quotations about beauty
Choosing beauty over content (or choosing beauty as content) is always an act of sedition. If we accept the cant of official culture, we must believe that the beauty we steal from any man-made thing is stolen from its more virtuous and metaphysical backstory, wherein "real" beauty is said to reside.
DAVE HICKEY
The Invisible Dragon
Beauty, when it first discloses the mellowing touches of age, affects us painfully. It is like the tints of sunset, or the beauty of autumn--a melancholy beauty--beauty in decline--upon which we cannot gaze without a feeling of sadness--of sadness that it is passing away.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
You cannot pluck roses without fear of thorns
Nor enjoy a fair wife without danger of horns.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanack, 1734
If you get simple beauty and nought else,
You get about the best thing God invents.
ROBERT BROWNING
Fra Lippo Lippi
Beauty when most unclothed is clothed best.
PHINEAS FLETCHER
Sicelides
It is part and parcel of every man's life to develop beauty in himself. All perfect things have in them an element of beauty.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
If I conceive of a woman so transcendingly beautiful that upon her beauty no improvement can be made, I do not conceive of the principle itself of beauty, but only of its incarnation. In the woman, and through her, I perceive that by virtue of which she becomes beautiful. When I see a beautiful woman, I see in her a more beautiful woman still; for in every person we find some fault, and by eliminating the fault, we attain nearer to perfection. But in and through that more beautiful woman still, I perceive that which gives the character of beauty. But this principle can never be perceived directly in itself; it can be perceived only when manifesting itself in some person or thing, and even then only as transcending.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
The Doctrine of Life
Affect not to despise beauty: no one is freed from its dominion;
But regard it not a pearl of price--it is fleeting as the bow in the clouds.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Beauty is when your outside intrigues people and your inside makes them stay.
ANONYMOUS
Your voice would have silenced merle and thrush,
And the rose outbloomed would have blushed to blush,
And Summer, seeing you, paused, and known
That the glow of your beauty outshone its own.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"My Winter Rose", Lyrical Poems
An essential quality of beauty is aloofness.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Myth of Sisyphus