“Though the gifts of the mind are infinite, they can, it seems to me, be thus classified. There are some so beautiful that everyone can see and feel their beauty. There are some lovely, it is true, but which are wearisome. There are some which are lovely, which all the world admire, but without knowing why. There are some so refined and delicate that few are capable even of remarking all their beauties. There are others which, though imperfect, yet are produced with such skill, and sustained and managed with such sense and grace, that they even deserve to be admired.”

Reflections on Various Subjects (1665–1678), II. On Difference of Character

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François de La Rochefoucauld156

French author of maxims and memoirs 1613–1680

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

“I do not know why it distressed me so much to see an animal die when human death did not move me. Perhaps because they were more beautiful, and there is no corruption in them, while in the best of men there can always be found some guilt or wickedness which seems to have earned him death.”

Tanith Lee book The Birthgrave

Book Two, Part IV “War March”, Chapter 3 (p. 246)
The Birthgrave (1975)

“No one who is not utterly blind can fail to see that God gathered all the beauty of which the whole world is capable of in woman.”

Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) Magician, occult writer, theologian, astrologer, alchemist

“God knows we’re all drawn toward what’s beautiful and broken; I have been, but some people cannot be fixed. Or if they can be, it’s only by love and sacrifice so great it destroys the giver.”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

“It's a feeling which tells me that any woman can be beautiful in the eyes of a man who loves her.”

Joanne Harris book Five Quarters of the Orange

Source: Five Quarters of the Orange

“Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of the character, though few can decypher even fragments of their meaning.”

Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist

1840s, Letters from New York (1843) <br class="br">Source: Letters from New York http://www.bartleby.com/66/58/12260.html, vol. 1, letter 26

“And yet she can tell he is visited by fears so immense, so multiple, that she can almost feel the terror pulsing inside him. As though some beast breathes all the time at the windowpanes of his mind.”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

“The man of half-grown intelligence, when he observes an object which is bathed in the glow of a seeming beauty, thinks that that object is in its essence beautiful, no matter what it is that so prepossesses him with the pleasure of the eye. He will not go deeper into the subject. But the other, whose mind's eye is clear, and who can inspect such appearances, will neglect those elements which are the material only upon which the Form of Beauty works; to him they will be but the ladder by which he climbs to the prospect of that Intellectual Beauty, in accordance with their share in which all other beauties get their existence and their name.”

Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) bishop of Nyssa

On Virginity, Chapter 11

“Yes, there is some one I love, though he has not told me yet that he even loves me.”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

Source: Dracula

“With all, the beautiful things of the earth become more dear as they elude pursuit; but with some natures utter elusion is the one special event which will make a passing love permanent for ever.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

Desperate Remedies (1871), ch. 1

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