Beauty Quotes

The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold.Or, if your ad revenue or your seven-figure salary or your privileged sexual status depend on it, it is an operable condition.

~ Naomi Wolf

This is the truth: we all desire to conquer the comely one, because it affirms our own worth. Speaking for the men of the world, we want to own the beauty of the woman we're fucking. We want to grasp that beauty, tightly in our greedy little fingers, to well and truly possess it, to make it ours. We want to do this as the woman shines her way through an orgasm. That's perfection. And while I can't speak for women, I imagine that they-whether they admit it or not-want the same thing: to possess the man, to own his rough handsomeness, if only for a few seconds.

~ Andrew Davidson

Please, I'm a transgender former boy-bander. You think I don't know how to defend myself?

~ Libba Bray

Brought to you by The Corporation: In your homes and in your pants.

~ Libba Bray

Self-denial can lock women into a smug and critical condescension to other, less devout women.According to Appel, cult members develop...an attitude of moral superiority, a contempt for secular laws, rigidity of thought, and the diminution of regard for the individual. A premium is placed on conformity to the cult group; deviation is penalized. Beauty is derivative; conforming to the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty that is then used to punish women physically and psychologically for failure to achieve and conform to it] is beautiful. The aim of beauty thinking, about weight or age, is rigid female thought. Cult members are urged to sever all ties with the past: I destroyed all my fat photographs!; It's a new me!

~ Naomi Wolf

The beauty myth of the present is more insidious than any mystique of femininity yet: A century ago, Nora slammed the door of the doll's house; a generation ago, women turned their backs on the consumer heaven of the isolated multiapplianced home; but where women are trapped today, there is no door to slam. The contemporary ravages of the beauty backlash are destroying women physically and depleting us psychologically. If we are to free ourselves from the dead weight that has once again been made out of femaleness, it is not ballots or lobbyists or placards that women will need first; it is a new way to see.

~ Naomi Wolf

But I want you to know that you're a beautiful girl, far more beautiful than I ever was at your age, and that starving yourself to compete with all of those skinny celebrities who spend half their lives checking in and out of rehab is not only a completely unreasonable and unattainable goal, but will only end up making you sick.

~ Alyson Noel

Pain and beauty, our constant bedfellows

~ Nick Bantock

But maybe you see beauty in me because you are beautiful, not because I am.

~ Amy Harmon

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

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

But Philip was impatient with himself; he called to mind his idea of the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful; he told himself strenuously that he must accept with gaiety everything, dreariness and excitement, pleasure and pain, because it added to the richness of the design.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

Kaderin didn't believe, as a whole, the nymphs were more beautiful than the Valkyrie, but everything about them screamed, Easy lay! When you don't want to work for it! And curiously, many males found that more appealing than the Valkyrie's Do it and die, simian.

~ Kresley Cole

I wish I could line up naked the men I've slept with and just gloat for a hot minute. Beautiful creatures.

~ Crystal Woods

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.

~ Camille Pissarro

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I love her bare legs from a distance. When she's standing by a pool. When she's facing the water, thinking. Her legs are white as watermelon rind, veined blue from cold. There's that 'H' shape behind her knees. The H trembles softly with the swimming-water cold.

~ Jaclyn Moriarty

Outward beauty is a true sign of inner goodness. This loveliness, indeed, is impressed upon the body in varying degrees as a token by which the soul can be recognized for what it is, just as with trees the beauty of the blossom testifies to the goodness of the fruit.

~ Baldassarre Castiglione

Whatever her name was, she was pretty. She had a thick, careless braid of chestnut hair, a quick smile, and dark, merry eyes. She wore some kind of a fuzzy lavender pullover, and when she crossed her legs and lifted her guitar onto her lap, she had an interesting way of tucking the foot of the bottom leg back under her chair that made Hector feel melty. He looked away in self-preservation.

~ Lynne Rae Perkins

All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Doing mathematics should always mean finding patterns and crafting beautiful and meaningful explanations.

~ Paul Lockhart

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separa

~ Adrienne Rich

When you are truly stunning, gorgeous and beautiful, you won’t have to prove that to anyone visually.

~ Alexandra Elle

I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.

~ Charles Baudelaire

[Women's magazines]ignore older women or pretend that they don’t exist; magazines try to avoid photographs of older women, and when they feature celebrities who are over sixty, ‘retouching artists’ conspire to ‘help’ beautiful women look more beautiful, ie less than their age...By now readers have no idea what a real woman’s 60 year old face looks like in print because it’s made to look 45. Worse, 60 year old readers look in the mirror and think they are too old, because they’re comparing themselves to some retouched face smiling back at them from a magazine.

~ Dalma Heyn

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

~ Oscar Wilde

The economics of industrialized countries would collapse if women didn't do the work they do for free: According to economist Marilyn Waring, throughout the West it generates between 25 and 40 percent of the gross national product.

~ Naomi Wolf

They will stop calling brides beautiful after today—you have simply set the standard too high,' he said.

~ Anna Godbersen

Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West is is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.

~ Naomi Wolf

It's so difficult to love another person and yourself for who they are and not what they do or who they could be. To stay in this moment and know it in all its pleasure and its pain. The world is a beautiful place. How often do we say this aloud?

~ Vicki Forman

Weight doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t. I mean, it does if you’re a model or whatever.

~ Meg Cabot

Most urgently, women's identity must be premised upon our beauty so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.

~ Naomi Wolf

Beauty soaks reality as water fills a rag.

~ Chet Raymo

Was Briony the only person who could hear the venom dripping from the woman’s tongue? What good was beauty — a mature beauty, but beauty nonetheless — if it cloaked such a viperous soul?

~ Tad Williams

As soon as a woman's primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women.

~ Naomi Wolf

What is true about music is true about life: that beauty reveals everything because it expresses nothing.

~ Mandy Slade

She was the most beautiful creature on Earth - her hair said so in that language only hair can speak.

~ Gabriel Bá

I sought her eye, desirous to read there the intelligence which I could not discern in her face or hear in her conversation; it was merry, rather small; by turns I saw vivacity, vanity, coquetry, look out through its irid, but I watched in vain for a glimpse of soul. I am no Oriental; white necks, carmine lips and cheeks, clusters of bright curls, do not suffice for me without that Promethean spark which will live after the roses and lilies are faded, the burnished hair grown grey. In sunshine, in prosperity, the flowers are very well; but how many wet days are there in life--November seasons of disaster, when a man's hearth and home would be cold indeed, without the clear, cheering gleam of intellect.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Amid the moon and the stars, amid the clouds of the night, amid the hills which bordered on the sky with their magnificent silhouette of pointed cedars, amid the speckled patches of the moon, amid the temple buildings that emerged sparkling white out of the surrounding darkness - amid all this, I was intoxicated by the pellucid beauty of Uiko's treachery.

~ Yukio Mishima

Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground

~ Diana Abu-Jaber

And she thought then how strange it was that disaster—the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face—could be at times, such a thing of beauty.

~ Anita Shreve