Beauty Quotes

Never regard your study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.
– Albert Einstein
Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.
– Albert Einstein
The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth. To make a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me; a system of ethics built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle.
– Albert Einstein
The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.
– Albert Einstein
The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.
– Albert Einstein
It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the dear deceit of beauty.
– George Eliot
Who has not felt the beauty of a woman's arm? The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently-lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness.
– George Eliot
He builded better than he knew; the conscious stone to beauty grew.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the Stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
It's not beauty but fine qualities, my girl, that keep a husband.
– Euripides
To dream anything that you want to dream. That's the beauty of the human mind. To do anything that you want to do. Tha is the strength of the human will. To trust yourself to test your limits. That is the courage to succeed.
– Bernard Edmonds
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?
– Richard P. Feynman
Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due - she reminds us too much of a prima donna.
– E. M. Forster
Another part of beauty is terror. The world isn't pretty, it's beautiful. Awe is a mixture of terror and beauty. You say that the opposite of beauty is ugliness. Right. I would say that all injustice is ugly, sin is ugly, tearing down the rainforest is ugly. To me, beauty is not about perfection, there's beauty in imperfection.
– Matthew Fox
I was the kind nobody thought could make it. I had a funny Boston accent. I couldn't pronounce my R's. I wasn't a beauty.
– Brendan Francis
The human face is the organic seat of beauty. It is the register of value in development, a record of Experience, whose legitimate office is to perfect the life, a legible language to those who will study it, of the majestic mistress, the soul.
– Eliza Farnham
Together we watched them skate hand in hand, and now his hand slipped from hers and we are left to wonder why, but we will never forget the beauty of Gordeeva and Grinkov.
– Peggy Fleming
To me art in order to be truly great must, like the beauty of Nature, be universal in its appeal. It must be simple in its presentation and direct in its expression, like the language of Nature.
– Mahatma Gandhi
When I admire the wonders of a sunset or the beauty of the moon, my soul expands in the worship of the creator.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Because when you put on the earphones and go to work, I guess your commitment to art is greater than your lack of commitment to each other. So you always get responsible and serious toward doing your best work from the heart with all the beauty you have within you when it's tape time.
– Art Garfunkel
Of life's two chief prizes, beauty and truth, I found the first in a loving heart and the second in a laborer's hand.
– Kahlil Gibran
Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.
– Kahlil Gibran
Beauty is a primeval phenomenon, which itself never makes its appearance, but the reflection of which is visible in a thousand different utterances of the creative mind, and is as various as nature herself.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A bad manner spoils everything, even reason and justice; a good one supplies everything, gilds a No, sweetens a truth, and adds a touch of beauty to old age itself.
– Baltasar Gracian
There's a beauty to wisdom and experience that cannot be faked. It's impossible to be mature without having lived.
– Amy Grant
Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?
– Germaine Greer
It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art.
– Walter Hagen
There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.
– Edith Hamilton
If the highest beauty requires both prettiness and harshness, perfection and discord, this place is sublimely beautiful.
– John Hart
What is beauty, or our sense of beauty, for? Where did it come from? Is it some accidental off-flowering from sex? Was the lion I saw swimming alone up and down an inlet, parting its sleek dark head to bark and bark and bark, feeling something we might recognize as an aesthetic zest?
– John Hart
Grace in women has more effect than beauty.
– William Hazlitt
It was an April day and I went out into the garden and it had been raining during the night. I had the feeling that I saw the earth and the beauty of nature as it had been when it was created, at the first day of creation. It was a beautiful experience! I was reborn, seeing nature in quite a new light.
– Albert Hofmann
Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.
– Langston Hughes
Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.
– Victor Hugo
To love beauty is to see light.
– Victor Hugo
Coercion may prevent many transgressions; but it robs even actions which are legal of a part of their beauty. Freedom may lead to many transgressions, but it lends even to vices a less ignoble form.
– Wilhelm von Humboldt
Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.
– David Hume
Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.
– Aldous Huxley
Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.
– Eugene Ionesco
The word 'beauty' is as easy to use as the word 'degenerate.' Both come in handy when one does or does not agree with you.
– Charles Ives
If Amsterdam or Leningrad vie for the title of Venice of the North, then Venice - what compliment is high enough? Venice, with all her civilisation and ancient beauty, Venice with her addiction to curious aquatic means of transport, yes, my friends, Venice is the Henley of the South.
– Boris Johnson
My windows open to the autumn night, In vain I watched for sleep to visit me, How should sleep dull mine ears, and dim my sight, Who saw the stars, and listened to the sea? Ah, how the City of our God is fair! If, without sea, and starless though it be, For joy of the majestic beauty there, Men shall not miss the stars, nor mourn the sea.
– Lionel Johnson
Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.
– Louis Kahn
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
I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.
– John F. Kennedy
I tell myself that God gave my children many gifts - spirit, beauty, intelligence, the capacity to make friends and to inspire respect. There was only one gift he held back - length of life.
– Rose Kennedy
If either man or woman would realize that the full power of personal beauty, it must be by cherishing noble thoughts and hopes and purposes; by having something to do and something to live for that is worthy of humanity, and which, by expanding and symmetry to the body which contains it.
– Rose Kennedy
Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.
– Jean Kerr
San Francisco is a mad city - inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty.
– Rudyard Kipling
The esthete stands in the same relation to beauty as the pornographer stands to love, and the politician stands to life.
– Karl Kraus
The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by men incapable of it.
– Murray Kempton
Truth and love are my law and worship; Form and conscience my manifestation and guide; Nature and peace are my shelter and companion; Order is my attitude; Beauty and perfection are my attack.
– Wayne Kramer
Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Marriage is tough, because it is woven of all these various elements, the weak and the strong. In love-ness is fragile for it is woven only with the gossamer threads of beauty. It seems to me absurd to talk about happy and unhappy marriages.
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh
How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life?
– Charles Lindbergh
I feel the garment of Christ being pulled over our shoulders. I am new... I finally sleep, wrapped in the beauty of the word, Savior.
– Laurel Lee
In gardens, beauty is a by-product. The main business is sex and death.
– Sam Llewelyn
Beauty and sadness always go together.Nature thought beauty too rich to go forthUpon the earth without a meet alloy.
– George MacDonald
I live in a small town now, so beauty salons are sort of like where all the gossip ruminates where I live.
– Andie MacDowell
I might have some character traits that some might see as innocence or naive. That's because I discovered peace and happiness in my soul. And with this knowledge, I also see the beauty of human life.
– Tobey Maguire
This was Venice, the flattering and suspect beauty - this city, half fairy tale and half tourist trap, in whose insalubrious air the arts once rankly and voluptuously blossomed, where composers have been inspired to lulling tones of somniferous eroticism.
– Thomas Mann
O, thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
– Christopher Marlowe
Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man's cruelty and baseness.
– Bryant H. McGill
The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.
– Herman Melville
Beauty is nature's brag, and must be shown in courts, at feasts, and high solemnities, where most may wonder at the workmanship.
– John Milton
In photographs, you'll see that my beauty spot moves around my face quite a bit, depending on where the largest zit is.
– Brian Molko
Faith goes out through the window when beauty comes in at the door.
– George Moore
Can it be a coincidence that, say, in the Sun newspaper, the ideal of female beauty would seem to be the body - the overdeveloped body - of a nubile woman and, what, the face of a twelve-year-old? Paedophilia is completely ingrained within our culture.
– Alan Moore
With the arrogance of youth, I determined to do no less than to transform the world with Beauty. If I have succeeded in some small way, if only in one small corner of the world, amongst the men and women I love, then I shall count myself blessed, and blessed, and blessed, and the work goes on.
– William Morris
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.
– John Muir
A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.
– Lewis Mumford
I don't think that anybody like me can really understand, even have an inkling, of what's going on in the criminal justice system, the people caught up in it, without seeing it in person. I spoke of the magistrates' courts in South Africa, but I've been down in the basement of 100 Centre Street and saw black people put in cages like animals in the United States, in the world's capital of culture, show biz and beauty, like New York City.
– Burke Marshall
Beauty and happiness and life are all the same and they are pervasive, unattached and abstract and they are our only concern. They are immeasurable, completely lacking in substance. They are perfect and sublime. This is the subject matter of art.
– Agnes Martin
Truth exists for the wise, beauty for the feeling heart.
– Samurai Maxim
Suffolk has something more than the coziness of Kent and Surrey. There is a hint of wildness in its tamed beauty, and the tang of the North Sea is never far away.
– Patricia Moyes
If we lose our heritage of health and vigor, all the beauty that has been achieved will be for naught!
– Bill Munson
It is now time to reverse the trend we have seen developing over the years, that of beauty at all costs and health will take care of itself.
– Bill Munson
The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.
– Pablo Neruda
I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.
– Georgia O'Keeffe
Enhance and intensify one's vision of that synthesis of truth and beauty which is the highest and deepest reality.
– Ovid
Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.
– Camille Paglia
I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.
– Camille Paglia
Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.
– Blaise Pascal
Liturgy is like a strong tree whose beauty is derived from the continuous renewal of its leaves, but whose strength comes from the old trunk, with solid roots in the ground.
– Pope Paul VI
Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.
– Laurence J. Peter
Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.
– Pablo Picasso
For every beauty there is an eye somewhere to see it. For every truth there is an ear somewhere to hear it. For every love there is a heart somewhere to receive it.
– Ivan Panin
Beauty is excrescence, superabundance, random ebulience, and sheer delightful waste to be enjoyed in its own right.
– Donald Culross Peattie
Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a 'universal' without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.
– Chaim Potok
Beauty is power; a smile is its sword.
– John Ray
Beauty attracts us men; but if, like an armed magnet it is pointed, beside, with gold and silver, it attracts with tenfold power.
– Jean Paul Richter
One evening I sat Beauty on my knees - And I found her bitter - And I reviled her.
– Arthur Rimbaud
She gave up beauty in her tender youth, gave all her hope and joy and pleasant ways; she covered up her eyes lest they should gaze on vanity, and chose the bitter truth.
– Christina G. Rossetti
Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.
– John Ruskin
Our hearts are drunk with a beauty our eyes could never see.
– George William Russell
If all feeling for grace and beauty were not extinguished in the mass of mankind at the actual moment, such a method of locomotion as cycling could never have found acceptance; no man or woman with the slightest aesthetic sense could assume the ludic.
– Marie Louise De La Ramee
Beauty comes from within; a greedy, avaricious, gossipy woman cannot be beautiful.
– Sally Rand