Beauty Quotes

Order is what exists before you start arranging things.

~ Marty Rubin

Her mighty lakes, like oceans of liquid silver; her mountains, with bright aerial tints; her valleys, teeming with wild fertility; her tremendous cataracts, thundering in their solitudes; her boundless plains, waving with spontaneous verdure; her broad, deep rivers, rolling in solemn silence to the ocean; her trackless forests, where vegetation puts forth all its magnificence; her skies, kindling with the magic of summer clouds and glorious sunshine - no, never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of natural scenery.

~ Washington Irving

To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business—not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything is flaking away into… rhetoric and plot.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

But the princess had never seen the beautiful expression of her eyes; the expression that came into them when she was not thinking of herself. As is the case with everyone, her face assumed an affected, unnatural, ugly expression as soon as she looked in the looking glass.

~ Leo Tolstoy

When you were in a room with Kurtis James, whether it was one or a hundred other people, Kurtis seemed to be the only one there

~ Dee Remy

Beauty is the worst kind of lie.

~ Beth Kephart

How I should despise such a thing if I were a man. What a nose she has! what a chin! what a neck! Then her eyes--and the worst kissing lips in the universe.

~ John Vanbrugh

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I felt like I was seeing Shannon through a new lens, undistracted by Jennifer's nuclear glow. I could see how pretty she really was, how kind her eyes were.

~ Kenneth Oppel

The surgeons' market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women's faces or bodies that social change won't cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.

~ Naomi Wolf

Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing.

~ Marilynne Robinson

Ultima came to stay with us the summer I was almost seven. When she came the beauty of the llano unfolded before my eyes, and the gurgling waters of the river sang to the hum of the turning earth. The magical time of childhood stood still, and the pulse of the living earth pressed its mystery into my living blood.

~ Rudolfo Anaya

Women are mere beauties in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable. A beautiful heroine is a contradiction in terms, since heroism is about individuality, interesting and ever changing, while beauty is generic, boring, and inert. While culture works out moral dilemmas, beauty is amoral: If a woman is born resembling an art object, it is an accident of nature, a fickle consensus of mass perception, a peculiar coincidence--but it is not a moral act. From the beauties in male culture, women learn a bitter amoral lesson--that the moral lessons of their culture exclude them.

~ Naomi Wolf

Men won't easily give up a system in which half the world's population works for next to nothing...[and recognizes that]precisely because that half works for so little, it may have no energy left to fight for anything else.

~ Marilyn Waring

Since middle-class Western women can best be weakened psychologically now that we are stronger materially, the beauty myth, as it has resurfaced in the last generation, has had to draw on more technological sophistication and reactionary fervor than ever before. The modern arsenal of the myth is a dissemination of millions of images of the current ideal; although this barrage is generally seen as a collective sexual fantasy, there is in fact little that is sexual about it. It is summoned out of political fear on the part of male-dominated institutions threatened by women's freedom, and it exploits female guilt and apprehension about our own liberation -- latent fears that we might be going too far.

~ Naomi Wolf

Beauty is given to dolls, majesty to haughty vixens, but mind, feeling, passion and the crowning grace of fortitude are the attributes of an angel.

~ Charlotte Brontë

I know that a pretty doll, a fair fool, might do well enough for the honeymoon; but when passion cooled, how dreadful to find a lump of wax and wood laid in my bosom, a half-idiot clasped in my arms, and to remember that I had made of this my equal- nay, my idol- to know that I must pass the rest of my dreary life with a creature incapable of understanding what I said, of appreciating what I thought, or of sympathising with what I felt!

~ Charlotte Brontë

The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us...During the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing specialty...pornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal...More women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition than we have ever had before; but in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers.

~ Naomi Wolf

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In drawing attention to the physical characteristics of women leaders, they can be dismissed as either too pretty or too ugly. The net effect is to prevent women's identification with the issues. If the public women is stigmatized as too 'pretty,' she's a threat, a rival--or simply not serious; if derided as too 'ugly,' one risks tarring oneself with the same brush by identifying oneself with her agenda.

~ Naomi Wolf

For the first time in his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it was - a chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces - and he needed days of repose to see it clothe itself again with the illusions of his senses, the white purity of its snows, the splendor of its light, and the infinity of its heavenly peace. Nature was kind; Lake Geneva was beautiful beyond itself, and the Alps put on charms real as terrors.

~ Henry Adams

Tremendous beauty and tremendous ugliness puts you on the outside of things.

~ Peter Bogdanovich

You looked so beautiful- your hair spread out around your head against the linoleum. Though your think brown curls had thinned since you'd started losing weight, they still fell in soft waves. You reminded me of a mermaid, your skin all shiny, your lips so full compared to the harshness of your angular cheekbones and pointed chin.

~ Steph Bowe

I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail leading into the unknown to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bread by cities... it is enough that I am surrounded by beauty.

~ Everett Ruess

I tell you Schoonmaker she doesn't know what she has. That's the heart of it. She's like some wild creature who hasn't a clue the worth of its coat.

~ Anna Godbersen

...it's fat women who are really beautiful. The fatter the better.

~ Antonio Olinto

It is not Beauty I demand, A crystal brow, the moon's despair, Nor the snow's daughter, a white hand, Nor mermaid's yellow pride of hair. Tell me not of your starry eyes, Your lips that seem on roses fed, Your breasts where Cupid trembling lies, Nor sleeps for kissing of his bed. ...Give me, instead of beauty's bust, A tender heart, a loyal mind, Which with temptation I could trust, Yet never linked with error find. One in whose gentle bosom I Could pour my secret heart of woes. Like the care-burdened honey-fly That hides his murmurs in the rose. My earthly comforter! whose love So indefeasible might be, That when my spirit won above Hers could not stay for sympathy.

~ George Darley

The stronger that women grow, the more prestige, fame, and money is accorded to the display professions: They are held higher and higher above the heads of rising women, for them to emulate.

~ Naomi Wolf

Creativity leads others to where I lead you, to an unseen beauty, so ineffable its very beauty destroys itself...

~ Fola

Rome was mud and smoky skies; the rank smell of the Tiber and the exotically spiced cooking fires of a hundred different nationalities. Rome was white marble and gilding and heady perfumes; the blare of trumpets and the shrieking of market-women and the eternal, sub-aural hum of more people, speaking more languages than Gaius had ever imagined existed, crammed together on seven hills whose contours had long ago disappeared beneath this encrustation if humanity. Rome was the pulsing heart of the world.

~ Marion Zimmer Bradley

Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?

~ William Shakespeare

And yonder sits a maiden, The fairest of the fair, With gold in her garment glittering, And she combs her golden hair.

~ Heinrich Heine

The quality of beauty lies on how beholder values an object.

~ Toba Beta

Look on beauty,And you shall see 'tis purchased by the weight;Which therein works a miracle in nature,Making them lightest that wear most of it:So are those crisped snaky golden locksWhich make such wanton gambols with the wind,Upon supposed fairness, often knownTo be the dowry of a second head,The skull that bred them in the sepulchre.Thus ornament is but the guiled shoreTo a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarfVeiling an Indian beauty; in a word,The seeming truth which cunning times put onTo entrap the wisest.

~ William Shakespeare

Why did people assume that the beautiful among them needed nothing but their beauty to bring them happiness? That behind the beauty there was nothing but an empty shell, insensitive shell?

~ Mary Balogh

Accentuated plainness and accentuated vice ought to bring about harmony. Beauty lies in harmony, in style, whether it be the harmony of ugliness or beauty, vice or virtue.

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

With characteristic lack of false modesty, John once said to me, My looks are a rough test of people. If they don't begin to see me beautiful when they have had a chance to learn, I know they're dead inside, and dangerous.

~ Olaf Stapledon

Yes! Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty—it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it... There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy.

~ George Eliot

Beauty itself doth of itself persuadeThe eyes of men without orator.

~ William Shakespeare

Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved, finally mysterious beauty and grace of this world that we did not make, that has no price? Where is our sanity but there? Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world? (pg. 215, Economy and Pleasure)

~ Wendell Berry