Beauty Quotes

Know that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history... for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe....
~Robinson Jeffers, from "The Answer"

 

For attractive lips, speak words of kindness.
For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.
For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.
For beautiful hair, let a child run his or her fingers through it once a day.
For poise, walk with the knowledge that you never walk alone....
~Sam Levenson

Beauty... is the shadow of God on the universe. ~Gabriela Mistral, Desolacíon

Beauty... when you look into a woman’s eyes and see what is in her heart. ~Nate Dircks

You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen. But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul’s own doing. ~Marie Stopes

Decay and disease are often beautiful, like the pearly tear of the shellfish and the hectic glow of consumption. ~Henry David Thoreau, journal, 1852 June 11th

Beauty — in projection and perceiving — is 99.9% attitude. ~Grey Livingston

Beauty?... To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to. ~Pablo Picasso

I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want — an adorable pancreas? ~Jean Kerr, The Snake Has All the Lines

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. ~Saint Augustine

There is no torture that a woman would not endure to enhance her beauty. ~Michel de Montaigne

Taking joy in living is a woman’s best cosmetic. ~Rosalind Russell

I hope you have lost your good looks, for while they last any fool can adore you, and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul. No, give me a ruined complexion and a lost figure and sixteen chins on a farmyard of Crow’s feet and an obvious wig. Then you shall see me coming out strong. ~George Bernard Shaw, to Mrs. Patrick Campbell

Beauty isn’t worth thinking about; what’s important is your mind. You don’t want a fifty-dollar haircut on a fifty-cent head. ~Garrison Keillor

 


The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone. ~Johann von Goethe

The misconception with a lot of girls is that it takes two to three hours to be beautiful. I always tell girls allow yourself 30 minutes so that you can really enjoy the process, so that you can get to know you in the morning before the world gets to know you. ~Tracy Balan, Girlfriend Intervention, "Sam, Trapped in Teen Fantasy World" (season 1, episode 3), original airdate 2014 September 10th

A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful. ~Karl Kraus

Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light. ~John Ruskin

Beauty in the flesh will continue to rule the world. ~Florenz Ziegfeld

Do I love you because you’re beautiful,
Or are you beautiful because I love you?
~Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Cinderella

Beauty without grace is a hook without a bait. ~Ninon de l’Enclos

 

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance. ~John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 1851

Glamour is a shooting star, it catches your eye, but fades away, beauty is the sun always brilliant day after day. ~Mike Dolan, @HawaiianLife

Beauty is the promise of happiness. ~Stendhal

Beauty, to me, is about being comfortable in your own skin. That, or a kick-ass red lipstick. ~Gwyneth Paltrow

 

One summer night, out on a flat headland, all but surrounded by the waters of the bay, the horizons were remote and distant rims on the edge of space. Millions of stars blazed in darkness, and on the far shore a few lights burned in cottages. Otherwise there was no reminder of human life. My companion and I were alone with the stars: the misty river of the Milky Way flowing across the sky, the patterns of the constellations standing out bright and clear, a blazing planet low on the horizon. It occurred to me that if this were a sight that could be seen only once in a century, this little headland would be thronged with spectators. But it can be seen many scores of nights in any year, and so the lights burned in the cottages and the inhabitants probably gave not a thought to the beauty overhead; and because they could see it almost any night, perhaps they never will. ~Rachel Carson

Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books. ~Walt Whitman

No spring nor summer’s beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one Autumnal face....
~John Donne, "Elegy IX: The Autumnal"

Men and women make their own beauty or their own ugliness. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton speaks in one of his novels of a man "who was uglier than he had any business to be;" and, if we could but read it, every human being carries his life in his face, and is good-looking or the reverse as that life has been good or evil. On our features the fine chisels of thought and emotion are eternally at work. ~Alexander Smith, "An Essay on an Old Subject"

 

Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

 



 

Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul. ~Alice Walker

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

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike. This natural beauty-hunger is made manifest in the little window-sill gardens of the poor, though perhaps only a geranium slip in a broken cup, as well as in the carefully tended rose and lily gardens of the rich, the thousands of spacious city parks and botanical gardens, and in our magnificent National parks — the Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, etc. — Nature's sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world. ~John Muir, The Yosemite

Our hearts are drunk with a beauty our eyes could never see. ~George W. Russell

I’ve never seen a smiling face that was not beautiful. ~Author Unknown

By plucking her petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower. ~Rabindranath Tagore

Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart. ~Khalil Gibran

Against Him those women sin who torment their skin with potions, stain their cheeks with rouge and extend the line of their eyes with black coloring. Doubtless they are dissatisfied with God’s plastic skill. In their own persons they convict and censure the Artificer of all things. ~Tertullian

That which is striking and beautiful is not always good, but that which is good is always beautiful. ~Ninon de L’Enclos

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked. ~Ralph Ellison, "Battle Royal"

Some people, no matter how old they get, never lose their beauty — they merely move it from their faces into their hearts. ~Martin Buxbaum

Tell them dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for being
~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Rhodora"

Close your eyes and see the beauty. ~Author Unknown

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. ~Leo Tolstoy

In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty. ~Christopher Morley

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything. ~Simone Weil

What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for Beauty, and never see the Dawn! ~Logan Pearsall Smith

The most beautiful view is the one I share with you. ~Author Unknown

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other. ~Chinese Proverb

Beauty comes in all sizes, not just size 5. ~Roseanne

I don’t like standard beauty — there is no beauty without strangeness. ~Karl Lagerfeld

There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. ~Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Beauty and folly are generally companions. ~Baltasar Gracián, translated from Spanish

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend....
~William Butler Yeats, "A Prayer for my Daughter"

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it. ~Confucius

Man, she looked as if she'd just been thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world. Yet in spite of this I got the impression of beauty, not the beauty of a movie actress, mind you, or the beauty you dream about when you're with your wife, but a natural beauty, a beauty that's almost homely because it's so real. ~Martin Goldsmith & Martin Mooney, Detour, 1945, spoken by the character Al Roberts

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don't let insecurity ruin the beauty you were born with. ~Author Unknown

Plainness has its peculiar temptations quite as much as beauty. ~George Eliot

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

No beauty is lost. You get to see the real face of it after the blossoms have fallen off the tree. That's why I would rather see the face of a beautiful woman than a pretty girl.
Girls aren't beautiful, they're pretty. Beautiful is too heavy a word to assign to a girl. Women are beautiful because their faces show that they know, they have lost something and picked up something else.
~Henry Rollins, Smile, You're Traveling (Black Coffee Blues Part 3), 2000

She was just sixteen, and not yet beautiful. She was too young for beauty. Her form was not developed; she would probably gain two or three inches in height; and her face, though exquisitely modelled, wanted the refining which comes either from a multitude of complex emotions or is given at once by some great heart-sorrow. ~Amelia E. Huddleston Barr, A Rose of a Hundred Leaves: A Love Story, 1891

We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it. ~Mary Oliver

If you feel beautiful, then you are. Even if you don't, you still are. ~Terri Guillemets

 

Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. ~Edgar Allan Poe