# Ugliness

Ugliness by context is a characteristic of what is unpleasant to look at as regards to people or objects.

## Quotes

* In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness.
** Colette, in Gigi (1945)
* I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may-light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.
** John Constable Art Is the Highest Form of Hope & Other Quotes by Artists by Phaidon (2016)
* Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.
** Democritus (ca. 4th century BCE). Tr. Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1948)
* Abraham Lincoln: You think you've been cheated because you are ugly, but I am here to show you otherwise. Come! There is much to see. [walks out] I want you to look in here. [they approach a random house and look inside. A bored woman is playing with a pencil and pebble at her small dining table] This woman is Nancy Pinkerton. As a child she was consistently the most beautiful girl in her entire school. Her life as a youth was filled with praises, and everything being handed to her. Boys told her she was special. She was funny. She was interesting. But that's only because she was hot. It wasn't until she reached age 40, when her looks started to fade, that she learned she was actually about as interesting and special, as a wet carrot. [they leave her as they found her, playing with a pencil, all alone in her dining room. They move on to the next house] This is the home of your new ugly friend, Yamal. [Yamal is shown playing a piano] Because he's ugly, he gets nothing handed to him. He has to work at making something of himself. But that work is gonna pay off when he's an adult. He will have character, something that kids who are hot rarely develop. Like your classmate, Clyde. [they approach Clyde's house. Clyde is all cool laying on his couch talking to someone on the phone] Now that he knows he's good-looking, he doesn't have to make any effort to be special.
** Trey Parker, "The List", South Park, (November 14, 2007)
* Evil and ugliness are the same thing, and dullness is the mother of both.
** Osbert Sitwell, Wisdom : conversations with the elder wise men of our day, edited by James Nelson, Norton, New York, 1958. Quoted in Murphy, Edward F., Webster's Treasury of Relevant Quotations, Greenwich House, New York, 1983 (pg. 228).
* Everything that's realistic has some sort of ugliness in it. Even a flower is ugly when it wilts, a bird when it seeks its prey, the ocean when it becomes violent. I'm very sensitive to ugly situations. I'm quick to read people, and I pick up if someone's reacting to me as just a sexy blonde. At times like that, I freeze. I can be very alone at a party, on the set, or in general, if I'm not in harmony with things around me.
** Sharon Tate, as quoted in "Who I'd Like To Be In My Next Life" featuring celebrity responses to that question, Eye magazine Vol. 2 No. 1 (January 1969)
* There are plenty of good reasons for fighting … but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.
** Kurt Vonnegut, in Mother Night (1961)
* Beauty is but skin deep, ugly to the bone. And when beauty fades away, ugly claims its own.
** Dorothy West, The Wedding (1995). Anchor Books, 1996, p. 171.

## See also

* Beauty
* Aesthetics