c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Beautiful girls should know how to defend themselves against the advances of gentlemen.
— Cassandra Clare
When I see a beautiful shell like that I can't help feeling a regret about what's inside it.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
I am fascinated by what is beautiful, strong, healthy, what is living. I seek harmony.
— Leni Riefenstahl
A woman is not beautiful when her ankle or arm wins compliments, but when her total appearance diverts admiration from the individual parts of her body.
— Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
You cannot wait for an untroubled world to have an untroubled moment. The terrible phone call, the rainstorm, the sinister knock on the door—they will all come. Soon enough arrive the treacherous villain and the unfair trial and the smoke and the flames of the suspicious fires to burn everything away. In the meantime, it is best to grab what wonderful moments you find lying around.
— Lemony Snicket, Shouldn't You Be in School?
... when I saw any of those kinds of beauty I knew I was alive, and not just in the sense that when I hit my thumb with a hammer I knew I was alive, but rather in the sense that I was partaking of something--something was passing through me that it was in my nature to be a part of.
— Neal Stephenson, Anathem
Had you but seen it, I promise you, your high-minded principles would have melted like candle wax. Never would you have wished such beauty away.
— Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution
When life is not coming up rosesLook to the weedsand find the beauty hidden within them.
— L.F.Young
What would beauty be if the whole world were blind?
— Marty Rubin
Both the grand and the intimate aspects of nature can be revealed in the expressive photograph. Both can stir enduring affirmations and discoveries, and can surely help the spectator in his search for identification with the vast world of natural beauty and wonder surrounding him.
— Ansel Adams
Young women today feel vulnerable to judgment; if a harsh sentence is passed (or even suspected or projected), it is not her reputation that suffers so much as the stability of her moral universe. They did not have long to explore the sexual revolution and make it their own. Before the old chains had grown cold, while young women were still rubbing the circulation back into their ankles and taking tentative steps forward, the beauty industries levied a heavy toll on further investigations, and beauty pornography offered them designer bondage.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
I cursed myself. For once, heaven had sent me "Beauty" in its most perfected form and I abandoned it. She might not have been a girl after all but an angel: a force to guide me on this hazardous path of life I hurry down... How can life be hazardous if it can only end in death?
— Roman Payne, The Wanderess
I prefer to believe the opposite - that there is always an indestructible beauty at the heart of darkness.
— Mary Balogh, A Secret Affair
I didn't know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up. The only think I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked from the peach stand and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt like I could see through t something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way.
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.
— Karl Kraus
It's lovely. I hate it.
— Tanith Lee, Wolf Queen
The ideal has many names and beauty is but one of them.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale
A rose, isn't quite as beautiful as it once was, when after its thorn pricks you.
— Anthony Liccione
And I find perfect beauty excessively boring, don't you?
— Gail Carriger
Thirty spokesShare one hub.Make the nothing therein appropriate, and you will have the use of the cart.
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
When you look in the mirror, it's usually to fix your hair or put on makeup. To examine your body searching for problem areas. We look at ourselves to see the flaw, not beauty. And we look at predictable times, in the morning, after using the bathroom, before bed. We hardly ever see ourselves when we aren't prepared for inspection. But only when you're unprepared can you see your true self, your true beauty.
— Valerie Frankel, The Girlfriend Curse
Long hair will make thee look dreafully to thine enemies, and manly to thyfriends: it is, in peace, an ornament; in war, a strong helmet; it...deadens the leaden thump of a bullet: in winter, it is a warm nightcap; in summer,a cooling fan of feathers.
— Thomas Dekker, The Guls Horne Booke, 1609
She felt so much aware of her own beauty it seemed inconceivable that everybody else wouldn't notice the difference too.
— Anna Godbersen, Rumors
Beauty discrimination has become necessary, not from the perception that women will not be good enough, but that they will be, as they have been, twice as good.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
I don’t care to be pretty,” Blue shot back hotly, “I care to look on the outside like I look on the inside.
— Maggie Stiefvater
I am such a bad girl," she thought. Yet...
— Anne Rice, Beauty's Punishment
If all we had were roses, would the thorns then be beautiful?
— Kamand Kojouri
People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.
— Lawrence Durrell, Justine
Hi! My little hutIs newly-thatched I see...Blue morning-glories
— Kobayashi Issa, Japanese Haiku
He's wearing boots, a kilt, and a long-sleeve tee. No coat, even though it's December. Beautiful people don't need coats. They've got their auras to keep them warm.
— Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution
I think the most profound beauty is found in what our hearts love. And I love this, Kate, more than I love anything else. It is beyond beautiful to me. It is home. It is..." He paused, and squinted a little, as if looking into the sun, but his gaze stayed steady on me. "It is the sight I want to see every day, for the rest of my life.
— Julianne Donaldson, Blackmoore
You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
— Alain de Botton
There are no ugly women, only lazy ones
— Helena Rubinstein
We walked always in beauty, it seemed to me. We walked and looked about, or stood and looked. Sometimes, less often, we would sit down. We did not often speak. The place spoke for us and was a kind of speech. We spoke to each other in the things we saw.
— Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
‎If heart filled with purity,then mind found the beauty.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
I’ve seen knives pierce the chest,Children dying in the roadCrawling things hooked and baited,Rapists bound and then castrated,Villains singed in public square.Yet none these sights did make me cringeLike when my Love cut all her hair.
— Roman Payne
That is the eternal folly of man. To be chasing after the sweet flesh, without realizing that it is simply a pretty cover for the bones.
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.
— Rollo May, My Quest for Beauty
There is a picture of me in their heads, a picture of someone I don't know yet. She is not the chubby girl with the braces and bad perm. She is not the girl hiding in the bathroom at recess. She is someone new, a blank slate they have named beautiful. That is what I am now: beautiful, with this new body and face and hair and clothes. Beautiful, with this erasing of history.
— Amy Reed, Beautiful
The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr. Watson - paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
until only infinity remained of beauty
— John Ashbery, Some Trees
fire is beautifuland we know that if we gettoo close it will kill usbut what does that matterit is better to be happy for a momentand be burned up with beautythan to live a long timeand be bored all the while
— Don Marquis
The old oak, utterly transformed, draped in a tent of sappy dark green, basked faintly, undulating in the rays of the evening sun. Of the knotted fingers, the gnarled excrecenses, the aged grief and mistrust- nothing was to be seen. Through the rough, century-old bark, where there were no twigs, leaves had burst out so sappy, so young, that is was hard to believe that the aged creature had borne them. "Yes, that is the same tree," thought Prince Andrey, and all at once there came upon him an irrational, spring feeling of joy and renewal. All the best moments of his life rose to his memory at once. Austerlitz, with that lofty sky, and the dead, reproachful face of his wife, and Pierre on the ferry, and the girl, thrilled by the beauty of the night, and that night and that moon- it all rushed at once into his mind.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
She walks in beauty.
— Ron Rash, Serena
He looked into the crowd for approval, saw his mother and father. He waved and they waved back. Smiles and Indian teeth. They were both drunk. Everything familiar and welcome. Everything beautiful.
— Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
and her skin shone luminous and impossibly pale, as if it drank light from the moon.
— Madeline Miller
Viktor was swinging a leather duffle and wearing a black Adidas tracksuit and his favorite brown UGG slippers with a hole in the toe."Worn and old, just like Viv," he'd say when Frankie made fun of them, and then his wife would swat him on the arm. But Frankie knew he was just joking, because Viveka was the type of woman you wished was in a magazine just so you could stare at her violet-colored eyes and shiny black hair without being called a stalker or a freak.
— Lisi Harrison, Monster High
I want to fulfill myself in one of the rarest of destinies. I have only a dim notion of what it  will be. I want it to have not a graceful curve slightly bent toward evening but a hitherto unseen beauty  lovely because of the danger which works away at it overwhelms it undermines it. Oh let me be only utter  beauty I shall go quickly or slowly but I shall dare what must be dared. I shall destroy appearances the  casings will burn away and one evening I shall appear there in the palm of your hand quiet and pure like a  glass statuette. You will see me. Round about me there will be nothing left.
— Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal
And looks commercing with the skies,Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.
— John Milton, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas
...[F]ireworks had for her a direct and magical appeal. Their attraction was more complex than that of any other form of art. They had pattern and sequence, colour and sound, brilliance and mobility; they had suspense, surprise, and a faint hint of danger; above all, they had the supreme quality of transience, which puts the keenest edge on beauty and makes it touch some spring in the heart which more enduring excellences cannot reach.
— Jan Struther, Mrs. Miniver
Oh, Mr. Cuthbert," she whispered, that place we came through--that white place--what was it?""Well now, you must mean the Avenue," said Matthew after a few moments' profound reflection. "It is a kind of pretty place.""Pretty? Oh, PRETTY doesn't seem the right word to use. Nor beautiful, either. They don't go far enough. Oh, it was wonderful--wonderful. It's the first thing I ever saw that couldn't be improved upon by imagination. It just satisfies me here"--she put one hand on her breast--"it made a queer funny ache and yet it was a pleasant ache. Did you ever have an ache like that, Mr. Cuthbert?""Well now, I just can't recollect that I ever had.""I have it lots of time--whenever I see anything royally beautiful. But they shouldn't call that lovely place the Avenue. There is no meaning in a name like that. They should call it--let me see--the White Way of Delight. Isn't that a nice imaginative name?
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Her eyes, always sad, now looked into the mirror with particular hopelessness. "She's flattering me," thought the princess, and she turned away and went on reading. Julie, however, was not flattering her friend: indeed, the princess's eyes, large, deep, and luminous (sometimes it was as if rays of light came from them in sheaves), were so beautiful that very often, despite the unattractiveness of the whole face, those eyes were more attractive than beauty. But the princess had never seen the good expression of thise eyes, the expression they had in moments when she was not thinking of herself. As with all people, the moment she looked in the mirror, her face assumed a strained, unnatural, bad expression.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
It is a beautiful and delightful sight to behold the body of the Moon.
— Galileo Galilei, The Starry Messenger, Venice 1610: "From Doubt to Astonishment"
To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.
— Martha C. Nussbaum
How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And it was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a chin and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on the face of the earth. To a young man with the least fire in him that little upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never before seen a woman’s lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow.Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no — they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Yet, even amidst the hatred and carnage, life is still worth living. It is possible for wonderful encounters and beautiful things to exist.
— Hayao Miyazaki
...I want those perfect eyes and lips, and for everyone to look at me and gasp. And for everyone who sees me to think Who's that? and want to get to know me, and listen to what I say.""I'd rather have something to say.
— Scott Westerfeld, Uglies
Cosmetic surgery processes the bodies of woman-made women, who make up the vast majority of its patient pool, into man-made women.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
To be beautiful you had to be willowy and tall. When you were as short as Clary was, just over five feet, you were cute. Not pretty or beautiful, but cute.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Bones
[G]rowing into your future with health and grace and beauty doesn’t have to take all your time. It rather requires a dedication to caring for yourself as if you were rare and precious, which you are, and regarding all life around you as equally so, which it is. (267-268)
— Victoria Moran, Younger by the Day: 365 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body and Revitalize Your Spirit
A personality for the incredibly beautiful can be a pointless cargo...
— Russell Brand, My Booky Wook
Having a purpose is the little secret of the nonpretties. Something to do always beats something to look at.
— Adriana Trigiani, Big Stone Gap
What was beauty unless you intended to use it, like a hammer, or a key? It was just something for other people to use and admire, or envy, despise. To nail their dreams onto like a picture hanger on a blank wall. And so many girls saying, use me, dream me.
— Janet Fitch
How sad it is!" murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. "How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June… . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Beauty" and sexuality are both commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be "beautiful" to be sexual. That of course is not true at all. The definitions of both "beautiful" and "sexual" constantly change to serve the social order, and the connection between the two is a recent invention.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Fashion Fact: Most people make the assumption that I wear trendy shades the majority of the time (often indoors) to protect my eyes from the elements. But in fact it's the reverse. I'm protecting the elements from the brilliance of my eyes.
— Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino, Here's the Situation: A Guide to Creeping on Chicks, Avoiding Grenades, and Getting in Your GTL on the Jersey Shore
What is your substance, whereof are you made,That millions of strange shadows on you tend?Since everyone hath every one, one shade,And you, but one, can every shadow lend.Describe Adonis, and the counterfeitIs poorly imitated after you.On Helen’s cheek all art of beauty set,And you in Grecian tires are painted new.Speak of the spring and foison of the year;The one doth shadow of your beauty show,The other as your bounty doth appear,And you in every blessèd shape we know.In all external grace you have some part,But you like none, none you, for constant heart.
— William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets
Human beings, in a sense, may be thought of as multidimensional creatures composed of such poetic considerations as the individual need for self-realization, subdued passions for overwhelming beauty, and a hunger for meaning beyond the flavors that enter and exit the physical body.
— Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays
Today, young girls measure the quality of their beauty based upon its entertainment value. The more people are entertained by their beauty, the more beautiful they think they must be. This is very unfortunate and I would like young girls to know that their beauty is a crown; not a clown. And crowns are best worn with elegance and serenity.
— C. JoyBell C.
I never think of policemen's wives
—  their beauty maddens me like wine.
Order and disorder', said the speaker, 'they each have their beauty.
— Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
You can spit on a rose, but it's still a rose.
— Marty Rubin
Beauty is to recognize how full of Love you are. Sensuality is to let some of that Love shine through your body.
— Nityananda Das, Divine Union
People are gonna disappoint you sometimes. We’re flawed creatures. Not one of us is perfect, not even you, and you’ve gotta let people mess up and then you’ve gotta forgive them. That’s just life.
— Jenny Han, Shug
Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing – say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne of the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico; in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico; for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico; to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles… If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
All in the eye of the beholder - Some of the most destructive forces in the world (Fire & Water), can also have the power of beauty.
— Martin R. Lemieux
Everyone will say I'm insane, but I don't care, Rose. Is it insane to marry the girl I love? A girl with golden brown hair, with gifts of beauty and goodness and storytelling?
— Melanie Dickerson, The Healer's Apprentice
The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
— William Carlos Williams, Howl and Other Poems
I follow Plato only with my mindPure beauty strikes me as a little thinA little cold, however beautiful.I am in love with what is mixed and impureDoubtful, dark and hard to disencumberI want beauty I must dig for, search for.Pure beauty is beginning and not endBegin with the sun and drop from sun to cloudFrom cloud to tree, and from tree to earth itselfAnd deeper yet to the earth dark root.I am in love with what resists my lovingWith what I have to labor to make live.
— Robert Francis
Painting reflects. It kills you in a colourful shower of emptiness. Flatness. Randomness. And beauty. Yes, it is the most pure beauty I have ever felt in my life.
— Nigel Tomm
He had always looked at the world and seen it in a thousand different colors, his fingers itching to paint each turn of light, each curl of the wind sweeping through the silver streets.Every shade was unique in Valen's eyes.And yet... he was losing colors, too.
— Sasha Alsberg, Zenith Part 1
I was going to tell you that you look beautiful with your hair down. That's all I was going to say.
— Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall
Beauty! Wasn't that what mattered? Beauty was hardly a popular ideal at that jumpy moment in history. The masses had been desensitized to it, the intelligentsia regarded it with suspicion. To most of her peers, 'beauty' smacked of the rarefied, the indulgent, the superfluous, the effete. How could persons of good conscience pursue the beautiful when there was so much suffering and injustice in the world? Ellen Cherry's answer was that if one didn't cultivate beauty, soon he or she wouldn't be able to recognize ugliness. The prevalence of social ugliness made commitment to physical beauty all the more essential. And the very presence in life of double-wide mobile homes, Magic Marker graffiti, and orange shag carpeting had the effect of making ills such as poverty, crime, repression, pollution, and child abuse seem tolerable. In a sense, beauty was the ultimate protest, and, in that it generally lasted longer than an orgasm, the ultimate refuge. The Venus de Milo screamed 'No!' at evil, whereas the Spandex stretch pant, the macrame plant holder were compliant with it. Ugly bedrooms bred ugly habits. Of course, it wasn't required of beauty that it perform a social function. That was what was valuable about it.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
Brushing the clouds away from my eyes, I see clarity in the raindrop and beauty in the first ray of morning sun...Life is strange and wondrous...
— Virginia Alison
Beautiful is he who recognizes what is truly beautiful even if the surface is ugly. Truthful is he who says what is true even if the truth is ugly. Ugly is he who measures beauty by its exterior without first weighing the interior. And ugly is the man who judges harshly what he sees looking out without first judging what he sees in the mirror.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
In an era where women undress their outfits & give their bodies so carelessly, become the rare wild woman that undresses her mind and soul & knows the worth of what she has to offer.
— Nikki Rowe
Music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.
— Woflgang Amadeus Mozart
He smiled. He liked to imagine that she saw the beauty, that she could think outside the well-worn tracks of her countrymen, find something to like about this unsophisticated place. Because that just might mean she could find something to like about him.
— Kim Wilkins, Unclaimed Heart
Penny knew also she loved the country for its beauty. Cities could be magnificent, astounding, fantastic, but they were not consistently beautiful and simple. Penny liked uncomplicated beauty.
— Dorothy Deming, Penny Marsh: Public Health Nurse
Big don't mean ugly, and thin sho don't mean pretty. If a person wants to be pretty, they gotta walk pretty, talk pretty and act pretty. Can't nobody take pretty from you.
— Daniel Black, Perfect Peace
Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.
— J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace
BELLADONNA, n. In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
But you weren't born expecting that kind of beauty in everyone, all the time. You just got programmed into thinking anything else is ugly.
— Scott Westerfeld, Uglies
Andrei, did you like the opera?""Not particularly.""Andrei, do you see what you're missing?""I don't think I do, Kira. It's all rather silly. And useless.""Can't you enjoy things that are useless, merely because they are beautiful?""No. But I enjoyed it.""The music?""No. The way you listened to it.
— Ayn Rand, We the Living
This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.
— Zadie Smith, On Beauty
You don’t know what a trial it is to be —like me. I've got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much? Have you practis'd so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,) You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self. 
— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
When [beauty pornography is] aimed at men, its effect is to keep them from finding peace in sexual love. The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman--known, marked, lined, familiar—-who hands him the paper every morning.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
There's nothing weak about beauty, child. The only weakness in it is if you think it means anything important.
— Charlie Fletcher, Silvertongue
The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold.Or, if your ad revenue or your seven-figure salary or your privileged sexual status depend on it, it is an operable condition.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
This is the truth: we all desire to conquer the comely one, because it affirms our own worth. Speaking for the men of the world, we want to own the beauty of the woman we're fucking. We want to grasp that beauty, tightly in our greedy little fingers, to well and truly possess it, to make it ours. We want to do this as the woman shines her way through an orgasm. That's perfection. And while I can't speak for women, I imagine that they-whether they admit it or not-want the same thing: to possess the man, to own his rough handsomeness, if only for a few seconds.
— Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle
Please, I'm a transgender former boy-bander. You think I don't know how to defend myself?
— Libba Bray, Beauty Queens
Brought to you by The Corporation: In your homes and in your pants.
— Libba Bray, Beauty Queens
Self-denial can lock women into a smug and critical condescension to other, less devout women.According to Appel, cult members develop..."an attitude of moral superiority, a contempt for secular laws, rigidity of thought, and the diminution of regard for the individual." A premium is placed on conformity to the cult group; deviation is penalized. "Beauty" is derivative; conforming to the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty that is then used to punish women physically and psychologically for failure to achieve and conform to it] is "beautiful." The aim of beauty thinking, about weight or age, is rigid female thought. Cult members are urged to sever all ties with the past: "I destroyed all my fat photographs!"; "It's a new me!
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
The beauty myth of the present is more insidious than any mystique of femininity yet: A century ago, Nora slammed the door of the doll's house; a generation ago, women turned their backs on the consumer heaven of the isolated multiapplianced home; but where women are trapped today, there is no door to slam. The contemporary ravages of the beauty backlash are destroying women physically and depleting us psychologically. If we are to free ourselves from the dead weight that has once again been made out of femaleness, it is not ballots or lobbyists or placards that women will need first; it is a new way to see.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
There is no reason for beauty. It just is.
— Erin Kellison
For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.
— Virginia Woolf
But I want you to know that you're a beautiful girl, far more beautiful than I ever was at your age, and that starving yourself to compete with all of those skinny celebrities who spend half their lives checking in and out of rehab is not only a completely unreasonable and unattainable goal, but will only end up making you sick.
— Alyson Noel, The Immortals Boxed Set
Pain and beauty, our constant bedfellows
— Nick Bantock, Griffin and Sabine
But maybe you see beauty in me because you are beautiful, not because I am.
— Amy Harmon, Making Faces
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
But Philip was impatient with himself; he called to mind his idea of the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful; he told himself strenuously that he must accept with gaiety everything, dreariness and excitement, pleasure and pain, because it added to the richness of the design.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
Kaderin didn't believe, as a whole, the nymphs were more beautiful than the Valkyrie, but everything about them screamed, "Easy lay! When you don't want to work for it!" And curiously, many males found that more appealing than the Valkyrie's "Do it and die, simian".
— Kresley Cole, No Rest for the Wicked
I wish I could line up naked the men I've slept with and just gloat for a hot minute. Beautiful creatures.
— Crystal Woods, Write like no one is reading 2
Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.
— Camille Pissarro
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
I love her bare legs from a distance. When she's standing by a pool. When she's facing the water, thinking. Her legs are white as watermelon rind, veined blue from cold. There's that 'H' shape behind her knees. The H trembles softly with the swimming-water cold.
— Jaclyn Moriarty, The Ghosts of Ashbury High
Outward beauty is a true sign of inner goodness. This loveliness, indeed, is impressed upon the body in varying degrees as a token by which the soul can be recognized for what it is, just as with trees the beauty of the blossom testifies to the goodness of the fruit.
— Baldassarre Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier
Whatever her name was, she was pretty. She had a thick, careless braid of chestnut hair, a quick smile, and dark, merry eyes. She wore some kind of a fuzzy lavender pullover, and when she crossed her legs and lifted her guitar onto her lap, she had an interesting way of tucking the foot of the bottom leg back under her chair that made Hector feel melty. He looked away in self-preservation.
— Lynne Rae Perkins, Criss Cross
Dear young woman, do not place your sense of beauty and self worth, upon the plastic pedestal called "what other people say to you", "what other people think about your photo", "how many 'likes' your pictures get", "how many guys tell you that you look sexy", "how skinny can you be?". A plastic pedestal that is but the dismal shadow of the real one. Dear young woman, place your sense of self worth and beauty upon the Roman marble pedestal that will exist even when all other people are no longer there. If you were the very last person on this planet, you should still be able to know within your heart that you are worthy, you are beautiful, you are wanted. Even if you become the very last person on Earth, you should be fully wanted. Want yourself. Know yourself. See yourself as beautiful, see yourself as worthy.
— C. JoyBell C.
Beauty will not come at the call of the legislature.... It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Doing mathematics should always mean finding patterns and crafting beautiful and meaningful explanations.
— Paul  Lockhart, A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
Her face ... was a one-of-a-kind, a surprising variation on a familiar theme - a variation that made observers think, Yes - that would be another very nice way for people to look. What Beatrice had done with her face, actually, was what any plain girl could do. She overlaid it with dignity, suffering, intelligence, and a piquant dash of bitchiness.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., The Sirens of Titan
We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separa
— Adrienne Rich
When you are truly stunning, gorgeous and beautiful, you won’t have to prove that to anyone visually.
— Alexandra Elle
Cosmetic surgery is not "cosmetic," and human flesh is not "plastic." Even the names trivialize what it is. It's not like ironing wrinkles in fabric, or tuning up a car, or altering outmoded clothes, the current metaphors. Trivialization and infantilization pervade the surgeons' language when they speak to women: "a nip," a "tummy tuck."...Surgery changes one forever, the mind as well as the body. If we don't start to speak of it as serious, the millennium of the man-made woman will be upon us, and we will have had no choice.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.
— Charles Baudelaire, Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du mal: A Bilingual Edition
Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
[Women's magazines]ignore older women or pretend that they don’t exist; magazines try to avoid photographs of older women, and when they feature celebrities who are over sixty, ‘retouching artists’ conspire to ‘help’ beautiful women look more beautiful, ie less than their age...By now readers have no idea what a real woman’s 60 year old face looks like in print because it’s made to look 45. Worse, 60 year old readers look in the mirror and think they are too old, because they’re comparing themselves to some retouched face smiling back at them from a magazine.
— Dalma Heyn
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
The economics of industrialized countries would collapse if women didn't do the work they do for free: According to economist Marilyn Waring, throughout the West it generates between 25 and 40 percent of the gross national product.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
They will stop calling brides beautiful after today—you have simply set the standard too high,' he said.
— Anna Godbersen, Rumors
Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West is is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.
— Naomi Wolf
It's so difficult to love another person and yourself for who they are and not what they do or who they could be. To stay in this moment and know it in all its pleasure and its pain. The world is a beautiful place. How often do we say this aloud?
— Vicki Forman, This Lovely Life
Weight doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t. I mean, it does if you’re a model or whatever.
— Meg Cabot, Queen of Babble
Most urgently, women's identity must be premised upon our "beauty" so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.
— Naomi Wolf
Beauty soaks reality as water fills a rag.
— Chet Raymo, Honey from Stone: A Naturalist's Search for God
Was Briony the only person who could hear the venom dripping from the woman’s tongue? What good was beauty — a mature beauty, but beauty nonetheless — if it cloaked such a viperous soul?
— Tad Williams, Shadowrise
As soon as a woman's primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
What is true about music is true about life: that beauty reveals everything because it expresses nothing.
— Mandy Slade
She was the most beautiful creature on Earth - her hair said so in that language only hair can speak.
— Gabriel Bá, Daytripper
I sought her eye, desirous to read there the intelligence which I could not discern in her face or hear in her conversation; it was merry, rather small; by turns I saw vivacity, vanity, coquetry, look out through its irid, but I watched in vain for a glimpse of soul. I am no Oriental; white necks, carmine lips and cheeks, clusters of bright curls, do not suffice for me without that Promethean spark which will live after the roses and lilies are faded, the burnished hair grown grey. In sunshine, in prosperity, the flowers are very well; but how many wet days are there in life--November seasons of disaster, when a man's hearth and home would be cold indeed, without the clear, cheering gleam of intellect.
— Charlotte Brontë, The Professor
Amid the moon and the stars, amid the clouds of the night, amid the hills which bordered on the sky with their magnificent silhouette of pointed cedars, amid the speckled patches of the moon, amid the temple buildings that emerged sparkling white out of the surrounding darkness - amid all this, I was intoxicated by the pellucid beauty of Uiko's treachery.
— Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground
— Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent
And she thought then how strange it was that disaster—the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face—could be at times, such a thing of beauty.
— Anita Shreve, The Pilot's Wife
Slowly the truth is loadingI'm weighted down with loveSnow lying deep and evenStrung out and dreaming ofNight falling on the cityQuite something to beholdDon't it just look so prettyThis disappearing worldWe're threading hope like fireDown through the desperate bloodDown through the trailing wireInto the leafless woodNight falling on the cityQuite something to beholdDon't it just look so prettyThis disappearing worldThis disappearing worldI'll be sticking right there with itI'll be by your sideSailing like a silver bulletHit 'em 'tween the eyesThrough the smoke and rising waterCross the great divideBaby till it all feels rightNight falling on the citySparkling red and goldDon't it just look so prettyThis disappearing world"~David Gray
— David Gray
But you're beautiful, and the beautiful should be given whatever they want.""Hey, what about the ugly ones?""The ugly ones." She poked her tongue out. "It's their fault if their ugly. They're to be blamed, not pitied.
— Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia
The baby's beauty lies on its' pure-hearted.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
I have gazed so much on beautythat my eyes overflow with it.
— Constantinos P. Cavafis, Remember, Body...
He's soft and strong at the same time
—  beautiful and cold like a polished japanese katana.
We need to theorize the meaning of beauty in our lives so that we can educate for critical consciousness, talking through the issues: how we acquire and spend money, how we feel about beauty, what the place of beauty is in our lives when we lack material privilege and even basic resources for living, the meaning and significance of luxury, and the politics of envy.
— bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics
Julian is bluff and sturdy, royal; he possesses a gracefully muscular, equine beauty so natural it suggests that beauty itself is a fundamental human condition and not a mutation in the general design. 
— Michael Cunningham
The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion . . . open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony.
— Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red
The desert, when the sun comes up...I couldn't tell where heaven stopped and the Earth began.
— Tom Hanks
I don't know why I feel so wounded with Kartik's obvious infatuation with Pippa. There's no romance between us. There's nothing that tethers us but this dark secret neither of us wants. It's not Kartik's longing that hurts. It's my own. It's knowing that I'll never have what she has--a beauty so powerful it brings things to you. I fear I will always have to chase things I want. I'll always have to wonder whether I'm truly wanted or whether I've just been settled for.
— Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty
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, The Fault in Our Stars
It is beautiful to talk about beautiful things and even more beautiful to silently gaze at them.
— Dejan Stojanovic
I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.
— John Fowles, The Collector
To me, merely and pretty were words that had nothing to do with each other. Pretty went with miraculously, and merely belonged in another paragraph entirely.
— Gail Carson Levine, Fairest
So odd. Most women of his acquaintance relied on physical beauty and charm to mask their less-pleasant traits. This girl did the opposite, hiding everything interesting about herself behind a prim, plain facade.What other surprises was she concealing?
— Tessa Dare, A Week to Be Wicked
Beauty’s not only skin deep. Just because a person is beautifuldoesn’t mean there’s no soul beneath. Doesn’t meanthat person hasn’t suffered like everyone else, doesn’t meanthey don’t hope to still be a good human being in an awfulworld. (Gabriel)
— Rachel Cohn, Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List
The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being vanquished.
— Charles Baudelaire, Twenty Prose Poems
Who would you impress if the world was blind?
— Shannon L. Alder
There's looking and there's looking. When some men look at you it's a greasy thing. It makes you want to have a bath. With other men it's nice. It helps you know you're beautiful.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear
The stars are on the inside. They are effing beautiful.
— Cath Crowley, Graffiti Moon
IIA grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,      A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,      Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,          In word, or sigh, or tear — O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood,To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd,      All this long eve, so balmy and serene,Have I been gazing on the western sky,      And its peculiar tint of yellow green:And still I gaze — and with how blank an eye!And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,That give away their motion to the stars;Those stars, that glide behind them or between,Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:Yon crescent Moon as fixed as if it grewIn its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;I see them all so excellently fair,I see, not feel how beautiful they are!III          My genial spirits fail;          And what can these availTo lift the smothering weight from off my breast?          It were a vain endeavour,          Though I should gaze for everOn that green light that lingers in the west:I may not hope from outward forms to winThe passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems
You are stronger than me," Asa says. "And in bravery and strength, there is a kind of beauty.
— Matthew J. Kirby, Icefall
The peace of Manderley. The quietude and the grace. Whoever lived within its walls, whatever trouble there was and strife, however much uneasiness and pain, no matter what tears were shed, what sorrows borne, the peace of Manderley could not be broken or the loveliness destroyed. The flowers that died would bloom again another year, the same birds build their nests, the same trees blossom. That old quiet moss smell would linger in the air, and the bees would come, and crickets, the herons build their nests in the deep dark woods. The butterflies would dance their merry jug across the lawns, and spiders spin foggy webs, and small startled rabbits who had no business to come trespassing poke their faces through the crowded shrubs. There would be lilac, and honeysuckle still, and the white magnolia buds unfolding slow and tight beneath the dining-room window. No one would ever hurt Manderley. It would lie always in its hollow like an enchanted thing, guarded by the woods, safe, secure, while the sea broke and ran and came again in the little shingle bays below.
— Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca