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Beauty Quotes

Browse 6492 quotes about Beauty.

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Beauty Quotes

“I have consciously sought after those things which make for value, order, richness, spirit and wonder, even though I am often unable to verbalize what I feel when I perceive something beautiful. Sometimes it's a pang or a sensation; at other times it is an awareness of joy and security or pure pleasure. In any event, it is a moment to be celebrated. Beauty justifies itself. The fact that it is beyond definition means nothing.”

FeelsMeanSometimesMomentsFactsBeautifulJoySpiritValuesOrderPleasureWonderBeautyAwarenessSecurityEventsPureDefinitionsPerceiveJustifySensationsRichnessSomething Beautiful
Author:Luci Swindoll
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“The sense of beauty is intuitive, and beauty itself is all that inspires pleasure without, and aloof from, and even contrarily to interest.”

InterestPleasureBeautyInspireIntuitiveAloof
Book:The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetry, Plays, Literary Essays, Lectures, Autobiography and Letters (Classic Illustrated Edition): The Entire Opus of the English poet, literary critic and philosopher, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel, Lyrical Ballads, Conversation Poems and Biographia Literaria
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“It has, moreover, been proven that horror, nastiness, and the frightful are what give pleasure when one fornicates. Beauty is a simple thing; ugliness is the exceptional thing. And fiery imaginations, no doubt, always prefer the extraordinary thing to the simple thing.”

GivingImaginationSimplePleasureBeautyDoubtHorrorExtraordinaryNo DoubtProvenExceptionalUglinessSimple ThingsFieryExtraordinary ThingsNastiness
Book:The 120 days of Sodom and other writings
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“Sometimes I come across a tree which seems like Buddha or Jesus: loving, compassionate, still, unambitious, enlightened, in eternal meditation, giving pleasure to a pilgrim, shade to a cow, berries to a bird, beauty to its surroundings, health to its neighbors, branches for the fire, leaves for the soil, asking nothing in return, in total harmony with the wind and the rain. How much can I learn from a tree? The tree is my church, the tree is my temple, the tree is my mantra, the tree is my poem and my prayer.”

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Author:Satish Kumar
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“The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity. The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.”

WellsPersonsDifferentLightWould BeAgeOrderPerfectPleasureBeautyMorningYouthAgingPatternsSillyOld AgeEveningMaturityCurtainsGrowing OldNoonRadianceTranquillityYouth And Old AgeComplete LifeSilly Person
Book:Mr. Maugham Himself
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“The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner.”

FormPleasureBeautyObjectsLimitsHighestStriveImpressionFlamesFancyLinksStrifeImpatientExquisiteGrandeurUneasyKindred
Book:Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)
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“We call beauty that which supplies us with a particular pleasure.”

PleasureBeautyParticularSupplies
Book:WHAT IS ART? & WHEREIN IS TRUTH IN ART? (Meditations on Aesthetics & Literature): On the Significance of Science and Art, Shakespeare and the Drama, The Works of Guy De Maupassant, A. Stockham'sTokology, Amiel's Diary, S. T. Seménov's Peasant Stories, Stop and Think!...
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“Any halfway clever devil would decorate the highway to Hell as beautiful as possible.”

HeartFeelingsWisdomTruthDesireEvilEasySinPleasureBeautyHellPathHonestyTrustJudgmentEmotionsDevilLiesEternityIntelligenceProsperityAppearanceGoodLustCleverPunishmentDeceptionFakeSatanConvinceDeceitSensationsWrongAestheticQuestioningFalsehoodRightDistrustBadFlatteryDemonsDiscernmentDishonestyGospelRoadLureDamnationFacadeGood JudgmentBrideFalse PromisesDrawHighwayAppealFrontProsperity GospelFalse ProphetDecorationsBad JudgmentHighway To HellMass Appeal
Book:Healology
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“We don't value craftsmanship anymore! All we value is ruthless efficiency, and I say we deny our own humanity that way! Without appreciation for grace and beauty, there's no pleasure in creating things and no pleasure in having them! Our lives are made drearier, rather than richer! How can a person take pride in his work when skill and care are considered luxuries! We're not machines! We have a human need for craftsmanship!”

ArtCarePleasureQualityBeautyGraceCreatingHumanMachinesValueAppreciationQuantityEfficiencySkillCraftsmanshipHandmade
Book:There's Treasure Everywhere
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“According to Mederic-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, mulâtresses affranchies circumvented laws requiring them to go barefoot by adorning themselves with flowers. They headed out to dances, at times matching their dress to that of “a good friend who is a confidante, the woman she cannot do without.” The emergence of sumptuary laws did not stop black femme presentation or intimacy.”

PleasureBeautyIntimacyFemininity
Book:Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World
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“The purpose of art is then to reveal a beauty that we like or can be taught to like; the purpose of art is to give pleasure; the work of art as the source of pleasure is its own end; art is for art's sake. We value the work for the pleasure to be derived from the sight, sound, or touch of its aesthetic surfaces; our conception of beauty is literally skin-deep; questions of utility and intelligibility rarely arise, and if they arise are dismissed as irrelevant.”

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Book:Christian & Oriental Philosophy of Art Formerly: "Why Exhibit Works of Art?"
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“[...] one cannot understand a music – if it is a highly organized music – as long as one perceives only individual beautiful passages in it, which may even become a virtual wall blocking one's access to an understanding of the work itself. If you add up an important musical work for yourself from such beautiful passages, what you are really making of this work is nothing but a potpourri of itself – or you are moving it in the direction of a smash hit.”

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Book:Aesthetics
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“Easy beauty was apparent and unchallenging: "A simple tune; a simple spatial rhythm... a one; a youthful face, or the human form in its prime, all these afford a plain straightforward pleasure..." Conversely, difficult beauty, wrote Bosanquet required more time, patience, and a higher amount of concentration. Our ability to appreciate difficult beauty depended on our education, insights endurance, and our capacity or attention. In difficult beauty, one often encourages intricacy, tension, and width. The intricacy of a difficult aesthetic object can provoke resentment and disgust in us if we are unable to resolve and classify the complex elements of the object. Difficult beauty also required us to stay in a state of "high tension of feeling," and it is our own weakness - the "weakness of the spectators," says Bosanquet, taking the phrase from Aristotle - that causes us to shrink from the challenge of difficult beauty. "The capacity to endure and enjoy feeling at high tension is somewhat rare.”

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Book:Easy Beauty
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“The philosophical study of beauty, art, and the splendor of nature nurtures a person’s fertile mind by exposing a person to the puzzling world of the beautiful, elegant, ugly, and grotesque. Human beings ability to experience sublime pleasure emanates from a variety of sensory experiences and a person’s ability to make discriminatory observations and judgment in taste and sentiment.”

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Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Then there are the fully intentional pleasures, which, although in some way tied up with sensory or perceptual experience, are modes of exploration of the world. Aesthetic pleasures are like this. Aesthetic pleasures are contemplative - they involve studying an object OUTSIDE of the self, to which one is GIVING something (namely, attention and all that flows from it), and not TAKING, as in the pleasure that comes from drugs and drinks. Hence such pleasures are not addictive - there is no pathway to reward that can be short-circuited here, and a serotonin injection is not a cheap way of obtaining the experience of PARISFAL or THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.”

PleasureBeautyStudyContemplationAesthetics
Book:On Human Nature
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“More and more, we take for granted that work must be destitute of pleasure. More and more, we assume that if we want to be pleased we must wait until evening, or the weekend, or vacation, or retirement. More and more, our farms and forests resemble our factories and offices, which in turn more and more resemble prisons—why else should we be so eager to escape them? We recognize defeated landscapes by the absence of pleasure from them. We are defeated at work because our work gives us no pleasure. We are defeated at home because we have no pleasant work there. We turn to the pleasure industries for relief from our defeat, and are again defeated, for the pleasure industries can thrive and grow only upon our dissatisfaction with them. 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?”

WorkPleasureBeauty
Book:What Are People For?
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“In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her. And 50, at an age when it would appear - since one seeks in love before everything else a subjective pleasure - that the taste for feminine beauty must play the larger part in its procreation, love may come into being, love of the most physical order, without any foundation in desire. At this time of life a man has already been wounded more than once by the darts of love; it no longer evolves by itself, obeying its own incomprehensible and fatal laws, before his passive and astonished heart. We come to its aid; we falsify it by memory and by suggestion; recognising one of its symptoms we recall and recreate the rest.”

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Book:Swann’s Way
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“In the course of aesthetic experience, the perceiver may be overwhelmed by this 'mere object', overcome with emotion, altered to the very roots of his being.[...] The experience of beauty involves an exchange of power, and as such, it is often disorienting, a mix of humility and exaltation, subjugation and liberation, awe and mystified pleasure.[...] Many people, fearing a pleasure they cannot control, have vilified beauty as a siren or a whore. Since at one time or another though, everyone answers to 'her' call, it would be well if we could recognize the meaning of our succumbing as a valuable response, an opportunity for self-revelation rather than defeat.[...] It entails a flexibility and empathy toward 'Others' in general and the capacity to see ourselves as both active and passive without fearing that we will be diminished in the process.”

OpportunityPleasureBeautyPowerAesthetics
Book:Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-century Art
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“...A mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place. She teaches you the nature of happiness: what is the right amount, what is too much, and the kind that makes you want more of what is bad for you. A mother helps her baby flex her first feelings of pleasure. She teaches her when to later exercise restraint, or to take squealing joy in recognizing the fluttering leaves of the gingko tree, to sense a quieter but more profound satisfaction in chancing upon an everlasting pine. A mother enables you to realize that there are different levels of beauty and therein lie the sources of pleasure, some of which are popular and ordinary, and thus of brief value, and others of which are difficult and rare, and hence worth pursuing.”

PleasureBeautyMothers
Book:Saving Fish From Drowning
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