Motivational Quotes

Beauty

The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.

- Frye, Northrop

Best Quotes about Beauty

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

Beauty depends on size as well as symmetry. No very small animal can be beautiful, for looking at it takes so small a portion of time that the impression of it will be confused. Nor can any very large one, for a whole view of it cannot be had at once, and so there will be no unity and completeness.

Aristotle

Beauty is variable, ugliness is constant.

Horton, Doug

The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.

Frye, Northrop

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.

Bataille, Georges

There are no better cosmetics than a severe temperance and purity, modesty and humility, a gracious temper and calmness of spirit; and there is no true beauty without the signatures of these graces in the very countenance.

Ray, John

What ever beauty may be, it has for its basis order, and for its essence unity.

Andre, Father

Like anyone else, there are days I feel beautiful and days I don't, and when I don't, I do something about it.

Cheryl Tiegs

10.

Strange that the vanity which accompanies beauty --excusable, perhaps, when there is such great beauty, or at any rate understandable --should persist after the beauty was gone.

Arnim, Mary

11.

If there is one thing worse than being an ugly duckling in a house of swans, it's having the swans pretend there's no difference.

Teena Booth

12.

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for instance.

Ruskin, John

13.

How goodness heightens beauty!

More, Hannah

14.

My heart that was rapt away by the wild cherry blossoms -- will it return to my body when they scatter?

Kotomichi

15.

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's scepter, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

Wollstonecraft, Mary

16.

The ideal beauty is a fugitive which is never found.

SeVigne, Marquise De

17.

Beauty is the promise of happiness.

Stendhal, Henri B.

18.

My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.

Wey, Hermann

19.

Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due -- she reminds us too much of a prima donna.

Forster, Edward M.

20.

All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory -- of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.

Baudelaire, Charles

21.

The plainer the dress, the greater luster does beauty appear.

Halifax, Edward F.

22.

Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good; a shining gloss that fadeth suddenly; a flower that dies when it begins to bud; a doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower, lost, faded, broken, dead within an hour. -

Shakespeare, William

23.

Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.

Huxley, Aldous

24.

The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider web.

Teale, Edwin Way

25.

Let there be nothing within thee that is not very beautiful and very gentle, and there will be nothing without thee that is not beautiful and softened by the spell of thy presence.

Allen, James

26.

I have learnt to love you late, Beauty at once so ancient and so new!

Augustine, St.

27.

Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.

Paglia, Camille

28.

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

Immermann

29.

The fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose.

Bejar, Hada

30.

Remember if you marry for beauty, thou bindest thyself all thy life for that which perchance, will neither last nor please thee one year: and when thou hast it, it will be to thee of no price at all.

Raleigh, Sir Walter

31.

I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.

John Constable

32.

I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!

Picasso, Pablo

33.

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

34.

One evening I sat Beauty on my knees --And I found her bitter --And I reviled her.

Rimbaud, Arthur

35.

The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

Havelock Ellis

36.

The beauty seen, is partly in him who sees it.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

37.

You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen. But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul's own doing.

Stopes, Marie Carmichael

38.

Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.

Godard, Jean-Luc

39.

Beauty is a good letter of introduction.

Proverb, Portuguese

40.

Beauty is not caused. It is.

Dickinson, Emily

41.

The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.

Wolf, Naomi

42.

Nothing's beautiful from every point of view.

Horace

43.

Beauty can't amuse you, but brainwork -- reading, writing, thinking--can.

Brown, Helen Gurley

44.

Beauty, unaccompanied by virtue, is as a flower without perfume.

Proverb, French

45.

Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.

Petrarch

46.

At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise... that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.

Camus, Albert

47.

There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes consider abominable.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

48.

It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the dear deceit of beauty.

Eliot, George

49.

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

Gibran, Kahlil

50.

By cultivating the beautiful we scatter the seeds of heavenly flowers, as by doing good we cultivate those that belong to humanity.