“Beautiful, ugly, impressive, disgusting, meaningless, grim, contradictory etc... It makes no difference, as long as it is life, vigorously pouring forth.”

Source: Behind The Spangles, Weir Is A Man In Full, Trey Graham, National Public Radio, 2010-02-26 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124121023&ft=1&f=1008, ; In response to gibes from Quebec sports announcers

Quoted in C.R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, Composed Chiefly of His Letters (1843), (Phaidon, London, 1951), p. 280
Reply "to a lady who, looking at an engraving of a house, called it an ugly thing"
posthumous, undated

Source: La coscienza di Zeno (1923), P. 275; p. 330.

Letter to Hugo Boxel (Oct. 1674) The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza (1891) Tr. R. H. M. Elwes, Vol. 2, Letter 58 (54).
Context: Beauty, my dear Sir, is not so much a quality of the object beheld, as an effect in him who beholds it. If our sight were longer or shorter, or if our constitution were different, what now appears beautiful to us would seem misshapen, and what we now think misshapen we should regard as beautiful. The most beautiful hand seen through the microscope will appear horrible. Some things are beautiful at a distance, but ugly near; thus things regarded in themselves, and in relation to God, are neither ugly nor beautiful. Therefore, he who says that God has created the world, so that it might be beautiful, is bound to adopt one of the two alternatives, either that God created the world for the sake of men's pleasure and eyesight, or else that He created men's pleasure and eyesight for the sake of the world. Now, whether we adopt the former or the latter of these views, how God could have furthered His object by the creation of ghosts, I cannot see. Perfection and imperfection are names which do not differ much from the names beauty and ugliness.<!--p. 382

pages 16-21 (at page 16)
1890s, The National Parks and Forest Reservations, 1895

The Baron's last Banquet, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).