c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Why does the social order feel the need to defend itself by evading the fact of real women, our faces and voices and bodies, and reducing the meaning of women to these formulaic and endlessly reproduced "beautiful" images? Though unconscious personal anxieties can be a powerful force in the creation of a vital lie, economic necessity practically guarantees it. An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that "justify" the institution of slavery. Western economies are absolutely dependent now on the continued underpayment of women. An idealogy that makes women feel "worth less" was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more. This does not require a conspiracy; merely an atmosphere. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
It was growing dark on this long southern evening, and suddenly, at the exact point her finger had indicated, the moon lifted a forehead of stunning gold above the horizon, lifted straight out of filigreed, light-intoxicated clouds that lay on the skyline in attendant veils. Behind us, the sun was setting in a simultaneous congruent withdrawal and the river turned to flame in a quiet duel of gold....The new gold of moon astonishing and ascendant, he depleted gold of sunset extinguishing itself in the long westward slide, it was the old dance of days in the Carolina marshes, the breathtaking death of days before the eyes of children, until the sun vanished, its final signature a ribbon of bullion strung across the tops of water oaks.
— Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides
She had once been described, by one who saw below the surface, as a perfectly beautiful woman in an absolutely plain shell.
— Florence L. Barclay, The Rosary
Where woman do not fit the Iron Maiden [societal expectations/assumptions about women's bodies], we are now being called monstrous, and the Iron Maiden is exactly that which no woman fits, or fits forever. A woman is being asked to feel like a monster now though she is whole and fully physically functional. The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Why,' I said, quite surprised by my own eloquence in inventing all this stuff, 'it happens every day. The old old story. Boys and girls fall in love, that is, they are driven mad and go blind and deaf and see each other not as human animals with comic noses and bandy legs and voices like frogs, but as angels so full of shining goodness that like hollow turnips with candles put into them, they seem miracles of beauty. And the next minute the candles shoot out sparks and burn their eyes. And they seem to each other like devils, full of spite and cruelty. And they will drive each other mad unless they have grown some imagination. Even enough to laugh.
— Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth
Sexual satisfaction eases the stranglehold of materialism, since status symbols no longer look sexual, but irrelevant. Product lust weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies. The price we pay for artificially buoying up this market is our heart's desire. The beauty myth keeps a gap of fantasy between men and women. That gap is made with mirrors; no law of nature supports it. It keeps us spending vast sums of money and looking distractedly around us, but its smoke and reflection interfere with our freedom to be sexually ourselves.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Beauty was a curse to be borne, not a blessing.
— Rebecca Johns, The Countess
The way I played music there was the way I wanted to farm, chop wood, cook, make love, raise children. Everything. A lo of it had to do with things I felt while I played. If only I could feel that sense of total absorption in what I was doing when I was doing other things. It was more than absorption, it was spontaneity, competence, a sense of grace and playfulness, of being in touch with an inexhaustible source of energy and beauty.
— Mark Vonnegut, The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity
I have a thing for evil bald bad guys. The Kurgan is too sexy.
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
The orange of the golden carp appeared at the edge of the pond. . . . We watched in silence at the beauty and grandeur of the great fish. Out of the corners of my eyes I saw Cico hold his hand to his breast as the golden carp glided by. Then with a switch of his powerful tail the golden carp disappeared into the shadowy water under the thicket.
— Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima
Modern cosmetic surgeons have a direct financial interest in a social role for women that requires them to feel ugly. They do not simply advertise for a share of a market that already exists: Their advertisements create new markets. It is a boom industry because it is influentially placed to create its own demand through the pairing of text with ads in women's magazines. The industry takes out ads and gets coverage; women get cut open. They pay their money and they takes their chances. As surgeons grow richer, they are able to command larger and brighter ad spaces.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
My eyes went straight to a soft woman who sat facing the wrong way at the bar top. Soft, because I knew if I were to touch her skin, it would feel like a peach, the kind of woman you could almost smell from inside the building. Instead of facing Andy, she had her back to him, keeping an eye on the door. That must be her. Her hair was exquisite. She was really the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. A golden crown of braids and curls complimented her sun-kissed skin. Her dress draped perfectly over her body, and in that moment, I needed her more than I needed air.
— Chelsie Shakespeare, The Pull
Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history
—  a quietly mad population is a tractable one.
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful. This is the reason why beauty is still escaping out of all analysis. It is not yet possessed, it cannot be handled. …It instantly deserts possession, and flies to an object in the horizon. If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Keating stood still, because he understood for the first time what it was that artists spoke about when they spoke of beauty.
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
Aging in women is 'unbeautiful' since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken.
— Naomi Wolf
Roseanne, Roseanne, if I called to you now, my own self calling to my own self, would you hear me? And if you could hear me, would you heed me?
— Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
I may enter a zone of transcendence, in which I marvel at all the accidents of fate, since the beginning of life on earth, that led to my genes being created and my standing in this particular garden in a contemplative and imagining mind. I’ve been reading recently how reflection evolved. what a fascinating solution to the rigors of survival…how amazing that a few basic ingredients- the same ones that form the mountains, plants, and rivers- when arranged differently and stressed could result in us.More and more of late, I find myself standing outside of life, with a sense of the human saga laid out before me. it is a private vision, balanced between youth and old age, a vision in which I understand how caught up in striving we humans get, and a little of why, and how difficult it is even to recognize, since it feels integral to our nature and is. but I find it interesting that, according to many religions, life and begins and ends in a garden.
— Diane Ackerman, Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden
Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight.
— Naomi Wolf
The mass depiction of the modern woman as a "beauty" is a contradiction: Where modern women are growing, moving, and expressing their individuality, as the myth has it, "beauty" is by definition inert, timeless, and generic. That this hallucination is necessary and deliberate is evident in the way "beauty" so directly contradicts women's real situation.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Vogue began to focus on the body as much as on the clothes, in part because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles...In a stunning move, an entire replacement culture was developed by naming a 'problem' where it had scarcely existed before, centering it on the women's natural state, and elevating it to the existential female dilemma...The number of diet-related articles rose 70 percent from 1968 to 1972...The lucrative 'transfer of guilt' was resurrected just in time.
— Naomi Wolf
Beauty is a matter of finding the right address.
— Apol Lejano-Massebieau
Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.
— Naomi Wolf
In the old age black was not counted fair,Or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name.But now is black beauty’s successive heir,And beauty slandered with a bastard shame.For since each hand hath put on nature’s pow'r,Fairing the foul with art’s false borrowed face,Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bow'r,But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seemAt such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,Sland'ring creation with a false esteem.  Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe,  That every tongue says beauty should look so.
— William Shakespeare
She did not want to say it, because it made no practical sense, but in the end she went to Japan for the delicate sake cups, resting in her hand like a blossom; she went to Japan for loveliness.
— Z.Z. Packer, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
She lifts a bowl of kheer and her thoughts, flittering like dusty sparrows in a brown back alley, turn a sudden kingfisher blue.
— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices
Order and reason, beauty and benevolence, are characteristics and conceptions which we find solely associated with the mind of man.
— Karl Pearson
It is strange, is it not, how an accident of a millimeter here, a millimeter there, makes one face so important. Think about it Elliot, She has two eyes, a nose, a mouth, just like everyone else. It,s all in tiny degrees of placement, such small area of magic to make such a big difference. For me, Elliot, I must tell you it is a hard thing to understand- why these things, these millimeters, are so crucial to you, you of all men.
— Judith Krantz, Scruples
You collect art: you must know that the miniature artists, at the end of careers spent painting the tiniest, most exacting details that no one would ever look at, would often put their eyes out with needles. Too much beauty, yes, but also too much seeing. They were tired of seeing. The dark was safe and warm and comfortable. Blindness was a gift. I still have seeing to do.
— Ian McDonald, The Dervish House
There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images to help us identify them.
— Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life
This boy," he said, indicating the paintings with one sweep of his arms, "was romantic. He thought that it was beauty that bound everything together. And for him it was true. Life had been beautiful for him. He was very young. He knew very little of life. He saw beauty but he did not feel any true passion. How could he? He did not know. He had not really encountered the force of beauty's opposite.""Are you more cynical now, then?" she asked him."Cynical," he frowned, "No, not that. I know that there is an ugly side of life-and not just human life. I know that everything is not simply beautiful. I am not a romantic as this boy was. But I am not a cynic either. There is something enduring in all of life, Anne, something tough. Something. Something terribly weak yet incredibly powerful...
— Mary Balogh, Simply Love
The secret to youth is to fill your mind with beauty! Amen
— Linda Ballou
I walked with my eyes on the path, but out of the corners of them I saw a man hiding behind an olive tree. He did not move as we approached, but I fell that he was watching us. As soon as we had passed I heard a scamper. Wilson, like a hunted animal, had made for safely. That was the last I ever saw of him. He died last year. He had endured that life for six years. He was found one morning on the mountainside lying quite peacefully as though he had died in his sleep. From where he lay he had been able to see those two great rocks called the Faraglioni which stand out of the sea. It was full moon and he must have gone to see them by moonlight. Perhaps he died of the beauty of that sight...---The Lotus Eater
— W. Somerset Maugham
There stood a young man who had the figure of a Greek athlete and the face of an English one...Just where he began to be beautiful the clothes started.
— E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey
BEL-IMPERIA: Oh let me go; for in my troubled eyesNow may'st thou read that life in passion dies.HORATIO: Oh stay a while, and I will die with thee;So shalt thou yield, and yet have conquered me.
— Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy
Beauty doesn't die with the beholder; it moves on. Hiding in the shadows, afraid of the light, she flees to find another host, possessing the body like a demon in need of exorcising.
— Jennifer Melzer, Beauty and Other Dangerous Things
The color and shape of flowers are a precise record of what bees find attractive
— Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Nothing overdone, nothing racy, which made her all the more alluring.
— Keith Ablow, Murder Suicide
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
— Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
Without imagination, we merely see or hear, and even if we see or hear that the objects of the senses are beautiful, we cannot feel that they are so. The difference is this: in feeling the beauty of objects, we enjoy not only the common, shared pleasures of the senses, but also the private pleasures of the imagination, peculiar to ourselves, and such that we have to struggle to articulate them.
— Mary Warnock, Imagination and Time
Take away all the moral beauty and sweetness in the Word, and the Bible is left wholly a dead letter, a dry, lifeless, tasteless thing. By this is seen the true foundation of our duty, the worthiness of God to be so esteemed, honoured, loved, submitted to, and served, as He requires of us, and the amiableness of the duties themselves that are required of us. And by this is seen the true evil of sin; for he who sees the beauty of holiness must necessarily see the hatefulness of sin, its contrary. By this men understand the true glory of heaven, which consists in the beauty and happiness that is in holiness. By this is seen the amiableness and happiness of both saints and angels. He that sees beauty of holiness, or true moral good, sees the greatest and most important thing in the world, which is the fulness of all things, without which all the world is empty, no better than nothing, yea, worse than nothing. Unless this is seen, nothing is seen that is worth the seeing; for there is no other true excellency or beauty. Unless this be understood, nothing is understood that is worthy of the exercise of the noble faculty of understanding. This is the beauty of the Godhead, and the divinity of Divinity (if I may so speak), the good of the infinite Fountain of good; without which, God Himself (if that were possible) would be an infinite evil; without which we ourselves had better never have been; and without which there had better have been no being.
— Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections
(it was) beautiful, like so many senseless things.
— Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, The Crimson Curtain
I held a brief debate with myself as to whether I should change my ordinary attire for something smarter. At last I concluded it would be a waste of labour. "Doubtless," though I, "she is some stiff old maid ; for though the daughter of Madame Reuter, she may well number upwards of forty winters; besides, if it were otherwise, if she be both young and pretty, I am not handsome, and no dressing can make me so, therefore I'll go as I am." And off I started, cursorily glancing sideways as I passed the toilet-table, surmounted by a looking-glass: a thin irregular face I saw, with sunk, dark eyes under a large, square forehead, complexion destitute of bloom or attraction; something young, but not youthful, no object to win a lady's love, no butt for the shafts of Cupid.
— Charlotte Brontë, The Professor
Why is it that beautiful women never seem to have curiosity? Is it because they know they're classical? With classical things the Lord finished the job. Ordinary ugly people know they're deficient and they go on looking for the pieces.
— Penelope Gilliatt
It's not Life that begans at forty, it's Death- Victoria
— Kathy Lette, Nip 'N' Tuck
What beauty could be your life’s mountain peak which you could climb all the way up?
— Sorin Cerin, Wisdom Collection: The Book of Wisdom
It's better to have nothing,' the children were saying.
— Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
It's not that I believe everything happens for a reason, it's just that...I just think that some things are meant to be broken. Imperfect. Chaotic. It's the universe's way of providing contrast, you know? There have to be a few holes in the road. It's how life is.
— Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever
A woman is only as beautiful as she believes she is, if she can't convince herself, no one else can.
— Theresa Lewis, The Beauty of a Black Woman: A Collection of Poems & Prayers
I do know that having smooth, unscarred skin does not make you beautiful. Shining like the brightest light in the dark does, though.
— Suki Fleet, Foxes
...a much younger woman, one of those round-faced, tiny-featured women who were touted as beauties though they were not in fact particularly beautiful. They were simply the daughters of wealthy families powerful enough to demand that the concept of beauty be expanded to include them.
— Michael Cunningham, Flesh and Blood
Unless you break free from the shackles of beauty as dictated by the media and society, true beauty will be elusive.
— Khang Kijarro Nguyen
[H]er spare strange beauty was not that of a woman, nor even of a statue, but that of the Platonic absolute of which all beauty is but a shadow in a cave, cast by the Fire beyond fire.
— James Blish, Doctor Mirabilis
In fact, his travelogues spend amazingly little time discussing his blindness. Only one passage stands out for its frank discussion of his handicap and how it changed his worldview. In it, Holman was reminiscing about a few rendezvous from his past. Disarmingly, he admitted that he had no idea what his paramours looked like, or even whether they were homely. Moreover, he didn't care: by abandoning the standards of the sighted world, he argues, he could tap into a more divine and more authentic beauty. Hearing a woman's voice and feeling her caresses -- and then filling in what was missing with his own fancy -- gave him more pleasure than the mere sight of a women ever had, he said, a pleasure beyond reality. "Are there any who imagine," Holman asked, "that my loss of eyesight must necessarily deny me the enjoyment of such contemplation? How much more do I pity the mental darkness which could give rise to such an error.
— Sam Kean, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery
I stopped caring about the appearance of the physical shell that is my body. Instead, I concerned myself only with the purifying and beautifying of my soul. I began feeding my heart all the good things: love, hope, courage and belief. I began caring for myself. I began loving myself. I began BEING MYSELF. The power of that was so great that I started to feel healthier, stronger, more energetic. I became healthier, stronger and more energetic and I CONTINUE to become healthier, stronger and more energetic. I came out of hiding, I started talking more, smiling more. I became braver, I felt safer, I built more trust and I took more risks. I risked reaching out, I asked for help from the universe, I asked for help from others, I began searching and grabbing at anything to serve this new purpose: this new path. I opened my mind. I began challenging everything, my thinking, my perspectives. Everything! It's not easy. There were and are moments where everything seems inside out and upside down. But! Amidst this chaos, I found BEAUTY. Beauty in everything around me, beauty in other people and even beauty in ME. Each and every day I feel more beauty. That openness, that growing awareness. That presence in the moment. The depth of being present. The depth of my experiences. The meaning!! Finally, I am learning to live! I am ALIVE! This is my life! I am seizing it. It is mine. I am full of INFINITE POTENTIAL. What a beautiful, wonderful, amazing thing to discover! I am beautiful!
— Akiroq Brost
She burns like the sunBeautiful when she comes undoneNo restraintsPure passion flowing through her veinsMadness refusing to be tamed.
— Melody  Lee, Moon Gypsy
I'm not into appearances. I like flaws, I think they make things interesting.
— Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever
For essential beauty is infinite, and, as the soul of Nature needs an endless succession of varied forms to embody her loveliness, countless faces of beauty springing forth, not any two the same, at every one of her heart-throbs, so the individual form needs an infinite change of its environments, to enable it to uncover all the phases of its loveliness.
— George MacDonald, Phantastes
There is no doubt that inner beauty is more important that outer appearance, but that doesn’t mean that your physical appearance is not important; would you pick up a chocolate bar from a toilet seat?
— Charbel Tadros
Art should be seen with the heart, not with the eyes, for its beauty is in the energy it radiates.
— Charbel Tadros
My soulmust reachinto the cloudsand touch the beauty of madness.
— Melody  Lee, Moon Gypsy
Her skin smelled like the twilight moon and her eyes looked primal, like a hungry animal. She was darkness – dangerous, beautiful darkness.
— Melody  Lee, Moon Gypsy
There is a beastwithin my heart.She plays immaculately with the beauty in my soul.
— Melody  Lee, Moon Gypsy
Things aren't important, but beauty is.
— Edith Eva Eger, The Choice: Embrace the Possible
She was the kind of art that was so valuable it wasn't even for sale, and she smiled when she saw Ash. His pulse jumped.
— Rose Lerner, True Pretenses
She raises her hands to the sky and breathes it in, she starts spinning, enjoying the feel and energy of this Africa. She floats, her long skirt swaying with the dry grass in the breeze with her spirals, her sandaled feet covered in dust. She is part of Africa. She has never felt so free and happy.
— Renee Topper, Pigment: The Limbs of the Mukuyu Tree
It is disgraceful for a philosopher to say: the good and the beautiful are one; if he adds 'also the true', one ought to beat him. Truth is ugly. We possess art lest we perish of the truth.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Brother, when beauty falls into your hand, you hold on to it while you can. You could be dead tomorrow.Well, that’s... inspiring.
— Nora Roberts, Bay of Sighs
Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
So bashful when I spied her!So pretty ― so ashamed!So hidden in her leafletsLest anybody find ―So breathless till I passed her ―So helpless when I turnedAnd bore her struggling, blushing,Her simple haunts beyond!For whom I robbed the Dingle ―For whom betrayed the Dell ―Many, will doubtless ask me,But I shall never tell!
— Emily Dickinson
Without Love, you can't know yourself.
— Reuben Berger
With poetry, rules are meant to be broken. And that's the beauty of poetry; it's rebellious, like me.
— Melody  Lee, Moon Gypsy
Beauty, love with truth, that is all there is.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Everything is beautiful in its own way, ma belle, even if you have to look hard to find it.
— Cameron Dokey, Kissed:  Once Upon A Time Omnibus Belle/Sunlight and Shadow/Winter's Child
I'd trade a hundred pretty faces for one person who's easy to talk to.
— Marty Rubin
No one is more beautiful to me than a person who's easy to talk to.
— Marty Rubin
No matter how beautiful or not one is perceived to be, the true beauty we all possess is found on the inside. That should be our focus and the measure by which we are judged. How do we move through life? What other lives have we touched? Who have we confronted with love? How have we changed the world for the better? Those are all qualities that can’t be countered or weighed. Really, beauty beyond size.
— Ashley Graham
It's her black wings that make her beautiful.
— Melody  Lee, Moon Gypsy
Look around and see the wonderful beauty in the world around you.
— Avina Celeste
A slight deviation form what we would think of as symmetry gives us a bit more information and the mind seems to enjoy this stimulation because it is always looking for value. Beauty is a slight deviation from expectation.
— R.A.Delmonico
If your love for […] wants to do something now, then its work and task is this: to catch up with what it has missed. For it has failed to see whither this person has gone, it has failed to accompany her in her broadest development, it has failed to spread itself out over the new distances this person embraces, and it hasn’t ceased looking for her at a certain point in her growth, it wants obstinately to hold fast to a definite beauty beyond which she has passed, instead of persevering, confident of new shared beauties to come.”—from letter to Paula Modersohn-Becker Bremen (February 12, 1902)
— Rainer Maria Rilke
…[S]uddenly your eye, which was already preparing itself for larger dimensions, goes about willingly with little, hesitating, hearkening steps over the many overgrown paths of a long dead experience and stands still by all its landmarks reverently and respectfully. And has forgotten the world, and has no world but a face. I know exactly everything you said then. The figure of the old lady who speaks rarely and reservedly, who hides her hands when a gesture of tenderness would move them, and who only with rare caresses builds bridges to a few people, bridges that no longer exist when she draws back her arm and lies again like an island fantastically repeated on all sides in the mirror of motionless waters. My eyes too were already caught up in the radiance and bound to great and deep beauties.”―from letter to Clara Westhoff Schmargendorf bei Berlin (October 18, 1900)
— Rainer Maria Rilke
And you, Clara Westhoff, how simply and well you endured, lived through the experience, and made it a forward step in your young existence! So great was your love that it was able to forgive the great dying, and your eye was so sure, even then, that it conceived beauty in all the new colors, feelings, and gestures of the earth, and that all coming to an end seemed for your feeling only a pretext under which Nature wanted to unfold beauties yet unrevealed. Just as the eyes of angels rest on a dying child, delighting in the similar transfiguration of its half-released little face, so without concern you saw in the dying earth the smile and the beauty and the trust in eternity."―from letter to Clara Westhoff Schmargendorf (Sunday, November 18, 1900)
— Rainer Maria Rilke,
Not much to look at, but as with all true beauty it is what's inside that counts.
— Matt Sewell, Our Garden Birds
Every new star that is found in the sky will lend of its rays to the passions, and thoughts, and the courage, of man. Whatever of beauty we see in all that surrounds us, within us already is beautiful; whatever we find in ourselves that is great and adorable, that do we find too in others.
— Maurice Maeterlinck, Wisdom And Destiny
The beauty of a bright new day!
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Walking there, she said: Look, it seems like some one has kept each stone with measured precision at its place. Yes, she was right.
— Mahrukh
Beauty has its own ways.
— Mahrukh
You do not have to run with out a sigh, sometimes you gotta stay and have a break when you breath and admire the beauty of the journey.
— Mahrukh
The favour of the Lord maketh a man's face to shine bright.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
It seems that by the time the singular beauty of a flower in bloom can no longer pierce the veil of black or obsessive thoughts in a person's mind, that mind's connection to the sensual world has grown dangerously frayed.
— Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
Desire for beauty will endure and undermine the desire for truth.
— Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - And Us
Your marks don’t matter when your radiance is overwhelming. When we’re our best selves we forget all those imperfections and appreciate beauty for how it is.
— Saim .A. Cheeda
Beauty is everywhere you look, but you have to look.
— Marty Rubin
If one can picture the words, then the works of the writer is an accomplishment!
— Shobana, Imagination Unchained
I heard her voice, her stories, her softness as she spoke of her family, and her iron as she spoke of me - I heard her scream, and I moved without thought.
— Meagan Spooner, Hunted
It takes my breath away!" that's all that I can say.
— Anthony T. Hincks
How beautiful this city, or perhaps any in the world, is to a woman who knows her bed awaits her even as she lingers, barefoot in the rain at midnight.
— Sharanya Manivannan, The High Priestess Never Marries
It's okay to look different, Lilith. Beauty is only a matter of opinion. If you believe you are beautiful, then that's all that matters. These are really tough years you're approaching now. Your decisions now as a teenager can change your entire life. Just make sure you talk to me or comeone if you're ever feeling like life is too much to handle. And never let anyone convince you that you're not worthy, only to take advantage of you.
— Penelope Ward, Drunk Dial
It's okay to look different, Lilith. Beauty is only a matter of opinion. If you believe you are beautiful, then that's all that matters. These are really tough years you're approaching now. Your decisions now as a teenager can change your entire life. Just make sure you talk to me or someone if you're ever feeling like life is too much to handle. And never let anyone convince you that you're not worthy, only to take advantage of you.
— Penelope Ward, Drunk Dial
How can you love art, beauty, poetry, and hate life? That's like saying you love the ocean but hate water.
— Marty Rubin
The beauty of this world is fading all too fast through the cruelty and thoughtlessness of men.
— Julie C. Dao, Forest of a Thousand Lanterns
He raised himself on his hands and looked at Irene's face: the nudity of that feminine body had risen into her face, the body had reabsorbed it, as nature reabsorbs forsaken gardens.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, The Reprieve
The Prophet Muhammad said: Innallaha jamiil wahuwa yuhibbul jamal. Verily God is beautiful and loves beauty. -33
— Ahmad Fuadi, Negeri 5 Menara
This moment is all there is and LOVE is like the glue that keeps you in it.
— Reuben Berger
How could anyone catch all of the beauty in the Present Moment, when, after years of misery, there was suddenly a day when all the wonderfulness of life unexpectedly blew down from all directions all at once?
— Cintra Wilson, Colors Insulting To Nature
I scanned the room, knowing it couldn't take long to spot Annie, who had chosen to wear a floor-length 1960s muumuu in a deep shade of turquoise that looked, I had to admit, strikingly lovely against her honey-toned skin. Her dark hair was piled on top of her head, giving her a couple extra inches of height, and spiked through with a gold, rhinestone-encrusted chopstick. Or at least I thought it was a chopstick, but who knew what you called the utensil once it pierced a mound of hair. Perhaps just a stick? Regardless, she looked stunning- like a colorful little bird that surprises everyone with its audacity and out-of-place beauty by landing right in the middle of a bustling city sidewalk.
— Meg Donohue, How to Eat a Cupcake
Beauty is fleeting. But the woman who fear God is blissful.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Within every beast there's always some beauty!
— Perdita Finn, Ever After High: Once Upon a Twist: Rosabella and the Three Bears
It's a rare man who can guard against beauty.
— Anthony  Ryan, Queen of Fire
A hundred lifetimes wouldn't suffice to see all the beauty in one acre of land.
— Marty Rubin
Tie love and loyalty around your neck.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
We are given this beautiful life, this beautiful world, and we destroy it with ingratitude and hate.
— Marty Rubin
A certain beauty in the world is no mark of God's favor, said Mr. Huss. There is no beauty one may not balance by an equal ugliness. The warthog and the hyena, the tapeworm and the stinkhorn, are equally God's creations. Nothing you have said points to anything but a cold indifference towards us of this order in which we live. Beauty happens; it is not given. Pain, suffering, happiness; there is no heed. Only in the heart of man burns the fire of righteousness.
— H.G. Wells
All this under a magnificent blue sky.
— Elie Wiesel, Night
Women incorporate the values of the male sexual objectifiers within themselves. Catharine MacKinnon calls this being "thingified" in the head (MacKinnon, 1989). They learn to treat their own bodies as objects separate from themselves. Bartky explains how this works: the wolf whistle sexually objectifies a woman from without with the result that, ``"The body which only a moment before I inhabited with such ease now floods my consciousness. I have been made into an object'' (Bartky, 1990, p. 27). She explains that it is not sufficient for a man simply to look at the woman secretly, he must make her aware of his looking with the whistle.She must, "be made to know that I am a 'nice piece of ass': I must be made to see myself as they see me'' (p. 27). The effect of such male policing behaviour is that, "Subject to the evaluating eye of the male connoisseur, women learn to evaluate themselves first and best'" (Bartky, 1990, p. 28). Women thus become alienated from their own bodies.
— Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West
The "fashion-beauty complex'," representing the corporate interests involved in the fashion and beauty industries, has, Bartky argues, taken over from the family and church as "central producers and regulators of 'femininity'" (1990, p. 39). The fashion-beauty complex promotes itself to women as seeking to, "glorify the female body and to provide opportunities for narcissistic indulgence'' but in fact its aim is to "depreciate woman's body and deal a blow to her narcissism'' so that she will buy more products. The result is that a woman feels constantly deficient and that her body requires "either alteration or else heroic measures merely to conserve it'' (p. 39).
— Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West
However, as Bordo herself notes, the problem with the adoption of postmodern ideas in general is that they have led some writers to disregard the materiality of power relations.
— Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West
...women's bodies are "inferiorised, stigmatized . . . within an overarching patriarchal ideology.For example, biologically and physiologically, women's bodies are seen as both disgusting in their natural state and inferior to men's'' (2001, p. 141).
— Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West
She reached for the notebook she kept in her purse. Bea found the page and read to calm and steady herself. 1. See yourself as beautiful. Flowering and giving life to the earth. This baby can’t do it without you. You are important.2. Food is your fuel. You need it in your body. It’s your sustenance. 3. When you feel overwhelmed go for a walk, write down your feelings, or play your favorite songs.
— Sadeqa Johnson, And Then There Was Me
Sometime during high school he’d gotten . . . kind of . . . beautiful, and Harper found it easier to not look directly at him. When she did, it did strange things to her, making her voice high and her cheeks burn. So she only ever really looked at him out of the corner of her eyes, like one would look at a solar eclipse.
— Summer Hines, Some Things Stay With You: A Windswept Wyoming Romance
As much as long conversations, laughter riots and wild meetups are desirable, there's still beauty and satisfaction in knowing via simple text messages that you wish someone well and they wish you back the same.
— Hrishikesh Agnihotri
Yesterday i was clever so i took the glory for me. Today HE makes me wise so i give the glory to HIM.
— indonesia123
Women understand that there are two distinct economies: There is physical attraction, and then there is the “ideal.” When a woman looks at a man, she can physically dislike the idea of his height, his coloring, his shape. But after she has liked him and loved him, she would not want him to look any other way: For many women, the body appears to grow beautiful and erotic as they grow to like the person in it. The actual body, the smell, the feel, the voice and movement, becomes charged with heat through the desirable person who animates it. Even Gertrude Stein said of Picasso, “There was nothing especially attractive about him at first sight…but his radiance, an inner fire one sensed in him, gave him a sort of magnetism I was unable to resist.” By the same token, a woman can admire a man as a work of art but lose sexual interest if he turns out to be an idiot.What becomes of the man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her “beauty” his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying a mutually suspicious set of insecurities. He does gain something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Big things in the glory of the world mean nothing. Small things in glory of God mean everything. Truly..., size doesn't matter in this world or in the world to come.
— indonesia123
The tangible and factual components of reality along with the intangible strands of memory and imagination constitute the framework that houses our vital life force. A person is likewise composed of contradictory and complementary forces of pain and pleasure, darkness and lightness, and clashing and harmonizing bands of thoughts and feelings. The web and root of all persons consists of both the expressible and the unsayable. Who has not held imaginary conversations with gods, devils, and spirits? Persons whom enthusiastically cultivate an inner life, ardently experience the quick of nature, and willingly immerse themselves in all aspects of everyday living will experience renewal. Analogous to the heat source of fire, we need the spark of desire to fuel our hearts and the spirit of the breeze to spread our heart songs.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
There was beauty in chaos, she'd just never known it before.
— Amanda Linsmeier, Beach Glass & Other Broken Things
Beauty is biased, brainless. It says little to nothing about anybody as far as ethics are concerned, so why not monetize it? Give it some value, pin it with a price point. Otherwise, it’s worthless.
— Kris Kidd, Return to Sender
Drift beautifully on the surface, and you will die unbeautifully in the depths.
— Richard Ellmann
Her face was very beautiful, he thought. He hadn't been sure before, but he was now. The mind that lived behind it made it beautiful, the same way that the flame inside a lantern makes the lantern beautiful.
— Philip Reeve
Fantasizing about the future is not wrong until and unless you are not missing the beauty of the present!
— Harrish Sairaman
For it is beautiful only to do the thing we are meant for
— Arthur Hugh Clough, The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough
A smile is what makes a face beautiful.
— Anthony T. Hincks
In the face of immense tragedy—yet again—unexpected beauty.
— Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
How many loved your moments of glad grace,And loved your beauty with love false or true,But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
— W. B. Yeats
How easy to be electrocuted. How fine the line between beauty and peril.
— Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
Had the world been different, in my opinion, without mountains and oceans, plains and seas, deserts and forests, and consisted of something else, inconceivable to us, as we don't know anything other than this, we would also have found it beautiful. A world with gloes and raies, evanbillits and conulames, for example, or ibitera, proluffs, and lopsits, whatever they might be, we would have sung their praises because that is the way we are, we extol the world and love it although it's not necessary, the world is the world, it's all we have.
— Karl Ove Knausgård
Beauty is seeing,the world through colored glass,of seeing everything in its glory,it's all it ever asks.
— Anthony T Hincks
I have found that most people are more willing to accept physical pain and limitation rather than acknowledge and deal with the mental and/or emotional pain that might have caused it.
— Tobe Hanson
Only when I quit lying to myself did I discover the real beauty of my truth.
— Scott Stabile
You were born beautiful, and you remain beautiful.
— Scott Stabile
Beautiful girls, are a bit like been there, done that. Once you have had one, the mystery is gone.
— Robert  Black
There is great beauty in the world but you will not trip over it with every step. When a man dulls himself to beauty, the world begins to die.
— R.A.Delmonico
If beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder, then surely I would have to had been blind to not see it in her.
— Ross  Turner, Jenson
Their beauty was to the beauty of Miss Canal Zone as the glory of the Sun was to the glory of a lightning bug.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I will forever remind you that you are gifted, strong and beautiful, exactly as you are.Will you forever remind yourself, too?
— Scott Stabile
Truth is Bitter & It's the Real Beauty in Ugliness.
— Gollapalli Nithin Kumar
I'm a buried kind of beautiful.Bring a shovel and a shooting starI may be a night's work.
— Casey Renee Kiser, Doll Shaker
When a work of painting, music or other form attains two-way communication, it is truly art. One occasionally hears an artist being criticized on the basis that his work is too 'literal' or too 'common.' But one has rarely if ever heard any definition of 'literal' or 'common.' And there are many artists simply hung up on this, protesting it. Also, some avant-garde schools go completely over the cliff in avoiding anything 'literal' or 'common'—and indeed go completely out of communication! The return flow from the person viewing a work would be contribution. True art always elicits a contribution from those who view or hear or experience it. By contribution is meant 'adding to it.’ An illustration is 'literal' in that it tells everything there is to know. Let us say the illustration is a picture of a tiger approaching a chained girl. It does not really matter how well the painting is executed, it remains an illustration and it is literal. But now let us take a small portion out of the scene and enlarge it. Let us take, say, the head of the tiger with its baleful eye and snarl. Suddenly we no longer have an illustration. It is no longer 'literal.' And the reason lies in the fact that the viewer can fit this expression into his own concepts, ideas or experience: he can supply the why of the snarl, he can compare the head to someone he knows. In short, he can CONTRIBUTE to the head. The skill with which the head is executed determines the degree of response. Because the viewer can contribute to the picture, it is art. In music, the hearer can contribute his own emotion or motion. And even if the music is only a single drum, if it elicits a contribution of emotion or motion, it is truly art.
— L. Ron Hubbard
Around them, the dawn gently wakes Borg like someone breathing into the ear of someone they love. With sun and promises. Tickling light falls over warm duvets, like the smell of freshly brewed coffee and toasted bread. It shouldn't be doing this. It's the wrong day to be beautiful, but the dawn doesn't care.
— Fredrik Backman, Britt-Marie Was Here
dragonflies circled me, the sun knifing off the brilliant blues and yellows of their bodies.
— Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir
Beauty lies in the eye.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
You yearn to stay in this in-between place, where the beauty of the times you have freshly bade farewell to is still alive and vivid in your mind – almost real – and the reality of your new circumstances has yet to fully sink in. You listen to the familiar melodies that had accompanied you on your journey, and allow the music to evoke landscapes and scenes in your mind. The songs caress your sub-consciousness and fill your being with an airy joy. You are both here and elsewhere. Or perhaps you are everywhere and nowhere.
— Agnes Chew, The Desire for Elsewhere
Maybe beauty had nothing to do with the garbage TV tried to sell us. It was more a matter of confidence. Either way, I had none.
— Gaia B. Amman, Sex-O-S: The Tragicomic Adventure of an Italian Surviving the First Time
It will not say, 'Isn't X beautiful?' Such demands are murderous to beauty.
— Maggie Nelson, Bluets
One could say that Hopkins practiced transubstantiation in every poem. By mysterious talent, he changed plain element into reality sublime. He encountered a jumble of weather, birds, trees, branches, waters, blooms, dewdrops, candle flames, prayers, then instressed them and, delighted, wrote in his journal, 'Chance left free toact falls into an order.
— Margaret R. Ellsberg, The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selections from His Poems, Letters, Journals, and Spiritual Writings
Sweet wine makes drunk, sour wine (insult) is "tetelestai". Life is not about what we have done and become, but how God to be fully glorified.
— indonesia123
Moments later, I was climbing nervously into the back of the car. The driver wore the archetypal expression of an antagonist. No words were exchanged beyond the brief lines uttered to this nameless stranger, whose inclinations remained unclear. The car sped along empty roads and traversed dingy alleyways. Music blared from its speakers. I did not remember exhaling throughout the entire journey.
— Agnes Chew, The Desire for Elsewhere
The best self is a beautiful soul.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
It seems to me that whatever else is beautiful apart from absolute Beauty is beautiful because it partakes of that absolute Beauty, and for no other reason... [I]t is by Beauty that beautiful things are beautiful.
— Socrates, Apology, Crito and Phaedo of Socrates.
Whatever we have in the glory of man is "away". Those are just not enough before we go "home" to the glory of God.
— indonesia123
She wished to appear only in the full radiance of her beauty. Oh yes, she was quite vain! And her mysterious adornment had lasted days and days. And then one morning, precisely at sunrise, she showed herself.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
The bright flower was like a face. Somehow, the beauty and life of it were surprising in the plain room, like a gay little child who might suddenly appear in a doorway.
— Sarah Orne Jewett, The Only Rose
Don't miss the beauty behind otherwise your whole race will end up with wasting time running on trademill.
— Ankit Samrat
Such beautiful strength lives in uncompromising humility.
— Scott Stabile