quotations about beauty
The young girl is often pretty but her prettiness is vague and uncertain, it inspires a sort of pitying admiration, but it suggests nothing; the very essence of the young girl's being is that she should have nothing to suggest, therefore the beauty of the young face fails to touch the imagination. No past lies hidden in those translucent eyes, no story of hate, disappointment, or sin.
GEORGE MOORE
Confessions of a Young Man
Old as I am, for ladies' love unfit,
The power of beauty I remember yet.
JOHN DRYDEN
Cymon and Iphigenia
It's a good thing beauty is only skin deep, or I'd be rotten to the core.
PHYLLIS DILLER
The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes
If we consider all the hypotheses, which have been formed either by philosophy or common reason, to explain the difference betwixt beauty and deformity, we shall find that all of them resolve into this, that beauty is such an order and construction of parts, as either by the primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul. This is the distinguishing character of beauty, and forms all the difference betwixt it and deformity, whose natural tendency is to produce uneasiness.
DAVID HUME
A Treatise of Human Nature
When we are young, the beauty of women has a supreme attraction beyond all other possessions or qualities; and there are self-evident reasons why it should be so. It is only as we grow older that we know the value of brains, and, while still admiring beauty--as indeed who does not?--admire it as one passing by on the other side--as a grace to look at, but not to hold, unless accompanied by something more lasting.
ELIZA LYNN LINTON
The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays
What is the beauty of bodies? It is something which at first view presents itself to sense, and which the soul familiarly apprehends and eagerly embraces, as if it were allied to itself. But when it meets with the deformed, it hastily starts from the view and retires abhorrent from its discordant nature.
PLOTINUS
"Concerning the Beautiful"
Were part of the human race to be arrayed in that splendor of beauty which beams from the statues of gods, universal consent would acknowledge the rest of mankind naturally formed to be their slaves.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
The queen whose beauty does the gaze transfix,
Adorns herself with pallid crucifix.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Quest for God"
It is one of the arts of a great beauty to heighten the effect of her charms by affecting to be sweetly unconscious of them.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Where Beauty was, nothing ever ran quite straight, which, no doubt, was why so many people looked on it as immoral.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
The Forsyte Saga
It's amazing how lovely common things become, if one only knows how to look at them.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Marjorie's Three Gifts
Birds of fine plumage are not the best songsters; neither are comely women the most virtuous.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
There isn't any way that one can get rid of the guilt of having a nice body by saying that one can serve society with it, because that would end up with oneself as what? There simply doesn't seem to be any moral place for flesh.
MARGARET DRABBLE
A Summer Bird-Cage
If you dear little girls would only learn what real beauty is, and not pinch and starve and bleach yourselves out so, you'd save an immense deal of time and money and pain. A happy soul in a healthy body makes the best sort of beauty for man or woman.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Eight Cousins
Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Philosophy of Composition", The Works of Edgar Allan Poe
Unexpected intrusions of beauty. That is what life is.
SAUL BELLOW
Herzog
The criterion of true beauty is, that it increases on examination; of false, that it lessens. There is something therefore in true beauty that corresponds with right reason, and is not merely a creature of fancy.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims
The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
HAVELOCK ELLIS
Impressions and Comments
E'en Beauty mourns in her decaying bower,
That Time upon her angel brow should set
His crooked autograph, and mar the jet
Of glossy locks. Lo! how her chaplet green,
The hoar frost and the canker worm destroy.
Decay's dull film obscures those matchless eyes.
ISAAC MCLELLAN
"Musings"
Beauty, of course, is an asset. But the girls who have greenbacks don't have to worry over not having pink faces.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs