beauty

1.

All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.

- Baudelaire, Charles

2.

Mona Lisa is the only beauty who went through history and retained her reputation.

- Rogers, Will

3.

The great attraction of fashion is that it diverted attention from the insoluble problems of beauty and provided an easy way -- which money could buy... to a simply stated, easily reproduced ideal of beauty, however temporary that ideal.

- Zeldin, Theodore

4.

The most natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral truth. For all beauty is truth. True features make the beauty of the face; true proportions, the beauty of architecture; true measures, the beauty of harmony and music.

- Shaftesbury, Lord

5.

The ability to see beauty is the beginning of our moral sensibility. What we believe is beautiful we will not wantonly destroy.

- Reverend Sean Parker Dennison

6.

We owe much (notwithstanding their partial and Manichean idea of beauty) to the early ascetic painters. Their works are a possession for ever. No future school of religious art will be able to rise to eminence without learning from them their secret. They taught artists, and priests, and laymen, too, that beauty is only worthy of admiration when it is the outward sacrament of the beauty of the soul within; they helped to deliver men from that idolatry to merely animal strength and loveliness into which they were in danger of falling in ferocious ages, and among the relics of Roman luxury.

- Miscellanies. 1849.

7.

There is great beauty in going through life without anxiety or fear. Half our fears are baseless, and the other half discreditable.

- Bovee, Christian Nevell

8.

There is only beauty -- and it has only one perfect expression -- poetry. All the rest is a lie --except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.

- Mallarme, Stephane

9.

The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.

- Baudelaire, Charles

10.

Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good; A shining gloss that vadeth suddenly; A flower that dies when first it'gins to bud; A brittle glass that's broken presently: A doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower, Lost, vaded, broken, dead within the hour.

- William Shakespeare

11.

It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.

- Sackville-West, Vita

12.

Judgement of beauty can err, what with the wine and the dark.

- Ovid

13.

Beauty is everywhere a welcome guest.

- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

14.

The pain passes. The beauty remains.

- Auguste Renoir

15.

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

- Dillard, Annie

16.

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.

- George Santayana

17.

You can not percieve beauty but with a serene mind.

- Henry David Thoreau

18.

Beauty is not only a terrible thing, it is also a mysterious thing. There God and the Devil strive for mastery, and the battleground is the heart of men.

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

19.

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 decipher even fragments of their meaning.

- Child, Lydia M.

20.

Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.

- Pearl Buck