“It is our destiny to be born beautiful into an ugly age.”

“But you weren't born expecting that kind of beauty in everyone, all the time. You just got programmed into thinking anything else is ugly.”

“To me, our destinies seem flower and fruit
Born of an ever-generating root…”

“This is our epoch, good or bad, beautiful or ugly, rich or poor — we did not choose it.”

“Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused”

“Because so many of our writers were born in ugly environments, in monstrous poverty and humilitation, they continue to assert that this is the natural environment, reality, and that beauty is artifice. Why should the natural state be ugliness? Natural to whom? We may be born in ugliness, but the natural consequences should be a thirst for its opposite. To mistake ugliness for reality is one of the frauds of the realistic school. A hunger for the unknown, and an aspiration towards beauty were inseparable from civilization. In America the word art was distorted to mean artificial.
We are born with the power to alter what we are given at birth.
When the Japanese paint flowers or the sea on a kimono they mean to establish a link with nature. But they select only what is beautiful in nature to maintain their love of life.
The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything. That is the deepest meaning of rebellion, not the wearing of different clothes, haircuts, or the adopting of other cultures.”

“Our destiny is solely determined by how we create ourselves. The only exception is when someone is born into wealth.”

“What good is modesty? — It makes us seem more beautiful when we are beautiful, and less ugly when we are ugly.”

“Stay beautiful, keep it ugly.”

“Beauty can be mask for ugliness.”