c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
— Annie Dillard
Every child likes to take a pencil to make a mark. Everybody makes beautiful things when they are three, four, or five years old. Most people lose that spontaneity; I think that always happens. Some are able to win a second spontaneity.
— Álvaro Siza
Sometimes I look in the mirror and think I'm really good looking. Then other times I think my body's all wrong.
— Alex   Sanchez, Rainbow Boys
Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.
— Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
…for what after all is Youth and Beauty?
— Jane Austen, Catharine and Other Writings
Beauty! Terrible Beauty! A deathless Goddess-- so she strikes our eyes!
— Homer, The Iliad
To be beautiful, handsome, means that you possess a power which makes all smile upon and welcome you; that everybody is impressed in your favor and inclined to be of your opinion; that you have only to pass through a street or to show yourself at a balcony to make friends and to win mistresses from among those who look upon you. What a splendid, what a magnificent gift is that which spares you the need to be amiable in order to be loved, which relieves you of the need of being clever and ready to serve, which you must be if ugly, and enables you to dispense with the innumerable moral qualities which you must possess in order to make up for the lack of personal beauty.
— Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin
Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never complete.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
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
We are immensed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson
As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women's advancement.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
The Brightness of her cheek would shame those stars as daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven would through the airy region stream so bright that birds would sing, and think it were not night.
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
This new world was a vicious, sleek world made of street lights and tight jeans, sharp smiles and fast cars. This was a city, edited. A city, pared down to its bare minimums, beautiful and abusive.
— Maggie Stiefvater
Then I wondered, what if?What if he kissed me? What if he told me I was beautiful? What if he told me he loved me?What would I say in return?
— Markelle Grabo, The Elf Girl
Fortune's fool! How we humans lie upon beauty like lizards upon a sun-baked rock.
— Roman Payne
Can human folly harbour a more arrogant or ungrateful thought than the notion that whereas God makes man beautiful in body, man makes himself pure in heart?
— Augustine of Hippo, Select Letters
If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community.
— Naomi Wolf
My look, mind you, is not chocolate like Lauryn Hill, Whoopi Goldberg, or Naomi Campbell - it is pitch black and shimmering like the purple outer space of the universe. I am the charcoal that creates diamonds. I am the blackest black woman (41).
— Kola Boof, The Sexy Part of the Bible
In a sexual double standard as to who receives consumer protection, it seems that if what you do is done to women in the name of beauty, you may do what you like. It is illegal to claim that something grows hair, or makes you taller, or restores virility, if it does not. It is difficult to imagine that the baldness remedy Minoxidil would be on the market if it had killed nine French and at least eleven American men. In contrast, the long-term effects of Retin-A are still unknown--Dr. Stuart Yusps of the National Cancer Institute refers to its prescription as "a human experiment"--and the Food and Drug Administration has not approved it yet dermatologists are prescribing it to women at a revenue of over $150 million a year.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Of course to one so modern as I am, `Enfant de mon siècle,’ merely to look at the world will be always lovely. I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me. Linnaeus fell on his knees and wept for joy when he saw for the first time the long heath of some English upland made yellow with the tawny aromatic brooms of the common furze; and I know that for me, to whom flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the petals of some rose. It has always been so with me from my boyhood. There is not a single colour hidden away in the chalice of a flower, or the curve of a shell, to which, by some subtle sympathy with the very soul of things, my nature does not answer. Like Gautier, I have always been one of those ‘pour qui le monde visible existe.
— Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Writings
The ugliness at the heart of beauty. Is there always ugliness, do you suppose? Even when the object is very, very beautiful?
— Mary Balogh, A Secret Affair
He was a handsome man, not in the way of mercurial Cesare or the false angel, Morozzi, but with a calm steadiness that sat well upon him and shown in everything he did. The creations he drew from fire and air were possessed of great delicacy, but I was coming to realize that the man himself was as an oak, unshakable in the greatest storm.
— Sara Poole, Poison
I blame Mother Nature two-faced bitch and Father Time bloody bastard .Yep those misogynistic killjoys have cut off my pocket money and left me grounded.With  those two authoritarian heavyweights ganging up what chance does a woman have I aks you
— Kathy Lette, Nip 'N' Tuck
Her face may have been the most beautiful female face I have ever seen. Yet, it was a beauty that was intimidating and overwhelming. It was an exquisiteness that made you want to turn and run, instead of approach.
— Mandy Nachampassack-Maloney, Asha in Time
If one of the things you believe in,Is that this world's an ugly place,You must have never gone outside at,And stared up into space,You haven't felt the way the air changes,In the minutes before it rains,Or watched the world pass by below,Out the window of a plane, You've never been awake so early, That you see the moment the sun starts to rise, And you've never lain with your back on the grass,And made shapes with the clouds in the sky,But maybe if you've done all this,But still don't believe it's not true, It's because you can't see all the beauty, That I see when I look at you" ~e.h.
— Erin Hanson, Reverie
My dear, it is a great strength to have faced the worst and to have *felt* it a feature of beauty. Nothing ever after can shake one.
— Olaf Stapledon, Odd John
It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.
— Nathanael West
One may lack words to express the impact of beauty but no one who has felt it remains untouched. It is renewal, enlargement, intensification. The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens.
— Bernard DeVoto
Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and . . . it is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal.
— Louis de Bernières, Corelli's Mandolin
I firmly believe that everyone deserves to live within walking distance of either beauty or convenience, if not both. (48)
— Victoria Moran, Lit From Within: Tending Your Soul For Lifelong Beauty
How did these organs of plant sex manage to get themselves cross-wired with human ideas of value and status and Eros? And what might our ancient attraction for flowers have to teach us about the deeper mysteries of beauty - what one poet has called "this grace wholly gratuitous"? Is that what it is? Or does beauty have a purpose? (64)
— Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
Dream Song:In the heavens A noise, Like the rustling of the trees.
— Frances Densmore, American Indians and Their Music
What, in nature," Kit asked, "is the most beautiful thing you've seen? Or the most terrible?""The Dismals," Giles answered promptly. "A beautiful aberration in the lay of the land--North Alabama. A section mysteriously lowered, strewn with boulders, ferny, mossy, cooler--the vegetation, they say, typical of Canada. There the creek runs clear, but all other Alabama rivers and waterways are muddy with sediment. I even like the name--the Dismals. An eternal place, disjunct with the climate, the time, and its location.""You think being dismal is an attractive association with eternity?" I asked."It is a cool Eden in the Southern summer heat. What's yours, Una?""The Kentucky hills in spring. Layers of pink and white--redbud and dogwood.""And you?" Giles asked Kit."Stars," he said. That was all.
— Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer
I will listen to a beautiful person much more quickly than a plain person, and I have to learn to be nice to people who are not attractive looking.
— Beatrice Wood
Outside the hospital, a young girl who was selling small bouquets of daffodils, their green stems tied with lavender ribbons. I watched as my mother bought out the girl's whole stock. Nurse Eliot, who remembered my mother from eight years ago volunteered to help her when she saw her comng down the hall, her arms full of flowers. She rounded up extra water pitchers from a supply closet and together, she and my mother filled them with water and placed the flowers around my father's room while he slept. Nurse Eliot thought that if loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman, my mother had grown even more beautiful.(The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold)
— Alice Sebold
Just the word beautiful was seductive - but what did it really mean? Beauty was a soft word that ached with possibility, pliant as dough. You could not presume to define it, she realized, because the very idea of beauty and all it represented was a subjective thing - in the eye of the beholder - but that wasn't really true anymore.
— Elizabeth Brundage, Somebody Else's Daughter
In my perception and self - awareness of life, I see the big picture ~ I see my self ~ the place of my true home ~ the home of my soul.You are the Master of your own life - The key and beauty of your soul.
— Angie karan
Yet, he thought, if I can die saying, "Life is so beautiful," then nothing else is important. If i can believe in myself that much, nothing else matters.
— Mario Puzo, The Godfather
Most people tend to think the best of those who are blessed with beauty
—  we have difficulty imagining that physical perfection can conceal twisted emotions or a damaged mind.
I was beautiful; after all, my skin was as rich and dark as wet, brown mud, a complexion that any and every pale white girl would pray for - that is, if she believed in God. My butt sat high in the air and my hips obviously gave birth to Creation. Titties like mangoes, firm, sweet, and ready. My thighs and legs were big and powerful, kicking Vanna White and Cindy Crawford to the curb.
— Sister Souljah, No Disrespect
Colors shone with exceptional clarity in the rain. The ground was a deep black, the pine branches a brilliant green, the people wrapped in yellow looking like special spirits that were allowed to wander over the earth on rainy mornings only.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
He looked around at the perfectly white world, felt the wet kisses of the snowflakes, pondered hidden meanings in the pale yellow streetlights that shone in a world so whitely asleep. "Beautiful," he whispered.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., The Sirens of Titan
A person with taste is merely one who can recognize the greatest beauty in the simplest things.
— Barbara Taylor Bradford, Her Own Rules
Kisses were better than potions.
— Gail Carson Levine, Fairest
maybe, beauty, true beauty, is so overwhelming, it goes straight to our hearts.maybe it makes us feel emotions that are locked away inside
— James Patterson, Sundays at Tiffany's
How can a deer tell when a leaf falls silent in the forest? She hears it breathing differently.
— Richard Bach, Running from Safety: An Adventure of the Spirit
What?" I asked."Nothing," he said."Why are you looking at me like that?"Augustus half smiled. "Because you're beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.
— John Green
There is something perfect to be found in the imperfect: the law keeps balance through the juxtaposition of beauty, which gains perfection through nurtured imperfection.
— Dejan Stojanovic
I preferred my brand of beauty where Norah was more beautiful than any bimbette, and Mom was beautiful whether sized extra-small or extra-large. Where Peony could look at herself in the mirror and murmur, wow, look at me. Just look at me.
— Justina Chen, North of Beautiful
The sky's gray and there's mizzle. It's so soft on my skin--it's nothing like rain. It's even softer than the lightest drizzle! Lift my face up, so it can kiss my skin." The Panopticon
— Jenn Fagan
And when we finally stood up and turned to face the world, I could feel something climbing through me. I could feel it on its hands and knees inside me, rising up, rising up - and I smiled.I smiled, thinking, The hunger, because I knew it all too well.The hunger.The desire.Then, slowly, as we walked on, I felt the beauty of it, and I could taste it, like words inside my mouth.
— Markus Zusak, Getting the Girl
...he talked quite naturally while we ate — about the difficulty of finding words to describe the luminous mist, and why one has the desire to describe beauty."Perhaps it's an attempt to possess it," I said."Or be possessed by it; perhaps that's the same thing, really. I suppose it's the complete identification with beauty one's seeking."The mist grew brighter and brighter.
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
Apart from pleasure, beauty also kindles imagination, hope and encouragement. If beauty ceased to exist, we would, in a very real sense, cease to exist--for we would be no longer who we are.
— Stephen R. Lawhead, The Paradise War
It's hard not to stand in awe and enchantment with the beauty in which nature expresses herself.
— Steve Maraboli
Maybe if everything was beautiful, nothing would be.People saw one thing, they swooned over it. They saw this other thing, they pounded it with sticks.Maybe there had to be variety for life to work. Swoon over everything, you get bored. Beat everything with a stick-boring.
— Dean Koontz, Dead and Alive
He used to say the uglier things are the longer they live, and the ugliest things live forever.
— Mal Peet, The Penalty
At that moment the universe appeared to me a vast machine constructed only to produce evil. I almost doubted the goodness of God, in not annihilating man on the day he first sinned. "The world should have been destroyed," I said, "crushed as I crush this reptile which has done nothing in its life but render all that it touches as disgusting as itself." I had scarcely removed my foot from the poor insect when, like a censoring angel sent from heaven, there came fluttering through the trees a butterfly with large wings of lustrous gold and purple. It shone but a moment before my eyes; then, rising among the leaves, it vanished into the height of the azure vault. I was mute, but an inner voice said to me, "Let not the creature judge his Creator; here is a symbol of the world to come. As the ugly caterpillar is the origin of the splendid butterfly, so this globe is the embryo of a new heaven and a new earth whose poorest beauty will infinitely exceed your mortal imagination. And when you see the magnificent result of that which seems so base to you now, how you will scorn your blind presumption, in accusing Omniscience for not having made nature perish in her infancy.God is the god of justice and mercy; then surely, every grief that he inflicts on his creatures, be they human or animal, rational or irrational, every suffering of our unhappy nature is only a seed of that divine harvest which will be gathered when, Sin having spent its last drop of venom, Death having launched its final shaft, both will perish on the pyre of a universe in flames and leave their ancient victims to an eternal empire of happiness and glory.
— Emily Brontë, Devoirs de Bruxelles
A couple of them were school beauty-queen pretty while a few were that more real-looking type. A realer kind of pretty.
— Markus Zusak, Underdog
Beauty is a cheap word, but beauty remains priceless.
— Dejan Stojanovic
In a world full of war, famine, oppression, deceit, monotony, what—apart from the eternal innocence of animals—offers an image of hope? A mother with a newborn child in her arms? The child may end up as a murderer or a murder victim, so that the hopeful image is a prefiguration of a pietà: a mother with her newly dead child on her lap.
— Harry Mulisch, The Discovery of Heaven
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
She is not fair to outward viewAs many maidens be;Her loveliness I never knewUntil she smiled on me.Oh! then I saw her eye was bright,A well of love, a spring of light.
— Hartley Coleridge
sad things are beautiful only from a distancetherefore you just want to get away from themfrom a distance of one hundred and thirty years ....i'm going to distance myself until the world is beautiful
— Tao Lin, this emotion was a little e-book
The beauty of this day doesn't depend on its lasting forever.
— Marty Rubin
If ever any beauty I did see,Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.
— John Donne
Even men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others. Modern, no less then Ancient History, supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so, indeed, History would be quite unreadable.
— Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits which we call fine - courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing - can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't have the warpings of ignorance and necessity.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Between the dark, heavily laden treetops of the spreading chestnut trees could be seen the dark blue of the sky, full of stars, all solemn and golden, which extended their radiance unconcernedly into the distance. That was the nature of the stars. and the trees bore their buds and blossoms and scars for everyone to see, and whether it signified pleasure or pain, they accepted the strong will to live. flies that lived only for a day swarmed toward their death. every life had its radiance and beauty. i had insight into it all for a moment, understood it and found it good, and also found my life and sorrows good.
— Hermann Hesse
Mister, when I see my first lady angel, if God ever sees fit to show me one, it’ll be her wings not her face that’ll make my mouth fall open. I’ve already seen the prettiest face that ever could be.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat's Cradle
Though the face before me was that of a young woman of certainly not more than thirty years, in perfect health and the first flush of ripened beauty, yet it bore stamped upon it a seal of unutterable experience, and of deep acquaintance with grief and passion. Not even the slow smile that crept about the dimples of her mouth could hide the shadow of sin and sorrow. It shone even in the light of those glorious eyes, it was present in the air of majesty, and it seemed to say: 'Behold me, lovely as no woman was or is, undying and half-divine; memory haunts me from age to age, and passion leads me by the hand--evil have I done, and with sorrow have I made acquaintance from age to age, and from age to age evil shall I do, and sorrow shall I know till my redemption comes.
— H. Rider Haggard, She
Order is what exists before you start arranging things.
— Marty Rubin
How old are you?""Ten," answered Tangle."You don't look like it," said the lady."How old are you, please?" returned Tangle."Thousands of years old," answered the lady."You don't look like it," said Tangle."Don't I? I think I do. Don't you see how beautiful I am!
— George MacDonald
Her mighty lakes, like oceans of liquid silver; her mountains, with bright aerial tints; her valleys, teeming with wild fertility; her tremendous cataracts, thundering in their solitudes; her boundless plains, waving with spontaneous verdure; her broad, deep rivers, rolling in solemn silence to the ocean; her trackless forests, where vegetation puts forth all its magnificence; her skies, kindling with the magic of summer clouds and glorious sunshine - no, never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of natural scenery.
— Washington Irving, The Sketch Book
To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business—not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything is flaking away into… rhetoric and plot.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
But the princess had never seen the beautiful expression of her eyes; the expression that came into them when she was not thinking of herself. As is the case with everyone, her face assumed an affected, unnatural, ugly expression as soon as she looked in the looking glass.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
There was no question about it- the girl in the photograph was staggeringly beautiful. She was Miss Canal Zone, a runner-up in the Miss Universe Contest -- and in fact far more beautiful than the winner of the contests. Her beauty had frightened the judges.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., The Sirens of Titan
When you were in a room with Kurtis James, whether it was one or a hundred other people, Kurtis seemed to be the only one there
— Dee Remy, There Once Was A Boy
Beauty is the worst kind of lie.
— Beth Kephart, Undercover
How I should despise such a thing if I were a man. What a nose she has! what a chin! what a neck! Then her eyes--and the worst kissing lips in the universe.
— John Vanbrugh, The Provoked Wife
A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I felt like I was seeing Shannon through a new lens, undistracted by Jennifer's nuclear glow. I could see how pretty she really was, how kind her eyes were.
— Kenneth Oppel, Half Brother
The surgeons' market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women's faces or bodies that social change won't cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Ultima came to stay with us the summer I was almost seven. When she came the beauty of the llano unfolded before my eyes, and the gurgling waters of the river sang to the hum of the turning earth. The magical time of childhood stood still, and the pulse of the living earth pressed its mystery into my living blood.
— Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima
Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable. A beautiful heroine is a contradiction in terms, since heroism is about individuality, interesting and ever changing, while "beauty" is generic, boring, and inert. While culture works out moral dilemmas, "beauty" is amoral: If a woman is born resembling an art object, it is an accident of nature, a fickle consensus of mass perception, a peculiar coincidence--but it is not a moral act. From the "beauties" in male culture, women learn a bitter amoral lesson--that the moral lessons of their culture exclude them.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Men won't easily give up a system in which half the world's population works for next to nothing...[and recognizes that]precisely because that half works for so little, it may have no energy left to fight for anything else.
— Marilyn Waring
Since middle-class Western women can best be weakened psychologically now that we are stronger materially, the beauty myth, as it has resurfaced in the last generation, has had to draw on more technological sophistication and reactionary fervor than ever before. The modern arsenal of the myth is a dissemination of millions of images of the current ideal; although this barrage is generally seen as a collective sexual fantasy, there is in fact little that is sexual about it. It is summoned out of political fear on the part of male-dominated institutions threatened by women's freedom, and it exploits female guilt and apprehension about our own liberation -- latent fears that we might be going too far.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Beauty is given to dolls, majesty to haughty vixens, but mind, feeling, passion and the crowning grace of fortitude are the attributes of an angel.
— Charlotte Brontë, Tales of Angria
Go ahead and point out my flaws and weaknesses to me. In doing so it's just something to get excited about! Knowing there's a flaw that my Heavenly Daddy wants to make beautiful is rather exciting!
— Melissa Bradley
I know that a pretty doll, a fair fool, might do well enough for the honeymoon; but when passion cooled, how dreadful to find a lump of wax and wood laid in my bosom, a half-idiot clasped in my arms, and to remember that I had made of this my equal- nay, my idol- to know that I must pass the rest of my dreary life with a creature incapable of understanding what I said, of appreciating what I thought, or of sympathising with what I felt!
— Charlotte Brontë, The Professor
The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us...During the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing specialty...pornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal...More women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition than we have ever had before; but in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers.
— Naomi Wolf
Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet
In drawing attention to the physical characteristics of women leaders, they can be dismissed as either too pretty or too ugly. The net effect is to prevent women's identification with the issues. If the public women is stigmatized as too 'pretty,' she's a threat, a rival--or simply not serious; if derided as too 'ugly,' one risks tarring oneself with the same brush by identifying oneself with her agenda.
— Naomi Wolf
For the first time in his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it was - a chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces - and he needed days of repose to see it clothe itself again with the illusions of his senses, the white purity of its snows, the splendor of its light, and the infinity of its heavenly peace. Nature was kind; Lake Geneva was beautiful beyond itself, and the Alps put on charms real as terrors.
— Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
Tremendous beauty and tremendous ugliness puts you on the outside of things.
— Peter Bogdanovich
You looked so beautiful- your hair spread out around your head against the linoleum. Though your think brown curls had thinned since you'd started losing weight, they still fell in soft waves. You reminded me of a mermaid, your skin all shiny, your lips so full compared to the harshness of your angular cheekbones and pointed chin.
— Steph Bowe, Girl Saves Boy
I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail leading into the unknown to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bread by cities... it is enough that I am surrounded by beauty.
— Everett Ruess
I tell you Schoonmaker she doesn't know what she has. That's the heart of it. She's like some wild creature who hasn't a clue the worth of its coat.
— Anna Godbersen, Envy
...it's fat women who are really beautiful. The fatter the better.
— Antonio Olinto, The Water House
It is not Beauty I demand, A crystal brow, the moon's despair, Nor the snow's daughter, a white hand, Nor mermaid's yellow pride of hair. Tell me not of your starry eyes, Your lips that seem on roses fed, Your breasts where Cupid trembling lies, Nor sleeps for kissing of his bed. ...Give me, instead of beauty's bust, A tender heart, a loyal mind, Which with temptation I could trust, Yet never linked with error find. One in whose gentle bosom I Could pour my secret heart of woes. Like the care-burdened honey-fly That hides his murmurs in the rose. My earthly comforter! whose love So indefeasible might be, That when my spirit won above Hers could not stay for sympathy.
— George Darley, Selected Poems Of George Darley
The stronger that women grow, the more prestige, fame, and money is accorded to the display professions: They are held higher and higher above the heads of rising women, for them to emulate.
— Naomi Wolf
Creativity leads others to where I lead you, to an unseen beauty, so ineffable its very beauty destroys itself...
— Fola, The Seed
Rome was mud and smoky skies; the rank smell of the Tiber and the exotically spiced cooking fires of a hundred different nationalities. Rome was white marble and gilding and heady perfumes; the blare of trumpets and the shrieking of market-women and the eternal, sub-aural hum of more people, speaking more languages than Gaius had ever imagined existed, crammed together on seven hills whose contours had long ago disappeared beneath this encrustation if humanity. Rome was the pulsing heart of the world.
— Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Forest House
Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
And yonder sits a maiden, The fairest of the fair, With gold in her garment glittering, And she combs her golden hair.
— Heinrich Heine
The quality of beauty lies on how beholder values an object.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Look on beauty,And you shall see 'tis purchased by the weight;Which therein works a miracle in nature,Making them lightest that wear most of it:So are those crisped snaky golden locksWhich make such wanton gambols with the wind,Upon supposed fairness, often knownTo be the dowry of a second head,The skull that bred them in the sepulchre.Thus ornament is but the guiled shoreTo a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarfVeiling an Indian beauty; in a word,The seeming truth which cunning times put onTo entrap the wisest.
— William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
Why did people assume that the beautiful among them needed nothing but their beauty to bring them happiness? That behind the beauty there was nothing but an empty shell, insensitive shell?
— Mary Balogh, A Secret Affair
Accentuated plainness and accentuated vice ought to bring about harmony. Beauty lies in harmony, in style, whether it be the harmony of ugliness or beauty, vice or virtue.
— Yevgeny Zamyatin, Islanders And, The Fisher Of Men
With characteristic lack of false modesty, John once said to me, "My looks are a rough test of people. If they don't begin to see me beautiful when they have had a chance to learn, I know they're dead inside, and dangerous.
— Olaf Stapledon, Odd John
Yes! Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty—it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it... There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy.
— George Eliot, Adam Bede
Beauty itself doth of itself persuadeThe eyes of men without orator.
— William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece
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? (pg. 215, Economy and Pleasure)
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
A flower's structure leads a bee toward having pollen adhere to its body . . . we don't know of any such reason why beautiful places attract humans.
— David Rains Wallace, The Untamed Garden and Other Personal Essays
Beauty is single. Only ugliness is multiple, and even then its multiplicity is soon exhausted.
— Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques
When it came time to build a tabernacle, the Israelite women brought all their mirrors to Moses so he could use them to make God's building more beautiful. (Exodus 38:8.) They were far more interested in enjoying God's glory than reflecting on their own images.
— Gwendolyn Díaz, More Beautiful You: A Study of True Beauty
In a sense, beauty is what one chooses to feel by virtue of what one chooses to imitate and to create.
— Robert Pack
We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art makes murder into the supreme image of Beauty and in doing so sets free the vengeful God. (referring to Jean Lorrain's LE VICE ERRANT)
— Jennifer Birkett
That is her style of beauty.
— George Orwell, 1984
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
Even now, I still believe metamorphosis is the greatest beauty.
— David Vann, Aquarium
If you see those pretty thingsthat nature likes to showRemember all those seals that singAnd leave them there to grow.
— Stephen Cosgrove, Trapper
I am the bended, but not broken. I am the power of the thunderstorm. I am the beauty in the beast. I am the strength in weakness. I am the confidence in the midst of doubt. I am Her!
— Kierra C.T. Banks
I have always thought that great artists were those who dared to confer the right of beauty on things so natural that people say on seeing them, "Why did I never realize before that that was beautiful too?
— André Gide, The Immoralist
I say that almost everywhere there is beauty enough to fill a person's life if one would only be sensitive to it. but Henry says No: that broken beauty is only a torment, that one must have a whole beauty with man living in relation to it to have a rich civilization and art. . . . Is it because I am a woman that I accept what crumbs I may have, accept the hot-dog stands and amusement parks if I must, if the blue is bright beyond them and the sunset flushes the breasts of sea birds?
— Elizabeth Coatsworth, Personal Geography: Almost an Autobiography
She could see all of Ferenwood from here: the rolling hills, the endless explosion of color cascading down and across the lush landscape. Reds and blues: Maroon and ceruleans. Yellow and tangerine and violet and aquamarine. Every hue held a flavor, a heartbeat, a life. She took a deep breath and drew it all in.
— Tahereh Mafi, Furthermore
Ah, Lovely October, as you usher in the season that awakens my soul, your awesome beauty compels my spirit to soar like an leaf caught in an autumn breeze and my heart to sing like a heavenly choir.
— Peggy Toney Horton
Deandre gazed at her like she was the stars, and he was a mere astronomer, searching her face for the constellations, admiring the beauty that was there
— Aishabella Sheikh, Jungle Princess
The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.
— Carl Sagan
She's beautiful,' he murmured.'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.
— George Orwell, 1984
She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Gene [Siskel] often mentioned something François Truffaut once told him: the most beautiful sight in a movie theater is to walk down to the front, turn around, and look at the light from the screen reflected on the upturned faces of the members of the audience.
— Roger Ebert
I didn’t tell him that I grew up in an ugly city that taught me how to look between dust and rubbish and potholes to find a splinter of glass that looked like unmelting ice, beautiful in its defiance of the sun.
— Kamila Shamsie, Kartography
There are always exquisite things and times to remind us of the original source of all beauty and love.
— Jay Woodman
Music is, for me, like a beautiful mosaic which God has put together. He takes all the pieces in his hand, throws them into the world, and we have to recreate the picture from the pieces.
— Jean Sibelius
The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls.
— Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
Begin with the soft smelted upturned heart-shaped mouth made for smiling a smile kept for kindness, tenderness, incapable of malice. Am I going too fast for you?The almond eyes see out through their sleepy epicanthic fold. Trusting and calm, if a flicker from slowness, a further flicker from stupidity.Settled in slow-motion beauty, heart-breaking beauty.
— Craig Raine
All beauty, according to Lady Katchatka, had its origins in pain.
— Jon Courtenay Grimwood, End of the World Blues
What's it really like to always be the prettiest person in a room? Dos it mean you're always acting as if in a play, because no one stops looking at you?''Life is a play, isn't it?
— Sherwood Smith, Remalna's Children
Everyone is pretty enough in the dark,”she whispered.“No, they are not.” He kissed her beforepulling back abruptly, willing himself to stop.
— Sylvain Reynard, Gabriel's Inferno
Thanks to Karen Connelly who read earlier versions of this manuscript and to Ronald Hatch my editor and publisher.
— Nancy  Holmes, Mandorla
Nature alone can speak to our intelligence an imperishable language, never changing, because it remains within the bounds of eternal truth and of what is absolutely noble and beautiful.
— George Sand
What if feeling good only comes after you destroy someone you hate?''That's not good, that's triumph,
— Sherwood Smith, Remalna's Children
The woman laughed again. She was the loudest person in the cave. Eena wondered if perhaps she was talking to a female Ghengat. Curiosity got the best of her and she turned around to look, surprised to find neither a Ghengat nor a Harrowbethian woman, but a Mishmorat. A striking, cheetah-spotted Mishmorat with straight lengths of charcoal hair and the most alluring dark eyes in existence. This bronzed female was the same size as Eena but observably more muscular. She appeared to be a mix of cheetah, Arabian princess, and gladiator in tight-fitting pants. Eena paused, dropping the stone in her hands. “Kira?” she breathed.“Hmmm,” the woman grumbled. Her painted eyes scrunched with displeasure. The look was still stunning. “I see my reputation precedes me.” Eena gawked as if a legendary ghost had been resurrected. “You’re alive?
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Eena, The Dawn and Rescue
Art is apotheosis; often, the complaint of beauty.
— Dejan Stojanovic
If I talk about her like she’s a beingIt’s because talking about her I need to use the language of menWhich gives personality to things,And imposes a name on things.
— Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep
If everywhere you go everyone watches you, and wants you, can you truly be yourself?
— Sherwood Smith, Remalna's Children
Act'. How many good people do you really know? I discount those who mouth out platitudes for the edification of the young, and who truly are 'good', whatever that means?"What a strange subject, and from such a strange person!"Everyone I know is a mixture, some with more good than bad, and it varies on different days,
— Sherwood Smith, Remalna's Children
True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally complete the incomplete.
— Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea
At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.
— Arthur Golden
Beautiful songs could sometimes take a person out of themselves and carry them away to a place of magic. But when Jill sang, it was not about the song, really. She could sing the phone book. She could sing a shopping list. Whatever she sang, whatever the words or the tune, it was so beautiful, so achingly lovely, that no one could listen and be untouched.
— Michael  Grant, Lies
In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment
In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition--either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail. Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit--that, say, a more graceful bridge across the Delaware River might actually set off the grandeur around it, or that the AT might be more interesting and rewarding if it wasn't all wilderness, if from time to time it purposely took you past grazing cows and till fields.
— Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods
How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.
— Elaine Scarry
She'd always been a little contemptuous of beauty, as though it was something you had to trade away some other vital thing for.
— Holly Black, Valiant
Why is wisdom so fair? Why is beauty so wise?Because all else is temporary, while beauty and wisdom are the only real and constant aspects of truth that can be perceived by human means.And I don't mean the kind of surface beauty that fades with age, or the sort of shallow wisdom that gets lost in plati
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
It's not the substance of what you make known to me that's beautiful
—  it's the opening of your heart. It is the 'yes' in your heart to be mine. The fact that you are revealing the secrets and letting me peer into your heart--that is in itself the beautiful part.
None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his hands.
— John Paul II, Letter to Artists
It was the upward-reaching and fathomlessly hungering, heart-breaking love for the beauty of the world at its most beautiful, and, beyond that, for that beauty east of the sun and west of the moon which is past the reach of all but our most desperate desiring and is finally the beauty of Beauty itself, of Being itself and what lies at the heart of Being.
— Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey: A Memoir of Early Days
...when we condescend, when we act consistently with a sense of the character of people in general which demeans them, we impoverish them AND ourselves, and preclude our having a part in the creation of the highest wealth, the testimony to the mysterious beauty of life we all value in psalms and tragedies and epics and meditations, in short stories and novels.
— Marilynne Robinson
Mia: I was sixteen when I first realized my mom was more concerned about my appearance than I was… I’ll be talking to my mom and realize she hasn’t heard a word because she’s studying my face to see if the foundation I’m using is a good match for my skin tone.
— Mia Fontaine
All the beautiful waitresses existed like eternal responsibilities.
— Spalding Gray, The Journals of Spalding Gray
Everything about riding a bicycle compels you towards beauty.
— BikeSnobNYC, Bike Snob: Systematically & Mercilessly Realigning the World of Cycling
To the rich, therefore, falls the burden of Beauty. And if they cannot assume it, then they deserve to die.
— Muriel Barbery
While the egg yolks cooled, he directed the beaters at the egg whites, setting the mixer on high speed that sent small bubbles giggling to the side of the bowl, where a few became many until they were a white froth rising up and then lying down again in patters and ridges, leaving an intricate design like the ribs of a leaf in the wake of the beaters
— Erica Bauermeister, The School of Essential Ingredients
An odd thing about beauty, however, is that it's absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do.
— Jonathan Franzen
... keeping her wild-honey-and-chamomile-soaked hair from falling into her oatmeal-and-yogurt face mask
— Emma McLaughlin, The Real Real
It was the most beautiful moment that was so perfect you felt like you could just die. It was like the first time you ever heard Dido and Aeneas’ “When I am laid in earth.” A moment so pure you feel like you’re dreaming and begin to question your own mortality that could be capable of and rival such innocent beauty.
— Phil Volatile, My Mind's Abyss
Describe plum-blossoms?Better than my verses...whiteWordless Butterflies
— Bashō Matsuo, Japanese Haiku