Beauty
134 quotes
Biography
"Beauty, real beauty, is something very grave. If there is a God, He must be partly that."
"Beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty: so that "good" means that which simply pleases the appetite; while the "beautiful" is something pleasant to apprehend."
"A common expression among African Americans relates the good to the beautiful, "beauty is as beauty does" or "she's beautiful because she's good." The first statement places emphasis on what a person does, that is, how a person "walks" among others in the society. The second statement identifies the beautiful by action. If a person's actions are not good, it does not matter how the person looks physically. Doing good is equivalent to being beautiful."
"Slow was I, Lord, too slow in loving you. ... You were waiting within me while I went outside me, looking for you there, misshaping myself as I flung myself upon the shapely things you made."
"Inasmuch as love grows in you, in so much beauty grows; for love is itself the beauty of the soul."
"Are not all young men ready to trust the promise of a pretty face and to infer beauty of soul from beauty of feature? An indefinable impulse leads them to believe that moral perfection must co-exist with physical perfection."
"Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the infinite."
"Unfortunately, truth is neither a listable nor a decidable property; nor is the truth of a statement of arithmetic. The American logician John Myhill has used the term 'prospective' to characterize those attributes of the world that are neither listable nor decidable. They are properties that cannot be recognized by the application of some formula, made to conform to a rule, or generated by some computer program. They are characterized by incessant novelty that cannot be encompassed by any finite set of rules. 'Beauty', 'ugliness', 'truth', 'harmony', simplicity', and 'poetry' are names we give to some of the attributes of this sort. There is no way of listing all examples of beauty or ugliness, nor any procedure for saying whether or not something possesses either of those attributes, without redefining them in some more restrictive fashion that kills their prospective character."
"Beauty. The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband."
"There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness."
"I had hardly ever seen a handsome youth; never in my life spoken to one. I had a theoretical reverence and homage for beauty, elegance, gallantry, fascination; but had I met those qualities incarnate in masculine shape, I should have known instinctively that they neither had nor could have sympathy with anything in me, and should have shunned them as one would fire, lightning, or anything else that is bright but antipathetic."
"L'air spirituel est dans les hommes ce que la régularité des traits est dans les femmes: c'est le genre de beauté où les plus vains puissent aspirer."
"And behold there was a very stately palace before him, the name of which was Beautiful."
"Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried. Is not this a demonstration of that change of surface continual and yet hardly perceptible at any point which forms one of the great constituents of beauty?"
"Nothing gives life a finer touch of grace, than the presence in the family circle of a lovely girl of seventeen."
"A lovely girl is above all rank. Men, however high, must feel her higher, however low."
"[B]eauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time."
"Beauty is pain and there's beauty in everything."
"There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of birds, in the ebb and flow of the tides; in the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in these repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter."
"Is it the right of this, our generation, in its selfish materialism, to destroy these things because we are blinded by the dollar sign? Beauty—and all the values the derive from beauty-are not measured and evaluated in terms of the dollar."
"The reason for the unreason with which you treat reason, so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of your beauty."
"No todas hermosuras enamoran, que algunas alegran la vista, y no rinden la voluntad."
"Beauty has this power, that in an instant, a moment, it brings with it the desire of whoever sees and knows it, and when it reveals or promises some way of reaching and enjoying it, with powerful fervor it sets fire to the soul of whoever contemplates it, just like the means whereby dry prepared gunpowder is easily lit by any spark that touches it."
"It is a prerogative of beauty to always be respected."
"Everything changes, but beauty remains."