in a television interview with Norman Ross, Chicago (17 November 1957)

“Beautiful is what we see, More Beautiful is what we know, most Beautiful by far is what we don't.”

Nicolas Steno (1638–1686) Pioneer in anatomy and geology, bishop

quoted by Addison Anderson in a TED-Ed lesson. https://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-most-groundbreaking-scientist-you-ve-never-heard-of-addison-anderson

“I'm guided by a signal in the heavens
I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin
I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.”

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

"First We Take Manhattan"
I'm Your Man (1988)

“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.”

Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) American writer

Originates in a 2007 blog post by Iain S. Thomas entitled The Fur http://www.iwrotethisforyou.me/2007/08/fur.html Misattributed

Pain, Hate, World

“However—the crucial thing is my lack of interest in ordinary life. No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it—and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order… defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law… are concerned. Just why this is so I haven't the slightest idea—it simply is so. I am interested only in broad pageants—historic streams—orders of biological, chemical, physical, and astronomical organisation—and the only conflict which has any deep emotional significance to me is that of the principle of freedom or irregularity or adventurous opportunity against the eternal and maddening rigidity of cosmic law… especially the laws of time…. Hence the type of thing I try to write. Naturally, I am aware that this forms a very limited special field so far as mankind en masse is concerned; but I believe (as pointed out in that Recluse article) that the field is an authentic one despite its subordinate nature. This protest against natural law, and tendency to weave visions of escape from orderly nature, are characteristic and eternal factors in human psychology, even though very small ones. They exist as permanent realities, and have always expressed themselves in a typical form of art from the earliest fireside folk tales and ballads to the latest achievements of Blackwood and Machen or de la Mare or Dunsany. That art exists—whether the majority like it or not. It is small and limited, but real—and there is no reason why its practitioners should be ashamed of it. Naturally one would rather be a broad artist with power to evoke beauty from every phase of experience—but when one unmistakably isn't such an artist, there's no sense in bluffing and faking and pretending that one is.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to E. Hoffmann Price (15 August 1934) , quoted in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters edited by S.T. Joshi, p. 268
Non-Fiction, Letters, to E. Hoffmann Price

Life, Law, Art, Idea

“Our admiration for natural beauty /…/ cares not to understand either the physical theories which explain what it admires, or the psychological theories which explain its admiration. It does not deny the truth of the first, nor (within due limits) the sufficiency of the second. But it requires more. It feels itself belittled unless conscious purpose can be found somewhere in its pedigree. Physics and psycho-physics, by themselves, suffice not. It longs to regard beauty as a revelation—a revelation from spirit to spirit, not from one kind of atomic agitation to the "psychic" accompaniment of another. On this condition only can its highest values be maintained.'”

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

Theism and humanism

Truth, Feeling, Understanding, Nature

“It is the pain, it is the pain, endures.
Your chemic beauty burned my muscles through.
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.”

William Empson (1906–1984) English literary critic and poet

"Villanelle" (1928), line 1; cited from John Haffenden (ed.) The Complete Poems (London: Allen Lane, 2000) p. 33.
The Complete Poems

Pain

“If you transmit the rays of the sun through a hole in the shape of a star you will see a beautiful effect of perspective in the spot where the sun's rays fall.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), III Six books on Light and Shade

Star, Sun

“I trust in Nature for the stable laws
Of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant
And Autumn garner to the end of time.
I trust in God,—the right shall be the right
And other than the wrong, while he endures.
I trust in my own soul, that can perceive
The outward and the inward,—Nature's good
And God's.”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

A Soul's Tragedy (1846), Act. i.

God, Law, Soul, Spring

“O the idea was childish, but divinely beautiful.”

Friedrich Schiller Don Carlos

Act I, sc. ii
Don Carlos (1787)

Idea

“Academic training in beauty is a sham. We have been deceived… The beauties of the Parthenon, Venuses, Nymphs, Narcissuses are so many lies. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

1930s, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35
Source: Herschel Browning Chip (1968, p. 271), quoted in Chipp (1978, 266); As cited in: Constance Milbrath (1998), Patterns of Artistic Development in Children, p. 257.

Art, Training

“Now the compound or composite may be supposed to be naturally capable of being dissolved in like manner as being compounded; but that which is uncompounded, and that only, must be, if anything is, indissoluble. …And the uncompounded may be assumed to be the same and unchanging, where the compound is always changing and never the same? …Is that idea or essence, which in the dialectical process we define as essence of true existence—whether essence of equality, beauty, or anything else: are these essences, I say, liable at times to some degree of change? or are they each of them always what they are, having the same simple, self-existent and unchanging forms, and not admitting of variation at all, or in any way, or at any time?”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Way, Idea, Nature, Change

“That which God said to the rose,
and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty,
He said to my heart,
and made it a hundred times more beautiful.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

III, 4129
Jewels of Remembrance (1996)

God, Time, Heart

“It is, indeed an incredible fact that what the human mind, at its deepest and most profound, perceives as beautiful finds its realization in external nature.… What is intelligible is also beautiful.”

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910–1995) physicist

From a lecture, "Beauty and the Quest for Beauty in Science" given at the International Symposium in recognition of Robert R. Wilson on April 27, 1979 at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Illinois.

Intelligence, Nature

“We gather here in memory of 20 beautiful children and six remarkable adults. They lost their lives in a school that could have been any school in a quiet town full of good and decent people that could be any town in America.
Here in Newtown, I come to offer the love and prayers of a nation. I am very mindful that mere words cannot match the depths of your sorrow, nor can they heal your wounded hearts.
I can only hope it helps for you to know that you’re not alone in your grief, that our world, too, has been torn apart, that all across this land of ours, we have wept with you. We’ve pulled our children tight.
And you must know that whatever measure of comfort we can provide, we will provide. Whatever portion of sadness that we can share with you to ease this heavy load, we will gladly bear it. Newtown, you are not alone.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2012, Sandy Hook Prayer Vigil (December 2012)

Love, Children, People, World

“The vicious lover is the follower of earthly Love who desires the body rather than the soul; his heart is set on what is mutable and must therefore be inconstant. And as soon as the body he loves begins to pass the first flower of its beauty, he "spreads his wings and flies away," giving the lie to all his pretty speeches and dishonoring his vows, whereas the lover whose heart is touched by moral beauties is constant all his life, for he has become one with what will never fade.”

Plato (-427–-347 BC) Classical Greek philosopher

183e, M. Joyce, trans, Collected Dialogues of Plato (1961), p. 537
The Symposium

Love, Life, Lie, Soul

“I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.”

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

1960s, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1967-1969)

Wisdom, Hate, World, Imagination

“Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty — he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world — alas! only a very human, an all too human, beauty.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Expeditions of an Untimely Man, 19
Twilight of the Idols (1888)

World, Forgetting

“Once centenarian teacher who had the body of an adolescent told me he had studied martial arts. "Me, too," I answered. We were in Notre Dame, and he said, "Attack me." I put myself in a combat position, and he moved his left hand in such an incredibly beautiful way that while I looked at it, fascinated, he gave me a big slap. "Beauty is the most dangerous weapon," he warned. It took me a long time to understand. He used a secret Chinese practice, which consists of drawing a snake in the air with your hand to distract the enemy. And that is how beauty is: the most awful weapon.”

Alejandro Jodorowsky (1929) Filmmaker and comics writer

Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy (2010)

Secret, Art, Way, Understanding

“I don’t consider my own clothing to be outrageous… The truth is that people just don’t have the same references that I do. To me it’s very beautiful and it’s art, and to them it’s outrageous and crazy.”

Lady Gaga (1986) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Lady Gaga, in V Magazine http://www.vmagazine.com/fashion_article.php?n=13327.

People, Truth, Art, Clothes

“Beauty is something animal, the beautiful is something celestial.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Animals

“However great a woman may be, she must place herself before her husband in this way; that is to say, she must be ready to carry out her husband’s orders and please him in all circumstances. Then her life will be successful. When the wife becomes as irritable as the husband, their life at home is sure to be disturbed or ultimately completely broken. In the modern day, the wife is never submissive, and therefore home life is broken even by slight incidents. Either the wife or the husband may take advantage of the divorce laws. According to the Vedic law, however, there is no such thing as divorce laws, and a woman must be trained to be submissive to the will of her husband. Westerners contend that this is a slave mentality for the wife, but factually it is not; it is the tactic by which a woman can conquer the heart of her husband, however irritable or cruel he may be. In this case we clearly see that although Cyavana Muni was not young but indeed old enough to be Sukanya’s grandfather and was also very irritable, Sukanya, the beautiful young daughter of a king, submitted herself to her old husband and tried to please him in all respects. Thus she was a faithful and chaste wife.”

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977) Indian guru

Srimad Bhagavatam, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1999. Canto 9, Chapter 6, verse 53, purport. Vedabase http://www.vedabase.com/en/sb/9/6/53 Quotes from Books: Loving God, Quotes from Books: Regression of Women's Rights

Life, Faith, Law, Way

“Some Saian mountaineer
Struts today with my shield.
I threw it down by a bush and ran
When the fighting got hot.
Life seemed somehow more precious.
It was a beautiful shield.
I know where I can buy another
Exactly like it, just as round.”

Archilochus (-680–-645 BC) Ancient Greek lyric poet

Fragments
Variant: A Saian boasts about the shield which beside a bush
though good armour I unwillingly left behind.
I saved myself, so what do I care about the shield?
To hell with it! I'll get one soon just as good.
Variant: I don't give a damn if some Thracian ape strut
Proud of that first-rate shield the bushes got.
Leaving it was hell, but in a tricky spot
I kept my hide intact. Good shields can be bought. (as translated by Stuart Silverman)
Variant: Let who will boast their courage in the field,
I find but little safety from my shield.
Nature's, not honour's, law we must obey:
This made me cast my useless shield away,
And by a prudent flight and cunning save
A life, which valour could not, from the grave.
A better buckler I can soon regain;
But who can get another life again?

Life, Mountain, Fight

“I don't work that way. Part of it has to do with an idea of beauty. Sunsets, flowers, landscapes: these kinds of things don't move me to do anything. I just want to leave them alone. My work comes out of being frustrated about the human condition. And about how people refuse to understand other people. And about how people can be cruel to each other. It’s not that I think I can change that, but it’s such a frustrating part of human history”

Bruce Nauman (1941) American artist

Source: Robert C. Morgan (2002). Bruce Nauman, p. 281

People, Way, History, Flowers

“Germany appeared in my eyes a very tiny portion of the earth. I had emerged from abstract Mysticism, and I learnt a love for Matter. Beauty of material and brilliancy of wit were lordly things to me: as regards my beloved music, I found them both among the Frenchmen and Italians. I forswore my model, Beethoven; his last Symphony I deemed the keystone of a whole great epoch of art, beyond whose limits no man could hope to press, and within which no man could attain to independence.”

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) German composer, conductor

Autobiographical Sketch (1843)

Love, Hope, Art, Music

“What we celebrate today is not a victory of party or of individuals. What we celebrate is a beginning as well as an end; a change as well as a restoration. A beginning to end poverty, and misery; a beginning to end ignorance and hopelessness; and a beginning to restore all that is good, beautiful and sublime in our lives as one people under God.”

Bukola Saraki (1962) Nigerian politician

Inaugural Address (2003)

God, People, Change, Victory

“As I conclude I reflect on my childhood experience when I would visit a stream next to our home to fetch water for my mother. I would drink water straight from the stream. Playing among the arrowroot leaves I tried in vain to pick up the strands of frogs’ eggs, believing they were beads. But every time I put my little fingers under them they would break. Later, I saw thousands of tadpoles: black, energetic and wriggling through the clear water against the background of the brown earth. This is the world I inherited from my parents. Today, over 50 years later, the stream has dried up, women walk long distances for water, which is not always clean, and children will never know what they have lost. The challenge is to restore the home of the tadpoles and give back to our children a world of beauty and wonder.”

Wangari Maathai (1940–2011) Kenyan environmental and political activist

Nobel lecture http://nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/2004/maathai-lecture.html (10 December 2004)

Women, Children, World, Home

“Some say that no machine conceived to kill could ever be called beautiful. Magnificent, maybe, and awesome perhaps. But not beautiful. The thing is though that in the battleship's short life of just 90 years it turned out to be a less effective killing machine than amost any other weapon of war. All they did was steam around the oceans, making the people who paid for them feel good.”

Jeremy Clarkson (1960) English broadcaster, journalist and writer

I Know You Got Soul (2004)

Life, War, People, Feeling

“Life, even the hardest life, is the most beautiful, wonderful, and miraculous treasure in the world.”

Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968) American sociologist

Source: The Ways and Power of Love (1954), p. xi

Life, World

“The beauty of America, neither cool jazz nor devoured Egyptian
heroes, lies in
lives in the darkness I inhabit in the midst of sterile millions.”

Frank O'Hara (1926–1966) American poet, art critic and writer

Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets (l. 34-36) (1960).

“This was the method which I adopted: I first assumed some principle which I judged to be the strongest, and then I affirmed as true whatever seemed to agree with this, whether relating to the cause or to anything else; and that which disagreed I regarded as untrue. …I want to show you the nature of that cause which has occupied my thoughts, and I shall have to go back to those familiar words which are in the mouth of everyone, and first of all assume that there is an absolute beauty and goodness and greatness, and the like; grant me this, and I hope to be able to show you the nature of the cause, and to prove the immortality of the soul.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Hope, Soul, Nature

“O tender yearning, sweet hoping!
The golden time of first love!
The eye sees the open heaven,
The heart is intoxicated with bliss;
O that the beautiful time of young love
Could remain green forever.”

Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright

The Song of the Bell (1799)

Love, Hope, Time, Heart

“Beauty is but the cloak of happiness. Where joy tarries, there also is beauty.”

Ludwig Klages (1872–1956) German psychologist and philosopher

Source: Rhythmen und Runen (1944), p. 468

Joy, Happiness

“O Night! most beautiful and rare!
Thou givest the heavens their holiest hue,
And through the azure fields of air
Bring’st down the gentle dew.”

Thomas Buchanan Read (1822–1872) American artist

Night.

Night

“The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky.”

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

The Wild Swans At Coole http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1712/, st. 1 The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)

Autumn, Tree, Water

“Not that I rise against thee, Poetry,
Mother of Beauty, of ideal Life!
But I must pity him condemned to dwell
Within the limits of these whirling worlds
In dying agonies, or yet to be,
Doomed to sad memories, or prophecies,
Perchance remorse, or vague presentiments,—
Who gives himself to thee! for everywhere
Thou ruinest wholly those who consecrate
Themselves, with all they are, to thee alone,
Who solely live the voices of thy glory!”

Zygmunt Krasiński (1812–1859) One of Poland's three national bards

The Undivine Comedy

Life, World, Sadness, Memory

“The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Sevastopol in May (1855), Ch. 16

Love, Truth, Soul

“I never knew a writer's wife who wasn't beautiful.”

Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) American writer

Preface
Welcome to the Monkey House (1968)

“Freedom exalts power; and, as is always the collateral effect of increasing strength, tends to induce a spirit of liberality. Coercion stifles power, and engenders all selfish desires, and all the mean artifices of weakness. Coercion may prevent many transgressions; but it robs even actions which are legal of a portion of their beauty. Freedom may lead to many transgressions, but it lends even to vices a less ignoble form.”

Wilhelm Von Humboldt (1767–1835) German (Prussian) philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the University of Berlin

Source: The Limits of State Action (1792), Ch. 8

Freedom, Selfishness

“I never believed from the day that I met you
A loser like me could ever get you
When we go out I hear people saying
"What's that beautiful girl doing with him?"”

Tom Odell (1990) British singer-songwriter

Jealousy
Lyrics, Wrong Crowd

People, Girl

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Hurtful, Hurt

“A 'civilization' that makes such a ridiculous fuss about alleged 'war crimes' -- acts of violence against the actual or potential enemies of one's cause -- and tolerates slaughterhouses and vivisection laboratories, and circuses and the fur industry (infliction of pain upon creatures that can never be for or against any cause), does not deserve to live. Out with it! Blessed the day it will destroy itself, so that a healthy, hard, frank and brave, nature-loving and truth-loving élite of supermen with a life-centered faith,-- a natural human aristocracy, as beautiful, on its own higher level, as the four-legged kings of the jungle -- might again rise, and rule upon its ruins, for ever!”

Savitri Devi (1905–1982) Greek–French writer

Impeachment of Man (Calcutta: Savitri Devi Mukherji, 1959, p. x, http://www.savitridevi.org/impeachment-preface.html)

Love, Life, Pain, War

“When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madness like the small drops of water torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victim's body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods.”

H.P. Lovecraft book Ex Oblivione

"Ex Oblivione" - First published in The United Amateur, 20, No. 4 (March 1921)
Fiction

Love, Life, Dreams, Sleep

“Rumfoord had known that Constant would try to debase the picture by using it in commerce. Constant’s father had done a similar thing when he found he could not buy Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” at any price. The old man had punished Mona Lisa by having her used in an advertising campaign for suppositories. It was the free-enterprise way of handling beauty that threatened to get the upper hand.”

Kurt Vonnegut book The Sirens of Titan

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 2 “Cheers in the Wirehouse” (p. 56)

Way

“To dwell on a heath without studying its meanings was like wedding a foreigner without learning his tongue. The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapours. An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy woman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine.”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Bk. I, ch. 7
The Return of the Native (1878)

Study, Wedding, Suffering, Learning

“In Art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them. They endure them as the inevitable, and, as they cannot mar them, they mouth about them…A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions - one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral.”

Oscar Wilde book The Soul of Man under Socialism

The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

Stupidity, Art, Appearance

“Cause maybe you're loveable.
Maybe you're my snowflake.
And your eyes turn from green to gray.
And in the winter I'll hold you in a cold place.
And you should never cut your hair,
'Cause I love the way you flick it off your shoulder.And you will never know
Just how beautiful you are to me.
But maybe I'm just in love
When you wake me up.”

Ed Sheeran (1991) English singer-songwriter and producer

Wake Me Up, written with Jake Gosling
Song lyrics, + (2011)

Love, Way, Winter

“But since, if the usefulness of the legislation, and the sequence and beauty of the history, were universally evident of itself, we should not believe that any other thing could be understood in the Scriptures save what was obvious, the word of God has arranged that certain stumbling-blocks, as it were, and offences, and impossibilities, should be introduced into the midst of the law and the history, in order that we may not, through being drawn away in all directions by the merely attractive nature of the language, either altogether fall away from the (true) doctrines, as learning nothing worthy of God, or, by not departing from the letter, come to the knowledge of nothing more divine.”

Origen (185–254) Christian scholar in Alexandria

On First Principles, Bk. 4, ch. 2, par. 15
On First Principles

God, Law, History, Knowledge

“He that prefers the beautiful to the useful in life will, undoubtedly, like children who prefer sweetmeats to bread, destroy his digestion and acquire a very fretful outlook on the world.”

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

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

Life, Children, World

“Beauty can pierce one like pain.”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

Buddenbrooks [Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie, Roman], Pt 11, Ch. 2

Pain

“Economics is organized common sense. Here is a short list of valuable lessons that our beautiful subject teaches.”

Thomas J. Sargent (1943) American economist

Thomas J. Sargent, University of California at Berkeley graduation speech (2007), quoted in David Glasner, " Memo to Tom Sargent: Economics Is More than Just Common Sense https://uneasymoney.com/2014/04/25/memo-to-tom-sargent-economics-is-more-than-just-common-sense/" (2014)

Sense

“Under each arm he carries an umbrella; one of them, with pictures on the inside, he spreads over the good children, and then they dream the most beautiful stories the whole night. But the other umbrella has no pictures, and this he holds over the naughty children so that they sleep heavily, and wake in the morning without having dreamed at all.”

Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) Danish author, fairy tale writer, and poet

Ole-Lukøie
Fairy Tales (1835)

Children, Dreams, Sleep, Night

“I am weary, having worked without a break all day; how beautiful it is here, to be sure, but how difficult to paint! I can see what I want to do quite clearly but I'm not there yet. It's so clear and pure in its pink and blues that the slightest misjudged stroke looks like a smudge of dirt... I have fourteen canvases underway.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

Monet's quote in a letter from Cote d'Azure to his second wife Alice Hoschedé, (ca. 1886): K.E. Sullivan. Monet: Discovering Art, Brockhampton press, London (2004), p. 55
1870 - 1890

Painting

“They went into my closets looking for skeletons, but thank God, all they found were shoes, beautiful shoes.”

Imelda Marcos (1929) Former First Lady of the Philippines

Statement made upon opening the Marikina City Footwear Museum in Manila, as quoted in "Homage to Imelda's shoes" at BBC News (16 February 2001) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1173911.stm.

God, Shoe

“I admire the proud and cold who go adventuring on the paths of great and demoniac beauty, and scorn "man" — but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet out of a man of letters, it is this plebeian love of mine for the human, living, and commonplace. All warmth, all goodness, all humor is born of it, and it almost seems to me as if it were that love itself, of which it is written that a man might speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and yet without it be no more than sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.”

Thomas Mann book Tonio Kröger

Source: Tonio Kröger (1903), Ch. 9, as translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan

Love, Men, Angels, Envy

“"Teddy — I suppose Mummy and Daddy are real, aren't they?"
Teddy said, "You ask such silly questions, David. Nobody knows what 'real' really means. Let's go indoors."
"First I'm going to have another rose!" Plucking a bright pink flower, he carried it with him into the house. It could lie on the pillow as he went to sleep. Its beauty and softness reminded him of Mummy.”

Brian W. Aldiss book Super-Toys Last All Summer Long

Super-Toys Last All Summer Long (1969)

Lie, Flowers, Question, Sleep

“Experience shows us that the air must have darkness beyond it and yet it appears blue. If you produce a small quantity of smoke from dry wood and the rays of the sun fall on this smoke, and if you then place behind the smoke a piece of black velvet on which the sun does not shine, you will see that all the smoke which is between the eye and the black stuff will appear of a beautiful blue colour. And if instead of the velvet you place a white cloth smoke, that is too thick smoke, hinders, and too thin smoke does not produce, the perfection of this blue colour. Hence a moderate amount of smoke produces the finest blue.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), VII On the Proportions and on the Movements of the Human Figure

Appearance, Sun, Perfection, Clothes

“The large-eyed daughter of Kuntibhoja, Pritha by name, was endued with beauty and every accomplishment. Of rigid vows, she was devoted to virtue and possessed of every good quality. Her father Kuntibhoja invited, O best of monarchs, the princes and kings of other countries and desired his daughter to select her husband from among her guests. The intelligent Kunti, entering the amphitheatre, beheld Pandu--the foremost of the Bharatas… The amiable daughter of Kuntibhoja… advancing with modesty,…placed the nuptial garland about Pandu's neck.”

Kunti character from Indian epic Mahabharata

Mahabharata translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli in: Mahabharata/Book 1: Adi Parva/Section CXII https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Mahabharata/Book_1:_Adi_Parva/Section_CXIIThe, Wikisource

Intelligence, Daughters, Country

“I'm very much alone all day, I read a litle but, in the long run, it gives me a headache. I draw and paint as much as I can, indeed till my hand grows tired, and when night begins to fall I hope Jeanne d'Armagnac [his cousin] will come to my bedside. She does sometimes, and cheers me up and plays with me, and I listen to her talk, without daring to look at her. She is so tall and so beautiful! And I am neither tall nor beautiful.”

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) French painter

The previous Summer, at Barèges, while he lay with his leg in plaster, Lautrec had often been visited in the evening by his cousin, Jeanne d'Armagnac
Source: 1879-1884, T-Lautrec, by Henri Perruchot, p. 53 - written note in Nice, Winter of 1880

Hope, Reading, Drawing, Painting

“Where the glacier meets the sky, the land ceases to be earthly, and the earth becomes one with the heavens; no sorrows live there anymore, and therefore joy is not necessary; beauty alone reigns there, beyond all demands.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Four: The Beauty of the Heavens

Joy

“.. the wish to produce beautiful things — when that wish is true and profound — falls together with [man's] striving for perfection.”

Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889–1943) Swiss artist

In Taeuber-Arp's article 'Remarks on the Instruction of Ornamental Design', in 'Bulletin de Tunion suisse des mattresses professionelles et menageres/ Korrespondenzblott' (Zurich), Jahrg. 14, no. 11 / 12 (Dec. 31 , 1922), p. 156

Perfection

“Every form of catechesis would do well to attend to the “way of beauty” (via pulchritudinis). Proclaiming Christ means showing that to believe in and to follow him is not only something right and true, but also something beautiful, capable of filling life with new splendour and profound joy, even in the midst of difficulties. Every expression of true beauty can thus be acknowledged as a path leading to an encounter with the Lord Jesus. This has nothing to do with fostering an aesthetic relativism which would downplay the inseparable bond between truth, goodness and beauty, but rather a renewed esteem for beauty as a means of touching the human heart and enabling the truth and goodness of the Risen Christ to radiate within it. If, as Saint Augustine says, we love only that which is beautiful, the incarnate Son, as the revelation of infinite beauty, is supremely lovable and draws us to himself with bonds of love. So a formation in the via pulchritudinis ought to be part of our effort to pass on the faith. Each particular Church should encourage the use of the arts in evangelization, building on the treasures of the past but also drawing upon the wide variety of contemporary expressions so as to transmit the faith in a new “language of parables”. We must be bold enough to discover new signs and new symbols, new flesh to embody and communicate the word, and different forms of beauty which are valued in different cultural settings, including those unconventional modes of beauty which may mean little to the evangelizers, yet prove particularly attractive for others.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

Section 167
2010s, 2013, Evangelii Gaudium · The Joy of the Gospel

Love, Life, Truth, Faith

“Once they knew each other it was more difficult, because it is difficult to love those we know well. To be in love is to be curious. A thing is only beautiful if we do not have surfeit of it, perhaps only what is new is beautiful; in any case we can only love what is new. In order to love people we have got to know too well, we must first of all forget them, not altogether but very nearly. This they learnt during the fortnight. They didn't tell each other that they had learnt it; they were careful, that is, untruthful. To be able to love someone a long time one must lie, quite often to oneself, but mostly to the person one loves.”

Stig Dagerman book A Burnt Child

Source: A Burnt Child (1948), p. 206

Love, People, Lie, Time

“A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That's how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.”

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) Russian composer and pianist

Letter to Isaac Glikman, August 28, 1955; Josiah Fisk & Jeff Nichols (eds.) Composers on Music (1997) p. 364.

Music

“It's like chasing a beautiful woman for 80 years. Finally, she relents and you say, "I am terribly sorry. I'm tired."”

Paul Newman (1925–2008) American actor and film director

Upon winning the 1986 Academy Award for Best Actor, (in The Color of Money), after having being nominated seven times; quoted in Tom O'Neil, "Gold Derby," http://goldderby.latimes.com/awards_goldderby/2006/09/an_oscar_finall.html, Los Angeles Times (2006-09-03)

“The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 75
The Book of Disquiet
Original: A beleza de um corpo nu só o sentem as raças vestidas.

“A black pall, you know, with a silver cross on it, or R. I. P. — requiescat in pace — you know. That seems to me the most beautiful expression — I like it much better than ‘He is a jolly good fellow,’ which is simply rowdy.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 5

“To me the most important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when you're traveling.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

'Edward Hopper in Saõ Paulo', as cited by William C. Seitz, Smithsonian Press, Washington D.C., 1967
posthumous

Travel, Sense

“Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.”

William Shakespeare book The Rape of Lucrece

The Rape of Lucrece (1594).

Men

“I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood, intruding into my relatively safe world, in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien book On Fairy-Stories

On Fairy-Stories (1939)

World, Fear, Peace, Imagination

“As a breeze or an echo rebounds from the smooth rocks and returns whence it came, so does the stream of beauty, passing through the eyes which are the windows of the soul, come back to the beautiful one.”

Plato book Phaedrus

255c
Phaedrus

Soul

“It was the White Race who produced men like Columbus who crossed the unknown Atlantic; men like Magellan who first circumnavigated the globe; men like Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Bernini, Rubens, Raphael and thousands of other geniuses who created beautiful and exquisite productions in the fields of sculpture and painting; geniuses like Beethoven, Bach, Wagner and Verdi who created beautiful music; men like James Watt who invented the steam engine; men like Daimler who invented and built the reciprocating internal combustion engine; production geniuses like Henry Ford, inventors like Thomas Edison; such a prodigal genius as Nikola Tesla in the field of physics and electricity; literary geniuses like Shakespeare, Goethe and thousands of others, untold geniuses in the fields of mathematics, in the fields of chemistry and physics.”

Ben Klassen (1918–1993) American engineer, author and politician

Nature's Eternal Religion (1973), Ch. 2, Paragraph 4
Nature's Eternal Religion (1973)

Men, Music, Mathematics, Painting

“Most men are scantily nourished on a modicum of happiness and a number of empty thoughts which life lays on their plates. They are kept in the road of life through stern necessity by elemental duties which they cannot avoid.
Again and again their will-to-live becomes, as it were, intoxicated: spring sunshine, opening flowers, moving clouds, waving fields of grain — all affect it. The manifold will-to-live, which is known to us in the splendid phenomena in which it clothes itself, grasps at their personal wills. They would fain join their shouts to the mighty symphony which is proceeding all around them. The world seem beauteous…but the intoxication passes. Dreadful discords only allow them to hear a confused noise, as before, where they had thought to catch the strains of glorious music. The beauty of nature is obscured by the suffering which they discover in every direction. And now they see again that they are driven about like shipwrecked persons on the waste of ocean, only that the boat is at one moment lifted high on the crest of the waves and a moment later sinks deep into the trough; and that now sunshine and now darkening clouds lie on the surface of the water.
And now they would fain persuade themselves that land lies on the horizon toward which they are driven. Their will-to-live befools their intellect so that it makes efforts to see the world as it would like to see it. It forces this intellect to show them a map which lends support to their hope of land. Once again they essay to reach the shore, until finally their arms sink exhausted for the last time and their eyes rove desperately from wave to wave. …
Thus it is with the will-to-live when it is unreflective.
But is there no way out of this dilemma? Must we either drift aimlessly through lack of reflection or sink in pessimism as the result of reflection? No. We must indeed attempt the limitless ocean, but we may set our sails and steer a determined course.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 256

Life, Men, Lie, World

“O thou that rollest above, round as the shield of my fathers! Whence are thy beams, O sun! thy everlasting light? Thou comest forth in thy awful beauty; the stars hide themselves in the sky; the moon, cold and pale, sinks in the western wave; but thou thyself movest alone. Who can be a companion of thy course? The oaks of the mountains fall; the mountains themselves decay with years; the ocean shrinks and grows again; the moon herself is lost in heaven: but thou art for ever the same, rejoicing in the brightness of thy course. When the world is dark with tempests, when thunder rolls and lightning flies, thou lookest in thy beauty from the clouds, and laughest at the storm. But to Ossian thou lookest in vain, for he beholds thy beams no more: whether thy yellow hair flows on the eastern clouds, or thou tremblest at the gates of the west. But thou art, perhaps, like me, for a season; thy years will have an end. Thou shalt sleep in thy clouds, careless of the voice of the morning. Exult then, O sun, in the strength of thy youth!”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

"Carthon", pp. 163–164
The Poems of Ossian

Youth, World, Art, Mountain

“If the plan [to intercept the shogunate emissary to the Kyoto court] is to be carried out, it can only be done with men from the grass roots. To wear silk brocades, eat dainty food, hug beautiful women, and fondle darling children are the only things hereditary officials care about. To revere the emperor and expel the barbarian is no concern of theirs. If this time it should be my misfortune to die, may my death inspire at least one or two men of steadfast will to rise up and uphold this principle after my death.”

Yoshida Shoin (1830–1859) Japanese politician

Vol. IX.
Yoshida Shoin Zenshu

Death, Women, Men, Children

“I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all — the colleges I mean — like an opera.”

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

Letter to Katharine Tynan (25 August 1888)

People, Dreams, Singing

“We have two lives about us,
Two worlds in which we dwell,
Within us and without us,
Alternate Heaven and Hell
Without, the somber Real,
Within, our hearts of hearts, the beautiful Ideal.”

Richard Henry Stoddard (1825–1903) American poet

The Castle in the Air.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

World, Hell, Heart

“I remember—the interruption of the hon. Gentleman reminds me of the words of a great writer, who said that "Grace was beauty in action." Sir, I say that justice is truth in action. Truth should animate an opposition, and I hope it does animate this opposition.;”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1851/feb/11/agricultural-distress in the House of Commons (2 February 1851). 1850s

Truth, Justice, Hope, Animals

“I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity; in clarity, in efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It's about bringing order to complexity.”

Jonathan Ive (1967) English designer and VP of Design at Apple

Ive explaining the design philosophy behind iOS 7 in its product video, shown at WWDC 2013.

Thinking

“Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 279
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Porque é bela a arte? Porque é inútil. Porque é feia a vida? Porque é toda fins e propósitos e intenções.

Life, Art

“This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.”

W.B. Yeats book Michael Robartes and the Dancer

St. 2 Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), Easter, 1916 http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1477/

Dreams, Change, Heart, Parting

“Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?”

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

No Second Troy http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1548/ The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)

Men, Age, Peace, Way

Quotes about beauty page 6

Quotes about beauty
page 6