“Beauty is seen through the eyes, but beautiful people are only known through their heart.”

“He had been through a good deal in the course of the Great Quest — he had seen beautiful things and horrible things — but up until now he had not known that one and the same creature can be both, that beauty can be terrifying.”

Michael Ende book The Neverending Story

“You can only possess beauty through understanding it.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

“When God’s power shines through us, it manifests as truth, auspiciousness and beauty. When God manifests through the intellect, truth shines forth. When God manifests through actions, it does so as goodness and auspiciousness. And when God manifests through the heart, beauty is the result. When truth, auspiciousness and beauty blend in our life, true strength awakens.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

“Beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

“Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.”

Naomi Wolf book The Beauty Myth

“Only through Beauty's morning gate, dost thou enter the land of Knowledge.”

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

“On the way to God you have to pass through beauty, pure beauty. If you do not pass through beauty it is not God that you find. Beauty stands at the gate of the kingdom of heaven. It is of the Creator, but not the Creator; and it is all-mighty.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

“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

“The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion… open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony.”

Orhan Pamuk (1952) Turkish novelist, screenwriter, and Nobel Prize in Literature recipient