beauty Quotes

“Well I am pretty. Nearly all spiders are good looking. I’m not as flashy as some, but I’ll do.”

“The humblest tasks get beautified if loving hands do them.”

“We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision.”

“Love is a great beautifier.”

“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”

“The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.”

“Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! - I have as much soul as you, - and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you!”

“She was dazzling-- alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.”

“Which would you rather be if you had the choice--divinely beautiful or dazzlingly clever or angelically good?”

“Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.”

“Turn him into stars and form a constellation in his image. His face will make the heavens so beautiful that the world will fall in love with the night and forget about the garish sun.”

“Justine, you may remember, was a great favourite of yours; and I recollect you once remarked that if you were in an ill humour, one glance from Justine could dissipate it, for the same reason that Ariosto gives concerning the beauty of Angelica--she looked so frank-hearted and happy.”

“It was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed for. But for those two things, his life might have been free from stain. His beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery. What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts. Why had he worn its livery? Youth had spoiled him.”

“Peace is always beautiful.”

“Without the frown of clouds and lightning, the vines would be burned by the smiling sun.”

“The human heart is a line, whereas my own is a circle, and I have the endless ability to be in the right place at the right time. The consequence of this is that I’m always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both.”

“What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.”

“He called you pretty,” he finally continued, his frown deepening. “That’s practically an insult, the way you look right now. You’re much more than beautiful.”

“When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”

“And from her great and humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean calm beauty. From her position as healer, her hands had grown sure and cool and quiet; from her position as arbiter she had become as remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess. She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.”

“There’s more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.”

“In his face, I see the whole of my life. I see a baby who came to me long after I’d given up … and a hint of the beauty I once had. I see … my life in his eyes.”

“I am not plain, but I don’t think anyone is ever going to call me beautiful. I don’t have that graceful thing going on.”

“It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty...”

Ritie, don’t worry ‘cause you ain’t pretty. Plenty pretty women I seen digging ditches or worse. You smart. I swear to God, I rather you have a good mind than a cute behind.

I shook the bell. It made the most beautiful sound my sister and I had ever heard.

“You must really begin to harden yourself to the idea of being worth looking at.”

All this was very pretty, but the prettiest of all was a tiny little lady, who stood at the open door of the castle; she, also, was made of paper, and she wore a dress of clear muslin, with a narrow blue ribbon over her shoulders just like a scarf.

“Just living is not enough,” said the butterfly, “one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.”

The tree first recovered itself while being unpacked in the courtyard of a house, with several other trees; and it heard a man say, “We only want one, and this is the prettiest.”

“We have looked in at the windows of the houses in the town, and we know what is done with them. They are dressed up in the most splendid manner. We have seen them standing in the middle of a warm room, and adorned with all sorts of beautiful things—honey cakes, gilded apples, playthings, and many hundreds of wax tapers.”

“Hearing thy mildness prais’d in every town, Thy virtues spoke of, and thy beauty sounded,-- Yet not so deeply as to thee belongs,-- Myself am mov’d to woo thee for my wife.”

“How beautiful she was when she let me kiss her.”

″‘Your soul is a beautiful thing, child.’ replied the grave man’s voice, ‘and I thank you. No emperor received so fair a gift. The angels wept to-night.”

“Your blood coagulates beautifully.”

“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”

“She looked as beautiful as if she had been dead!”

“Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven’t the answer to a question you’ve been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you’re alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.”

Beauty! Terrible Beauty! A deathless Goddess-- so she strikes our eyes!

“She’s as bright as the morning. She corresponds to your description;it is for that I wish you to know her. She fills all your requirements.” “More or less, of course.” “No; quite literally. She is beautiful, accomplished, generous, and for an American, well-born. She is also very clever and very amiable, and she has a handsome fortune.”

Your face is the same, but I don’t remember what beautiful means anymore.

“Whatever can die is beautiful — more beautiful than a unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful creature in the world. Do you understand me?”

“The dawn was coming then. All the lower valley was covered with mist, and sometimes little pieces of it broke off and floated away in small clouds. The sky was lighter in the east, and the horizon was a thin golden line. The clouds changed from gray to pink, and the mist was touched with gold. There was a silent moment when everything held its breath, and then the sun rose. It was beautiful.”

“But even though she was attractive, there was something else about her that caught his eye. She was intelligent, he could sense that right away, and confident, too, as if she were able to move through life on her own terms. To him, these were the things that really mattered. Without them, beauty was nothing.”

“What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful.”

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”

“She was everything I wanted. She was beautiful and charming, with a quick sense of humor, and she supported me in everything I did.”

“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

“I wander around the room, looking at the artwork on the walls. These days, the only artists are in Amity. Abnegation sees art as impractical, and its appreciation as time that could be spent serving others, so though I have seen works of art in textbooks, I have never been in a decorated room before. It makes the air feel close and warm, and I could get lost here for hours without noticing.”

Time erodes gratitude more quickly than it does beauty!

As for my father, I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician but he certainly believed God could count and that only by picking up God’s rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word “beautiful.”

“Then thought about herself. Years ago, she had told her girl self to wait for her in the looking glass. It had been a long time since she had remembered. Perhaps she’d better look. She went over to the dresser and looked hard at her skin and features. The young girl was gone, but a handsome woman had taken her place.”

“I didn’t plan on falling in love with you, and I doubt if you planned on falling in love with me. But once we met, it was clear that neither of us could control what was happening to us. We fell in love, despite our differences, and once we did, something rare and beautiful was created.”

“A passive life of enjoyment affords . . . [man] the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature.”

“But women who have common sense are so curiously plain, father, aren’t they?”

“I looked up once more, at the whole world; it was beautiful, I knew it was, but I wasn’t a part of it. I was never going to be a part of it.”

“I held you in my hand, Wanderer. And you were so beautiful.”

“There was some beauty to life after all, even if it was only the beauty of hope.”

“She creates grace in her own image, brings Heaven to earth in one movement of her hand.”

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.

“Whom I love? Think a moment. Think of me— Me, whom the plainest woman would despise— Me, with this nose of mine that marches on Before me by a quarter of an hour! Whom should I love? Why—of course—it must be The woman in the world most beautiful.”

“for you to see beauty here does not mean there is beauty in me it means there is beauty rooted so deep within you you can’t help but see it everywhere”

“Forgive me For being light and vain and loving you Only because you were beautiful.”

“Mom frowned at me. ‘You’d be destroying what makes it special’ she said, ‘It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty’.”

“There comes one moment, once—and God help those Who pass that moment by!—when Beauty stands Looking into the soul with grave, sweet eyes That sicken at pretty words!”

“Who knows her smile has known a perfect thing.”

“Why, there is nothing more sublime than tears.”

“Though there were moments of beauty, Mariam knew for the most part that life had been unkind to her.”

″‘The new one is the most beautiful of all; he is so young and pretty.’ And the old swans bowed their heads before him.”

“The sunset was too beautiful. It almost made Lena feel panicked because she couldn’t save it.”

“But what did he see in the clear stream below? His own image; no longer a dark, gray bird, ugly and disagreeable to look at, but a graceful and beautiful swan.”

“It must be said that Lacey Pemberton was very beautiful. She was not the kind of girl who could make your forget about Margo Roth Spiegelman, but she was the kind of girl who could make you forget about a lot of things.”

“Every moment the patches of green grew bigger and the patches of snow grew smaller. Every moment more and more of the trees shook off their robes of snow. Soon, wherever you looked, instead of white shapes you saw the dark green of firs or the black prickly branches of bare oaks and beeches and elms. Then the mist turned from white to gold and presently cleared away altogether. Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down onto the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky between the tree-tops.”

“Helda,” Katsa said, “how much time do you suppose I spend wondering which of the gentlemen finds me beautiful?” “Not enough.”

“Time had not made me immune to the perfection of his face, and I was sure that I would never take any aspect of him for granted.”

“You also realize that all the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, and inner peace - arise from beyond the mind.”

“The scriptural picture of heaven is therefore just as symbolical as the picture which our desire, unaided, invents for itself; heaven is not really full of jewelry any more than it is really the beauty of Nature, or a fine piece of music.”

“She doesn’t brush her hair a thousand times at night, or pluck her eyebrows, or bathe with sesame oil so her skin will stay smooth. In a world without love, what is the point of any of that?”

“Those who put themselves in His hands will become perfect, as He is perfect- perfect in love, wisdom, joy, beauty, health, and immortality. The change will not be completed in this life, for death is an important part of the treatment. How far the change will have gone before death in any particular Christian is uncertain.”

“If you retain nothing else, always remember the most important Rule of Beauty. ‘Who cares?’”

“If you know how to make good use of the mud, you can grow beautiful lotuses.”

“i notice everything i do not have and decide it is beautiful”

“i made change after change on the road to perfection but when i finally felt beautiful enough their definition of beauty suddenly changed what if there is no finish line and in an attempt to keep up i lose the gifts i was born with for a beauty so insecure it can’t commit to itself -the lies they sell”

“You have become a small giant since the day Danny’s ball struck your eye. You do not see it. But I see it. And it is a beautiful thing to see.”

“I know so many women who have kept the things she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded.”

“Why is pornography the number one snare for men? He longs for the beauty, but without his fierce and passionate heart he cannot find her or win her or keep her.”

“Yet, in good faith, some say that thee behold, Thy face hath not the power to make love groan; To say they err I dare not be so bold, Although I swear it to myself alone.”

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.”

“Then, the question I asked myself was: Do I look pretty? Now, the question I ask is: Do I look strong?”

“You have words of your own, Cassia,” Grandfather says to me. “I have heard some of them and they are beautiful.”

“I thought that Elves were all for moon and stars: but this is more elvish than anything I ever heard tell of. I feel as if I was inside a song, if you take my meaning.”

“Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.”

“But if thou live, remember’d not to be, Die single and thine image dies with thee.”

“It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. ”

“He was thinking of Mme. Bonacieux. For an apprentice Musketeer the young woman was almost an ideal of love. Pretty, mysterious, initiated in almost all the secrets of the court, which reflected such a charming gravity over her pleasing features, it might be surmised that she was not wholly unmoved; and this is an irresistible charm to novices in love.”

“We traveled so far and your friendship meant everything. It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty. Everything ends. I am not afraid.”

“What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty.”

“But Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, but can recapture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty in it, the beauty! Till that, too, fades away in its turn, and the dreamer bitterly accepts the hard, cold waking and all its penalties.”

“And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.”

“...beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.”

“Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only - if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things - beautiful things - that they connect you to some larger beauty?”

“Today, to him gazing south with a new-born need stirring in his heart, the clear sky over their long low outline seemed to pulsate with promise; today, the unseen was everything. The unknown, the only real fact of life.”

“The last figure of all was the most interesting—a woman even more richly dressed than the others, very tall (but every figure in that room was taller than the people of our world), with a look of such fierceness and pride that it took your breath away. Yet she was beautiful too. Years afterward, when he was an old man, Digory said he had never in all his life known a woman so beautiful. It is only fair to add that Polly always said she couldn’t see anything specially beautiful about her.”

“a woman who has adjusted to many things in life and overcome many more, her face is full of strength. She has, we can see, wit and faith of a kind that keep her eyes lit and full of interest and expectancy. She is, in a word, a beautiful woman. Her bearing is perhaps most like the noble bearing of the women of the Hereros of Southwest Africa - rather as if she imagines that as she walks she still bears a basket or a vessel upon her head.”

“I gazed at it in wonder—not because it was awful, but because it was beautiful.”

“A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard.”

“I can’t say sweet things. But you are beautiful.”

“Fortunately, the sun has a wonderfully glorious habit of rising every morning. When the sky lightened, when the birds awoke, I knew I would never again see anything so splendid as the round red sun coming up over the earth.”

“No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty.”

″‘All this--’ she exclaimed, the sweep of her arm including the deepening blue of the sky, the shining lake in the distance, the snow-covered mountain far to the north. ‘So much! You must look at it all, Daniel, not just at the unhappy things.‘”

“Even though it clings to things of beauty, if their beauty is outside God and outside the soul, it only clings to sorrow.”

“To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.”

“Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace.”

“Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All.”

″[…] the gates of liberty seemed still unopened. [Lucy] was conscious of her discontent; it was new to her to be conscious of it. ‘The world,’ she thought, ‘is certainly full of beautiful things, if only I could come across them.‘”

“You don’t believe all that crap, do you—that there’s only one way to look, and everyone’s programmed to agree on it?”

“At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to paint, photograph or even remember it. It is enough.”

“But it’s a trick, Tally. You’ve only seen pretty faces your whole life. Your parents, your teachers, everyone over sixteen. But you weren’t born expecting that kind of beauty in everyone, all the time. You just got programmed into thinking anything else is ugly.”

“So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is,—for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know.”

“I read that the real Cleopatra wasn’t even that great-looking. She seduced everyone with how clever she was.”

“That place of true healing is a fierce place. It’s a giant place. It’s a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light. And you have to work really, really, really hard to get there, but you can do it.”

“To gaze into the depths of blue of the child’s eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my agitation. I couldn’t abjure for merely wanting to, but I could repeat to Mrs. Grose—as I did there, over and over, in the small hours—that with their voices in the air, their pressure on one’s heart, and their fragrant faces against one’s cheek, everything fell to the ground but their incapacity and their beauty.”

“I’ve taught scores of American millionairesses how to speak English: the best looking women in the world. I’m seasoned. They might as well be blocks of wood. I might as well be a block of wood.”

“There is nothing more beautiful than a confident women who knows what she wants. There is nothing like a woman driven by passion, selfish in that she takes good care of herself, and believes she is worth it.”

“She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble.”

“My beauty was the cause of my misfortune.”

“Divine love is incessantly restless until it turns all woundedness into health, all deformity into beauty and all embarrassment into laughter.”

“And yet what precisely is this ‘greatness’? Just where, or in what, does it lie? . . . I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart.”

“It struck me as odd that even though no one could have called her a beauty, Mr. Tanaka’s eyes were fixed on her like a rag on a hook.”

“Maybe you’re just too pretty yourself to be able to see it elsewhere.”

“In the years since, I’ve been called beautiful more often than I can remember. Though, of course, geisha are always called beautiful, even those who aren’t. But when Mr. Tanaka said it to me, before I’d ever heard of such a thing as a geisha, I could almost believe it was true.”

“Beauty is indeed a good gift of God; but that the good may not think it a great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked.”

“Because beauty is power the way money is power the way a loaded gun is power.”

“Beautiful teeth, black eyes, dainty feet, and graceful as a Parisian. How the devil did she get here? How did such a clumsy oaf ever get a wife like that?”

“She looked extraordinarily beautiful to him, and majestic as a phantom; without understanding what she wanted, he had a foreboding of something terrible.”

“It was a sort of ferocious, quiet beauty, the sort that wouldn’t let you admire it. The sort of beauty that always hurt.”

“Sweet air, that circlest round those radiant tresses, And floatest, mingled with them, fold on fold, Deliciously, and scatterest that fine gold, Then twinest it again, my heart’s dear jesses; Thou lingerest on those eyes, whose beauty presses Stings in my heart that all its life exhaust, Till I go wandering round my treasure lost, Like some scared creature whom the night distresses. I seem to find her now, and now perceive How far away she is; now rise, now fall; Now what I wish, now what is true, believe. O happy air! since joys enrich thee all, Rest thee; and thou, O stream too bright to grieve! Why can I not float with thee at thy call?”

“She ruled in beauty o’er this heart of mine, A noble lady in a humble home, And now her time for heavenly bliss has come, ’Tis I am mortal proved, and she divine. The soul that all its blessings must resign, And love whose light no more on earth finds room Might rend the rocks with pity for their doom, Yet none their sorrows can in words enshrine; They weep within my heart; no ears they find Save mine alone, and I am crushed with care, And naught remains to me save mournful breath. Assuredly but dust and shade we are; Assuredly desire is mad and blind; Assuredly its hope but ends in death.”

″Doth any maiden seek the glorious fame Of chastity, of strength, of courtesy? Gaze in the eyes of that sweet enemy Whom all the world doth as my lady name! How honor grows, and pure devotion’s flame, How truth is joined with graceful dignity, There thou mayst learn, and what the path may be To that high heaven which doth her spirit claim; There learn that speech, beyond all poet’s skill, And sacred silence, and those holy ways Unutterable, untold by human heart. But the infinite beauty that all eyes doth fill, This none can learn! because its lovely rays Are given by God’s pure grace, and not by art.”

“What man dwelling on the decaying mortal plane, having approached the undecaying immortal one, and having reflected upon the nature of enjoyment through beauty and sense pleasure, would delight in long life?”

“Dreams bore my fancy to that region where She dwells whom here I seek, but cannot see. ’Mid those who in the loftiest heaven be I looked on her, less haughty and more fair. She took my hand, she said, ‘Within this sphere, If hope deceive not, thou shalt dwell with me: I filled thy life with war’s wild agony; Mine own day closed ere evening could appear. My bliss no human thought can understand; I wait for thee alone, and that fair veil Of beauty thou dost love shall yet retain.’ Why was she silent then, why dropped my hand Ere those delicious tones could quite avail To bid my mortal soul in heaven remain?”

“Those eyes, ’neath which my passionate rapture rose, The arms, hands, feet, the beauty that erewhile Could my own soul from its own self beguile, And in a separate world of dreams enclose, The hair’s bright tresses, full of golden glows, And the soft lightning of the angelic smile That changed this earth to some celestial isle,— Are now but dust, poor dust, that nothing knows. And yet I live! Myself I grieve and scorn, Left dark without the light I loved in vain, Adrift in tempest on a bark forlorn; Dead is the source of all my amorous strain, Dry is the channel of my thoughts outworn, And my sad harp can sound but notes of pain.”

″O wandering steps! O vague and busy dreams! O changeless memory! O fierce desire! O passion strong! heart weak with its own fire; O eyes of mine! not eyes, but living streams; O laurel boughs! whose lovely garland seems The sole reward that glory’s deeds require! O haunted life! delusion sweet and dire, That all my days from slothful rest redeems; O beauteous face! where Love has treasured well His whip and spur, the sluggish heart to move At his least will; nor can it find relief. O souls of love and passion! if ye dwell Yet on this earth, and ye, great Shades of Love! Linger, and see my passion and my grief.”

“Society programs us, through the subliminal messages of popular culture, to believe that we’re not truly desirable as women unless we adhere to the current standards of physical beauty.”

“For if we truly believed in an internal light, we would not believe in the power of external forces, and we would not be so easy to dominate and control. We would not be tempted to see hair and clothes and makeup as sources of so much of our self-esteem and the ideal beauty of a fashion model as a sign that we are not beautiful at all.”

“All I saw was his beauty, his singing limbs, the quick flickering of his feet.”

“Beauty is an internal light, a spiritual radiance that all women have but most women hide, unconsciously denying its existence.”

“They’re happy like that; I’m happy like this. Life has changed completely. At that all her being, even her beauty, became for a moment, dusty and out of date.”

“He called them privately after the Kings and Queens of England; Cam the Wicked, James the Ruthless, Andrew the Just, Prue the Fair—for Prue would have beauty, he thought, how could she help it?—and Andrew brains.”

“I saw then how I had changed. I did not mind anymore that I lost when we raced and I lost when we swam out to the rocks and I lost when we tossed spears or skipped stones. For who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty?”

“Such women as you a hundred men always covet—your eyes will bewitch scores on scores into an unavailing fancy for you—you can only marry one of that many.”

“i usedta live in the world really be in the world free & sweet talkin good mornin & thank-you & nice day uh huh i cant now i cant be nice to nobody nice is such a rip-off regular beauty & a smile in the street is just a set-up”

“I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”

“Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of the regrettable things I’d done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.”

“The edges of the drawings were yellowed and brittle, but they were all beautiful, and they were all by Georges Méliès.”

″‘A seventh princess!’ sighed the romantic maidens. ‘And of course she will be the most beautiful of all. Youngest princesses always are.‘”

“They were in every way all that real princesses should be, for their hair was as yellow as the gold that is mined by the little gnomes in the mountains of the north, their eyes were as blue as the larkspurs in the palace gardens, and they had complexions like wild rose petals ad cream.”

“For though she was ordinary, she possessed health, wit, courage, charm, and cheerfulness. But because she was not beautiful, no one ever seemed to notice these other qualities, which is so often the way of the world.”

“On the third of June, at a minute past two, where once was a person, a flower now grew... The world was much crueler an hour ago. I’m glad someone decided to give flowers a go.”

“He who always greets and constantly reveres the aged, four things will increase to him, viz. life, beauty, happiness, power. But he who lives a hundred years, vicious and unrestrained, a life of one day is better if a man is virtuous and reflecting. And he who lives a hundred years, ignorant and unrestrained, a life of one day is better if a man is wise and reflecting.And he who lives a hundred years, idle and weak, a life of one day is better if a man has attained firm strength. And he who lives a hundred years, not seeing beginning and end, a life of one day is better if a man sees beginning and end. And he who lives a hundred years, not seeing the immortal place, a life of one day is better if a man sees the immortal place. And he who lives a hundred years, not seeing the highest law, a life of one day is better if a man sees the highest law.”

“A fragile, unearthly prettiness has come out in Laura: she is like a piece of translucent glass touched by light, given a momentary radiance, not actual, not lasting.”

“You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique. (And her only thirty-one) I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face, It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.”

“It seems cruel, cruel, to give us such a vision; to let us dream and drift through heaven for six months, and then to take it out of our lives.”

“The fair taught men and women steeped only in the necessary to see that cities did not have to be dark, soiled, unsafe bastions of the strictly pragmatic. They could also be beautiful.”

“Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations.”

“The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne.”

“A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She’s too pretty.”

″‘Well, first of all, they are very beautiful,’ said Peregrine, leaning back against a tree trunk and ticking off the points on his fingers. ‘Then secondly and thirdly and fourthly, they all have long golden hair, blue eyes, and the most lovely complexions. Fifthly and sixthly, they are graceful and accomplished. Sev enthly, they have names like Persephone, Sapphire, and Roxanne. And lastly,’ said Peregrine, running out of fingers, ‘they are all excessively proper and extremely dull ... except when they are make-believe princesses who are really kitchen maids!‘”

“She was the still point of the turning world,”

“but none of these signs of malnourishment or illness or grief … detracted from Lux’s overwhelming impression of being a carnal angel.”

“How much more respectable is the woman who earns her own bread by fulfilling any duty, than the most accomplished beauty!”

“While Anne was not beautiful in any strictly defined sense of the word she possessed a certain evasive charm and distinction of appearance that left beholders with a pleasurable sense of satisfaction in that softly rounded girlhood of hers, with all its strongly felt potentialities.”

“And seriously, I can’t even. Because Cal’s bangs. Cal’s eyes.”

“I want to enjoy the mystery of not knowing you. Take in every exciting opportunity to learn you. Then, fall in love with the anticipation of one day truly understanding you, so that I can become totally obsessed with the beauty of doing all the things that make you smile.”

″... I’m so thankful for friendship. It beautifies life so much.”

“Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment given the proper circumstances, context, or point of view.”

“Ivy sat rapt with attention. Mr Daniel’s words - incredible adventure, beauty and light, unquestionably brilliant, begin in earnest - fueled her with optimism.”

“The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.”

“Wabi-sabi is ambivalent about separating beauty from non-beauty or ugliness.”

“Beauty is thus an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace.”

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”

“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”

“Beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness.”

“There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty – unless she is wed to something more meaningful – is always superficial.”

“An ugly woman would ruin me, the disease would be sure to strike in and kill me at the sight of her. I think a pretty physician, with engaging manners, would coax a fellow to live through almost anything.”

“Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful.”

“At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.”

“My goal was not joy but purity, not happiness but beauty, and spirituality.”

“I’ll never forget this time he wanted to do a portrait of me. He always used to say to me - serious as the devil, too - ‘Eddie, you’re not beautiful according to conventional standards, but there’s something in your face I wanna catch.’ Serious as the devil he’d say it, I mean. Well. I only posed for him this once.”

“When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life”

“And you ask things about me, and I tell you about myself. I do not know why I tell you so much truth, but you are beautiful and I am tired—though I am attached, too, to my alone-ness.”

Sutra 4.15: vastu-sâmye citta-bhedât tayor vibhaktah panthâh Translation: Although individuals perceive the same objects, these objects are perceived in different ways, because those minds are each unique and beautifully diverse.

“People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve.”

“Lust, I suspect, wears repatent stilettos, that feather boa and not much else. Maybe glossy red lipstick.”

“We missed the reality and the beauty of the forest because we were diverted by the ugliness of some of its trees.”

“Well, you may get off on being a beautiful stereotype, regardless of the social consequences, but my conscience won’t allow it.”

“Beauty reminds us of an Eden we have never known, but somehow our hearts were created for.”

“We think you’ll find that every woman in her heart of hearts longs for three things: to be romanced, to play an irreplaceable role in a great adventure, and to unveil beauty. That’s what makes a woman come alive.”

“We desire to possess a beauty that is worth pursuing, worth fighting for, a beauty that is core to who we truly are. We want beauty that can be seen; beauty that can be felt; beauty that affects others; a beauty all our own to unveil.”

“Miss Kelly, you know, when you wear my flower you make it beautiful.”

“No one is safe from nature’s savagery, not even the innocent. Only beauty is consistent.

“But for all her youth and beauty she has a sour distrusting expression that only dissolves under the weight of immense pleasure.”

“Ask Jesus to show you your beauty. Ask him what he thinks of you as a woman. His words to us let us rest and unveil our beauty.”

″[Beauty] was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.”

“Aware of our deep failings, we pour contempt on our own hearts for wanting more. Oh, we long for intimacy and for adventure; we long to be the beauty of some great story. But the desires set deep in our hearts seem like a luxury, granted only to those women who get their acts together. The message to the rest of us – whether from a driven culture or a driven church – is try harder.”

“In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art--the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard’s canvases--beauty was savage.”

“Despereaux stared up at her in wonder. The Pea, he decided, looked just like the picture of the fair maiden in the book in the library. The princess smiled at Despereaux again, and this time, Despereaux smiled back. And then, something incredible happened: The mouse fell in love.”

“No doubt your sword is indeed a beautiful thing. It is a tribute to whoever forged it in bygone ages. There are very few such swords as this one left in the world, but remember, it is only a sword, Matthias.”

“Everyone used to say, ‘What a nice looking bunch of ducklings-all except that one. Boy, he’s really ugly.’ The really ugly duckling heard these people, but he didn’t care. He knew that one day he would probably grow up to be a swan and be bigger and look better than anything in the pond.”

“She was so sure, so present, so easy, so light and gold, while I was all gray and shadow. I was not ugly or monstrous. That might have been better. Monsters always command attention, if only for their freakishness. My parents would have wrung their hands and tried to make it up to me, as parents will with a handicapped or especially ugly child. Even Call, his nose too large for his small face, had a certain satisfactory ugliness.”

“Why bother with driving lessons, her mother said, anyone as pretty as you can always find a handsome young man to chauffeur you. She should have insisted. She should have said no just one to her mother, just once. It was too late now.”

“My uncle sat and looked at the moon, its silvery light spilling over the mountains, making all things quietly beautiful.”

“If there was ever a more perfect day in the history of time it isn’t one I’ve heard about.”

“You’ve never in your life seen a horse run like this! He’s all power-all beauty.”

“His mane was like a crest, mounting, then falling low. His neck was long and slender, and arched to the small, savagely beautiful head. The head was that of the wildest of all creatures- a stallion born wild- and it was beautiful, savage, and splendid. A stallion with a wonderful physical perfection that matched his savage, ruthless spirit.”

“Ronald, your clothes are really pretty and your hair is neat. You look like a real prince, but you are a bum.”

“They didn’t get married after all.”

“Elizabeth was a beautiful princess. She lived in a castle and had expensive princess clothes. She was going to marry a prince named Ronald.”

“Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful World, With the wonderful water round you curled, And the wonderful grass upon your breast, World, you are beautifully drest.”

“The astronomer gazed at the stars and, with the help of Drosselmeier, who was also versed in such matters, drew up Princess Pirlipat’s horoscope. This was no easy matter, for the lines of her destiny crisscrossed and tangles, but at last-oh joy!- as last it was revealed that all Princess Pirlipat had to do to throw off the spell that had made her ugly and to recover her beauty was to eat the sweet kernel of the nut Krakatuk.”

“If she hadn’t thrown her slipper at the right time, if she hadn’t outfitted me with the pensioned colonel’s sword, I’d be lying in my grave, bitten to pieces by the abominable King of Mice. Tell me now, can Pirlipat, though a true princess, hold a candle to Mistress Stahlbaum for beauty, kindness, and virtue? No, I say, she cannot!”

“How could I doubt such a miracle? Isn’t it a miracle that the sun rises every day in the east and sets in the west? Isn’t there mystery in all of nature’s wonders? In the movements of the moon or the stillness of the stars?”

“He landed in a jungle alive with beautiful plants.”

“It is because every one under Heaven recognizes beauty as beauty, that the idea of ugliness exists.”

“The birdlike gestures are worn away to a mere picking and plucking her way between the tire rims and the sunflowers, between Coke bottles and milkweed, among all the waste and beauty of the world—which is what she herself was. All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us.”

“Before he had come to the town he had known about nothing but death: here he had learnt to live, to decide things for himself…he had learnt the sound of laughter that was free from cruelty; he had learnt the meaning of beauty”

“Of all the wishes people had brought him - money, love, revenge - this seemed to him the most poignant and the one most deserving of fulfillment. A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes.”

“I remember the stars that night. They were like salt against the sky, like someone spilled the shaker against very dark cloth. That mattered to me, their accidental beauty.”

“He knew that most young men made nothing at all of giving a pretty girl a kiss, and he remembered that the night before, when he had put his arm about Mattie, she had not resisted. But that had been out-of-doors, under the open irresponsible night. Now, in the warm lamplit room, with all its ancient implications of conformity and order, she seemed infinitely farther away from him and more unapproachable.”

“All I had to do was fly over it for it to be mine forever. I can wear it like a giant diamond necklace, or just fly above it and marvel at its sparkling beauty. I can fly-yes, fly. Me, Cassie Louise Lightfoot, only eight years old and in the third grade, and I can fly. That means I am free to go wherever I want for the rest of my life.”

“Sometimes it’s like people are a million times more beautiful to you in your mind. It’s like you see them through a special lens — but maybe if it’s how you see them, that’s how they really are. It’s like the whole tree falling in the forest thing.”

“Amos, a little speck of a living thing in the vast living universe, felt thoroughly akin to it all. Overwhelmed by the beauty and mystery of everything, he rolled over and over and right off the deck of his boat and into the sea.

“The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”

“There is nothing more rare, nor more beautiful, than a woman being unapologetically herself; comfortable in her perfect imperfection. To me, that is the true essence of beauty.”

“A woman’s scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Walter Mitty’s arms.”

“Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew.”

“To this day I do not know what they mean when they call dead bodies beautiful. The ugliest man alive is an angel of beauty compared with the loveliest of the dead.”

“What is in all this beauty for me when every minute, every second I am obliged, forced to know that even this tiny gnat, buzzing near me in the sunlight now, is taking part in all this banquet and chorus, knows its place in it, loves it, and is happy, and I alone am an outcast.”

“I don’t understand how one can walk by a tree and not be happy at the sight of it! Or to speak with a man and not be happy in loving him? There are so many things at every step so beautiful.”

“Sobriety, if it is anything, is paying attention, seeing the wonder and the beauty around us that we so easily sprint by on our way to the next thing. And this is more than fun; this is actually living.”

“Morris’s brother, Victor, got a hockey outfit. Morris’s sister, Rose, got a beauty kit. Morris’s other sister, Betty, got a chemistry set. And Morris got a bear.”

“And he was too silly to use the beauty kit, said Rose, he would waste all the lipstick.”

Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.

“Of course, I was old enough to know this wouldn’t work out, but the picture he painted was so beautiful and serene that all I could do was whisper yes, yes.”

“Finally, I could see I was licked. Doodle was my brother, and he was going to cling to me forever, no matter what I did, so I dragged him across the burning cotton field to share with him the only beauty I knew, Old Woman Swamp.”

“Of course, I was old enough to know this wouldn’t work out, but the picture he painted was so beautiful and serene that all I could do was whisper yes, yes.”

“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”

“It is my belief that the World (or, if you will, the House, since the two are for all practical purposes identical) wishes an inhabitant for Itself to be a witness to its Beauty and the recipient of its Mercies.”

“My body goes before me like a lantern down a dark lane, bringing one thing after another out of darkness into a ring of light. I dazzle you.”

“Her beauty, which most of them had never seen, worked on then as a terror might work.”