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Beauty
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“ There is a sound reason why one and a half billion dollars are spent for cosmetics in your country every year, and only half that sum for education: There are no naturally pretty girls in the United States.”
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“Beauty often fades, but seldom so swiftly as the joy it gives us.”
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“... beauty that dies the soonest has the longest life. Because it cannot keep itself for a day, we keep it forever. Because it can have existence only in memory, we give it immortality there. ”
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“And like you, I remain as always strikingly beautiful, even though nobody knows it but me.”
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“If I did not wear torn pants, orthopedic shoes, frantic disheveled hair, that is to say, if I did not tone down my beauty, people would go mad. Married men would run amuck.”
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“The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one's soul shine through. If there are places on one's body where this is a possibility, you are not attractive — you are leaking.”
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“... loveliness is infernally sad.”
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“... the beauty of the world ... has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
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“I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want — an adorable pancreas?”
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“There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness.”
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“ ... the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor even touched, but just felt in the heart.”
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“You agree — I'm sure you agree, that beauty is the only thing worth living for.”
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“Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.”
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“She had accomplished what according to builders is only possible to wood and stone of the very finest grain; she had weathered, as they call it, with beauty.”
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“I don't believe makeup and the right hairstyle alone can make a woman beautiful. The most radiant woman in the room is the one full of life and experience.”
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“I hope the day will come when a wasp-waist and a pair of thin shoulders will not be esteemed beauty: we have had our ideas ruined by trash novels, praising 'fragile forms' and 'delicate beauty,' 'dainty waists,' 'snow-drop faces,' and a lot of other nonsense.”
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“It has been said that a pretty face is a passport. But it's not, it's a visa, and it runs out fast.”
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“Everything about her was at once vigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine. He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her.”
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“I am waylaid by beauty.”
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“And all the loveliest things there be come simply, so it seems to me.”
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“Looking young and attractive with makeup is the next best thing to actually being young and attractive. After all, a woman only has a few years where she really is youthful, but she can wear foundation makeup til the day she dies (and even after!).”
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“By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.”
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“... beware the Lure of a handsome Face, the all too ready Assumption that the lovely Façade must needs have lovely Chambers within; for as 'tis with Great Houses, so, too, with Great Men.”
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“[On one of her lovers:] Unfortunately I could not help listening to him; he was handsome as the dawn.”
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“For beauty I am not a star, / There are others more handsome by far; / But my face I don't mind it, / For I am behind it, / It's the people in front that I jar.”
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“What delights us in visible beauty is the invisible.”
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“It may be that vice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at.”
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“The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.”
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“Beauty can illustrate an ideal, a perfection. Or, because of its identification with women (more accurately, with Woman), it can trigger the usual ambivalence that stems from the age-old denigration of the feminine. Much of the discrediting of beauty needs to be understood as a result of the gender inflection. Misogyny, too, might underlie the urge to metaphorize beauty, thereby promoting it out of the realm of the 'merely' feminine, the unserious, the specious. For if women are worshipped because they are beautiful, they are condescended to for their preoccupation with making or keeping themselves beautiful. Beauty is theatrical, it is for being looked at and admired; and the word is as likely to suggest the beauty industry (beauty magazines, beauty parlors, beauty products) — the theater of feminine frivolity — as the beauties of art and of nature. How else to explain the association of beauty — i.e., women — with mindlessness? To be concerned with one's own beauty is to risk the charge of narcissism and frivolity. Consider all the beauty synonyms, starting with the 'lovely,' the merely 'pretty,' which cry out for a virile transposition.”
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“The test of beauty is whether it can survive close knowledge.”
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“The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own — even more, one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.”
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“She was glad that sometimes, by night, her beauty crawled out of the pit age had dug for it ...”
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“Below the incandescent stars / below the incandescent fruit, / the strange experience of beauty; / its existence is too much; / it tears one to pieces / and each fresh wave of consciousness / is poison.”
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“Beauty is everlasting / and dust is for a time.”
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“... one reason we haven't any national art is because we have too much magnificence. All our capacity for admiration is used up on the splendor of palace-like railway stations and hotels. Our national tympanum is so deafened by that blare of sumptuousness that we have no ears for the still, small voice of beauty.”
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“... perhaps all this modern ferment of what's known as 'social conscience' or 'civic responsibility' isn't a result of the sense of duty, but of the old, old craving for beauty.”
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“Beauty is a simple passion, / but, oh my friends, in the end / you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.”
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“I'd much rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.”
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“Beauty is not caused. It is.”
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“It is useless to dabble in beauty. One must be utterly devoted to beauty, with every nerve of the body.”
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“... the skin of moss / holds the footprints of / star-footed birds.”
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“Truth is the vital breath of Beauty; Beauty the outward form of Truth ...”
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“Love beauty; it is the shadow of God on the universe.”
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“To seek after beauty as an end, is a wild goose chase, a will-o'-the-wisp, because it is to misunderstand the very nature of beauty, which is the normal condition of a thing being as it should be.”
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“Beauty is a perilous gift ...”
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“... to transpose the quotation ... 'I had slept and dreamed that life was duty, / But waked to find that life was beauty.'”
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“Doubtless almost any intense emotion may open our 'inward eye' to the beauty of reality. Falling in love appears to do it for some people. The beauties of nature or the exhilaration of artistic creation does it for others. Probably any high experience may momentarily stretch our souls up on tiptoe, so that we catch a glimpse of that marvelous beauty which is always there, but which we are not often tall enough to perceive.”
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“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder ...”
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“An attractive person is attractive at any age, and cosmetics have little to do with it.”
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“The history of cosmetics is as old as the history of mankind. The impulse to self-decoration has been present in all human societies.”
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“In Brazil there are more Avon ladies than members of the army. In the United States more money is spent on beauty than on education or social services.”
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“... throughout human history people have scarred, painted, pierced, padded, stiffened, plucked, and buffed their bodies in the name of beauty.”
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“Beauty is equal parts flesh and imagination: we imbue it with our dreams, saturate it with our longings.”
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“Beauty ensnares hearts, captures minds, and stirs up emotional wildfires. From Plato to pinups, images of human beauty have catered to a limitless desire to see and imagine an ideal human form.”
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“The idea that beauty is unimportant is the real beauty myth.”
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“Physical beauty is like athletic skill: it peaks young.”
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“[On the cosmetics industry:] This is an industry with built-in obsolescence. The trick is to get the new colors out before the old bottles and containers are quite empty. Women can be easily persuaded that these are now out of date and that they must move on to a new color.”
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“Beauty without grace, is a hook without bait.”
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“To die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty.”
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“Spend all you have for loveliness, / Buy it and never count the cost; / For one white singing hour of peace / Count many a year of strife well lost, / And for a breath of ecstasy / Give all you have been, or could be.”
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“... beauty more than bitterness / Makes the heart break.”
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“Oh who can tell the range of joy / Or set the bounds of beauty?”
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“Oh, beauty, are you not enough? / Why am I crying after love?”
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“Who is in love with loveliness, / Need not shake with cold; / For he may tear a star in two, / And frock himself in gold. / Who holds her first within his heart, / In certain favor goes; / If his roof tumbles, he may find / Harbor in a rose.”
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“Beauty's as essential to one's being as bread, don't you think?”
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“I will hold beauty as a shield against despair.”
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“The cardinal virtue of all beauty is restraint.”
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“The sudden desire to look beautiful made her straighten her back. 'Beautiful! For whom? Why for myself, of course.'”
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“Extreme beauty arouses no sympathy.”
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“Truth has beauty, power and necessity.”
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“Oh, grieve not, ladies, if at night / Ye wake to feel your beauty going. / It was a web of frail delight, / Inconstant as an April snowing.”
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“You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen. But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul's own doing.”
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“Beauty's in the eye of the beer holder.”
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“As I walk .. as I walk .. / The universe .. is walking with me .. / Beautifully .. it walks before me .... / Beautifully .. on every side .... / As I walk .. I walk with beauty.”
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“All things are perceived in the light of charity, and hence under the aspect of beauty: for beauty is simply Reality seen with the eyes of love.”
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“When you see beauty anywhere, it's a reflection of yourself.”
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“There is a terrible weight in all kinds of beauty”
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“... some kinds of beauty did not heal, but hollowed the pain even deeper.”
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“Think of all the beauty that's still left in and around you and be happy!”
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“Beauty has nothing to do with possession. If possession and beauty must go together, then we are lost souls. A beautiful flower is not to be possessed, it's there to be beheld. You're not going to take a beautiful painting off the musuem wall. It's there for your pleasure.”
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“... she wore her beauty with a shrug as if it were an ermine wrap of which she could say, 'I suppose it is lovely, but then I've had it so long!'”
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“I think women see me on the cover of magazines and think I never have a pimple or bags under my eyes. You have to realize that's after two hours of hair and makeup, plus retouching. Even I don't wake up looking like Cindy Crawford.”
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“... I fell in love with beauty a long, long time ago, but what I wanted was to create beauty — not to be blinded by it.”
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“Taking joy in life is a woman's best cosmetic.”
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“What is beautiful is right: what is unbeautiful is wrong.”
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“The fact that beauty is at one and the same time without cost and above price, robs it of the curse of possessiveness.”
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“[On beauty:] One problem is that it's like being born rich and getting poorer.”
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“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.”
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“Beauty and adventure have a certain value of their own which can be weighed only in spiritual scales.”
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“... the most deeply moving element in the contemplation of beauty is the element of loss. We desire to hold; but the sunset melts into the night, and the secret of the painting on the wall can never be the secret of the buyer.”
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“... the worship of beauty is to me a religion. Nothing bad was ever truly beautiful; nothing good is ever really ugly.”
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“... I can't see how any woman can find time to do to herself all the things that must apparently be done to make herself beautiful and, having once done them, how anyone without the strength of mind of a foreign missionary can keep up such a regime.”
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“Beauty is only bearable when you're happy.”
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“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 it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.”
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“If you go through life trading on your good looks, there'll come a time when no one wants to trade.”
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“... real beauty is never vain.”
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“I collect fierce beauty, and I am curator of my own collection. I do not house it in a building: most of it cannot be housed at all, and some part of it is in me, in some sense of 'in' that philosophers still quarrel about.”
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“Danger hides in beauty and beauty in danger.”
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“Beauty is utility.”
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“Beautiful young people are accidents of nature. But beautiful old people are works of art.”
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“He who is fair to look upon is good, and he who is good will soon be fair also.”
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“It is not good for beauty that it should be a profession.”
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“You Don't Have to Be Pretty. You don't owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don't owe it to your mother, you don't owe it to your children, you don't owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked 'female.'”
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“Youth and beauty are not accomplishments, they're the temporary happy by-products of time and/or DNA.”
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“It's not the face, but the expressions on it. It's not the voice, but what you say. It's not how you look in that body, but the things you do with it. You are beautiful.”