quotations about beauty
Much that is said about beauty and its importance in our lives ignores the minimal beauty of an unpretentious street, a nice pair of shoes or a tasteful piece of wrapping paper, as though those things belonged to a different order of value from a church by Bramante or a Shakespeare sonnet. Yet these minimal beauties are far more important to our daily lives, and far more intricately involved in our own rational decisions, than the great works of art which (if we are lucky) occupy our leisure hours. They are part of the context in which we live our lives, and our desire for harmony, fittingness and civility is both expressed and confirmed in them. Moreover, the great works of architecture often depend for their beauty on the humble context that these lesser beauties provide.
ROGER SCRUTON
Beauty
Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.
SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents
Beauty rests on necessities. The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Conduct of Life
The spirit in man has been created in accordance with the image of beauty, so that whenever it either hears or sees anything beautiful, it may have a propensity towards it, and seek for communion with it.
MUHAMMAD AL-GHAZALI
The Alchemy of Happiness
I was brought up imagining that cream rises to the top, merit wins out, the race is to the swift and riches to men of understanding, but it ain't necessarily so. The swift stand a better chance if they are also beautiful.
GARRISON KEILLOR
"Not Smart? Not a Problem," A Prairie Home Companion, Jun. 22, 2010
At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens -- that letting go -- you let go because you can.
TONI MORRISON
Tar Baby
All beautiful things bring sadness, nor alone
Sweet music, as our wisest Poet spake,
Because in us keen longings they awake.
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH
"All Beautiful Things"
Arguments out of a pretty mouth are unanswerable.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Freeholder, Jan. 2, 1716
The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
preface, Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence
For one to admire a woman merely for her beauty, is to love the building for its exterior; but to love one for the greatness of her soul, is to appreciate the tenement for its intrinsic value.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
ANNE CARSON
preface, Eros the Bittersweet
Beauty is a simple passion,
but, oh my friends, in the end
you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.
ANNE SEXTON
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
What can still that hunger of the heart which sickens the eye for beauty, and makes sweet-scented ease an oppression?
GEORGE ELIOT
Daniel Deronda
True love survives all shocks: an affection originally produced by admiration for unusual beauty may not only survive the loss of that beauty, but may become more intense if the beauty has changed into ugliness through causes that bind the lovers together in tender associations.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
Beauty acts as a cause to produce love, because the being, the attributes and the works of God possess beauty, and every one loves that which is beautiful.
MUHAMMAD AL-GHAZALI
The Alchemy of Happiness
In spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.
JOHN KEATS
Endymion
Beauty itself soon fades, and when a woman has beauty and nothing else, well, it's like putting all the goods in the shop window, isn't it? And the moment she loses her good looks--poor creature! what is she? Just a mere bit of faded finery to be thrown aside.
HENRY ARTHUR JONES
Her Tongue
Incapacity to appreciate certain types of beauty may be the condition sine qua non for the appreciation of another kind; the greatest capacity both for enjoyment and creation is highly specialized and exclusive, and hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant. The invectives of one school against another, perverse as they are philosophically, are artistically often signs of health, because they indicate a vital appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of them that has grown into a jealous passion.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Sense of Beauty
Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world. All privilege is that of beauty; for there are many beauties; as, of general nature, of the human face and form, of manners, of brain, or method, moral beauty, or beauty of the soul.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Conduct of Life
Beauty for the most part, consists in objects of sight; but it is also received through the ears, by the skilful composition of words, and the consonant proportion of sounds; for in every species of harmony, beauty is to be found.
PLOTINUS
"Concerning the Beautiful"