c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Is the beauty myth good to men? It hurts them by teaching them how to avoid loving women. It prevents men from actually seeing women. It does not, contrary to its own professed ideology, stimulate and gratify sexual longing. In suggesting a vision in place of a woman, it has a numbing effect, reducing all senses but the visual, and impairing even that.
— Naomi Wolf
Give time, give space to sprout your potential. Awaken the beauty of your heart – the beauty of your spirit. There are infinite possibilities.
— Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power
Her sculptured face was as perfect as a painting.
— Christopher Paolini, Eragon & Eldest
People only picked the pretty, sweet-smelling flowers. The ones with thorns were left alone.
— Nenia Campbell, Fearscape
Secrets are generally terrible. Beauty is not hidden--only ugliness and deformity.
— L.M. Montgomery
the late afternoon sunlight, warm as oil, sweet as childhood ...
— Stephen King, Carrie
A beautiful woman should break her mirror early.
— Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom
The alchemist picked up a book that someone in the caravan had brought. Leafing through the pages, he found a story about Narcissus.The alchemist knew the legend of Narcissus, a youth who knelt daily beside a lake to contemplate his own beauty. He was so fascinated by himself that, one morning, he fell into the lake and drowned. At the spot where he fell, a flower was born, which was called the narcissus.But this was not how the author of the book ended the story.He said that when Narcissus died, the goddesses of the forest appeared and found the lake, which had been fresh water, transformed into a lake of salty tears.'Why do you weep?' the goddesses asked.'I weep for Narcissus," the lake replied.'Ah, it is no surprise that you weep for Narcissus,' they said, 'for though we always pursued him in the forest, you alone could contemplate his beauty close at hand.''But... was Narcissus beautiful?' the lake asked.'Who better than you to know that?' the goddesses asked in wonder. 'After all, it was by your banks that he knelt each day to contemplate himself!'The lake was silent for some time. Finally, it said:'I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed that Narcissus was beautiful. I weep because, each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see, in the depths of his eyes, my own beauty reflected.''What a lovely story,' the alchemist thought.
— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
As I have said, you have no reason to trust me, and an excellent reason not to.
— Robin McKinley, Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast
When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect - they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul - not of intellect, or of heart.
— Edgar Allan Poe
Love, built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.
— John Donne, The Complete English Poems
Beauty belongs to the sphere of the simple, the ordinary, whilst ugliness is something extraordinary, and there is no question but that every ardent imagination prefers in lubricity, the extraordinary to the commonplace
— Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings
Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light.
— Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
All kinds of beauty do not inspire love; there is a kind which only pleases the sight, but does not captivate the affections.
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.
— Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
She was so intelligent that she could think herself into beauty. Intelligence...they don't talk about it much, the poets, but when a woman is intelligent and passionate and good...
— Eva Ibbotson, A Company of Swans
...you don't have to be perfect to be pretty
— Carson Kressley
Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.
— André Breton, Nadja
Now, even more than the evening before, he could think of no one with whom to compare her. She had become absolute, beyond comparison. She had become decision and fate.
— Yasunari Kawabata, Thousand Cranes
Have all beautiful things sad destinies?
— Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone's nose, but if a girl's got brains and looks and personality, she's going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way.
— Tana French, Faithful Place
There is a pain you can’t think your way out of. You can’t talk it away. If there was someone to talk to. You can walk. One foot the other foot. Breathe in breathe out. Drink from the stream. Piss. Eat the venison strips. And. You can’t metabolize the loss. It is in the cells of your face, your chest, behind the eyes, in the twists of the gut. Muscles, sinew, bone. It is all of you. When you walk you propel it forward. When you let the sled and sit on a fallen log and. You imagine him curling in the one patch of sun maybe lying over your feet. Then it sits with you, the Pain puts its arm over your shoulders. It is your closest friend. Steadfast. And at night you can’t bear to hear your own breath unaccompanied by another and underneath the big stillness like a score is the roaring of the cataract of everything being and being torn away. Then. The Pain is lying beside your side, close. Does not bother you with sound even of breathing.
— Peter Heller, The Dog Stars
And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.
— Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
Creamy and leggy, with long azure hair and the eyes of a silent-movie star, she moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.
— Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone
Healthy emotions come in all sizes. Healthy minds come in all sizes. And healthy bodies come in all sizes.
— Cheri K. Erdman
Nonviolence is only for the brave men and women of the world because it requires courage – courage to love the beauty of life, beauty of humanity and the beauty of the world.
— Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power
The Devil hath powerTo assume a pleasing shape.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Women could probably be trained quite easily to see men first as sexual things. If girls never experienced sexual violence; if a girl's only window on male sexuality were a stream of easily available, well-lit, cheap images of boys slightly older than herself, in their late teens, smiling encouragingly and revealing cuddly erect penises the color of roses or mocha, she might well look at, masturbate to, and, as an adult, "need" beauty pornography based on the bodies of men. And if those initiating penises were represented to the girl as pneumatically erectible, swerving neither left nor right, tasting of cinnamon or forest berries, innocent of random hairs, and ever ready; if they were presented alongside their measurements, length, and circumference to the quarter inch; if they seemed to be available to her with no troublesome personality attached; if her sweet pleasure seemed to be the only reason for them to exist--then a real young man would probably approach the young woman's bed with, to say the least, a failing heart.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Moments of beauty sustain us through hours of ugliness.
— Brent Weeks, The Black Prism
The French girls would tell you, to believe that you were pretty would make you so.
— Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters
But those who seek only reassurance from life will never be more than tourists—seeing everything and trying to possess what can only be felt.Beauty is the shadow of imperfection.
— Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After
Let me, O let me bathe my soul in colours; let me swallow the sunset and drink the rainbow.
— Kahlil Gibran
You have this ability to find beauty in weird places.
— Kamila Shamsie, Kartography
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is an indispensable companion to all those who are keen to make sense of life in an infinitely complex and confusing Universe, for though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does at least make the reassuring claim, that where it is inaccurate it is at least definitively inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy it's always reality that's got it wrong.This was the gist of the notice. It said "The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate."This has led to some interesting consequences. For instance, when the Editors of the Guide were sued by the families of those who had died as a result of taking the entry on the planet Tralal literally (it said "Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal for visiting tourists: instead of "Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal of visiting tourists"), they claimed that the first version of the sentence was the more aesthetically pleasing, summoned a qualified poet to testify under oath that beauty was truth, truth beauty and hoped thereby to prove that the guilty party in this case was Life itself for failing to be either beautiful or true. The judges concurred, and in a moving speech held that Life itself was in contempt of court, and duly confiscated it from all those there present before going off to enjoy a pleasant evening's ultragolf.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
A mode of conduct, a standard of courage, discipline, fortitude and integrity can do a great deal to make a woman beautiful.
— Jacqueline Bisset
Audrey had an angelic quality about her. She didn't act like she was better than everyone, she just had a presence, an energy, a sort of light coming from within her that was overwhelming.
— Kevyn Aucoin
What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Relax. You are beautiful, and everyone wants some of that beauty.
— Julie Metz, Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal
There are cities that get by on their good looks, offer climate and scenery, views of mountains or oceans, rockbound or with palm trees; and there are cities like Detroit that have to work for a living, whose reason for being might be geographical but whose growth is based on industry, jobs. Detroit has its natural attractions: lakes all over the place, an abundance of trees and four distinct seasons for those who like variety in their weather, everything but hurricanes and earth-quakes. But it’s never been the kind of city people visit and fall in love with because of its charm or think, gee, wouldn’t this be a nice place to live.
— Elmore Leonard
I covet truth
—  beauty is unripe childhood's cheat
Just one smileImmensely increases the beauty Of the universe.
— Sri Chinmoy, Sri Chinmoy's Heart Garden: A Book of Aphorisms for Joy and Inspiration
That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity—that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are an essential part and characteristic of beauty.
— Charles Baudelaire
Yes, just like those flowers. There's something strained, but there's beauty in that. Something like that
— Koushun Takami, Battle Royale
Tell me again about the girl whose handshave no color. Whose hands are completelywhite. This time make them damned, oruntouched, or have her open a red umbrellaor point at some maple leaves and damnednear cry. Those hands. As freakish goes,I wish I had a tail. Maybe then you’d knowhow much I like you. It shakes me through,damn through. It shakes me. When she carriesa peacock feather. When she touches her neckor thighs. You’re a person. It’s not so bad.You have hands. You are a person with handsto hold things. Things you like. Tremendousthings. Tell me what you will hold today. Iknow there is room for everything. There is noneed to be ceremonious. Tell what gets let go.
— Rebecca Wadlinger
It was one of God's jokes that such a dumb mind had been put in such an eloquent body.
— Charlaine Harris, Dead Until Dark
I wake up in the morning and I see that flower, with the dew on its petals, and at the way it's folding out, and it makes me happy, she said. It's important to focus on the things in the here and now, I think. In a month, the flower will be shriveled and you will miss its beauty if you don't make the effort to do it now. Your life, eventually, is the same way.
— Dan Buettner, Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way
There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them
—  but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.
A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.
— Naomi Wolf
I didn't know that the world could be so mind-blowingly beautiful.
— Justina Chen
The prince says that the world will be saved by beauty! And I maintain that the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love. 
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
Maybe it’s NOT Maybelline. Maybe you were just born with it.
— Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
You built your walls too, she tells him. So I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he cannot stand. She with her beautiful clothes with her pale face that laughs at everyone who smiles at her...
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
You cannot fake chic but you﻿ can be chic and fake fur
— Karl Lagerfeld
A little girl loves her bird--Why? Because it lives and feels; because it is helpless and harmless? A toad, likewise, lives and feels, and is equally helpless and harmless; but though she would not hurt a toad, she cannot love it like the bird, with its graceful form, soft feathers, and bright, speaking eyes.
— Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey
Killing an animal to make a coat is sin. It wasn't meant to be, and we have no right to do it. A woman gains status when she refuses to see anything killed to be put on her back. Then she's truly beautiful.
— Doris Day
Everything changes, but beauty remains.
— Kelly Clarkson
In a time when nothing is more certain than change, the commitment of two people to one another has become difficult and rare. Yet, by its scarcity, the beauty and value of this exchange have only been enhanced.
— Robert Sexton
Kieran glanced at her with shimmering eyes. Neither looked quite human: The black eye was too dark, the silver too metallic. And yet the overall effect was haunting, inhumanly beautiful.
— Cassandra Clare, Lady Midnight
Do you know what makes someone beautiful? Confidence. You don't have to have this shape eyes or that shape lips. No one seems to be able to decide which shape is best anyway. You can have every kind of blemish. It's confidence that attracts people. That's what everybody's looking for. It's what no potion can really give you. And believe me, Belle, you've got it. You've got it if you want it.
— Daniel Nayeri, Another Faust
Value yourself for what the media doesn't - your intelligence, your street smarts, your ability to play a kick-ass game of pool, whatever. So long as it's not just valuing yourself for your ability to look hot in a bikini and be available to men, it's an improvement.
— Jessica Valenti, Full Frontal Feminism
I end up watching this movie about some girl who's supposed to be so smart and edgy and unpopular. She wears glasses, that's how you know she's so smart. And she's the only one that has dark hair in the school- a place that looks like Planet Blond. Anyway, she somehow ends up going to the prom- hello, gag- and she doesn't wear her glasses, so suddenly she's all beautiful. And she's bashful and shy because she doesn't feel comfortable wearing a dress. But then the guy says something like, "Wow, I never knew you were so pretty," and she feels on top of the world. So, basically, the whole point is she's pretty. Oh, and smart, too. But what's really important here is that she's pretty. For a second I think about Katie. About her thin little Clarissa Le Fey. It must be a pain being fat. There are NO fat people on Planet Blond. I don't get it. I mean, even movies where the actress is smart- like they seem like they'd be smart in real life, they're all gorgeous. And they usually get a boyfriend somewhere in the story. Even if they say they don't want one. They always, always end up falling in love, and you're supposed to be like, "Oh, good." I once said this to my mom, and she laughed. "Honey, Hollywood... reality- two different universes. Don't make yourself crazy." Which made me feel pretty pathetic. Like I didn't know the difference between a movie and the real world. But then when everyone gets on you about your hair and your clothes and your this and your that, and "Are you fat?" and "Are you sexy?" you start thinking, Hey, maybe I'm not the only one who can't tell the difference between movies and reality. Maybe everyone really does think you can look like that. And that you should look like that. Because, you know, otherwise you might not get to go to the prom and fall in love.
— Mariah Fredericks, Head Games
Schuyler put a gentle hand on Abbadon's feathered extensions, feeling the majestic power underneath their silky weight. She had been frightened once, to see him in this light, but now that she saw his terrifying face, she found it beautiful.
— Melissa de la Cruz, Misguided Angel
Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers, and when it wasn't raining a diamond dust took over which veiled and yet magnified all things
— Laurie Lee, Cider With Rosie
Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune.
— Thomas Fuller
There is a certain standard of grace and beauty which consists in a certain relation between our nature... and the thing which pleases us.
— Blaise Pascal, Pensées
People are crying up the rich and variegated plumage of the peacock, and he is himself blushing at the sight of his ugly feet.
— Saadi
What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
— Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.
— Charlie Chaplin
He looked like a fallen angel, replete with all the dangerous male beauty that Lucifer could devise.
— Lisa Kleypas, Devil in Winter
If a rainbow makes a sound, or a flower as it grows, that was the sound of her laughter.
— William Paul Young, The Shack
The most beautiful women I have known had one thing in common apart from beauty: humility. It's a shame that those with less to boast about do it the most.
— Donna Lynn Hope
I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Raise your children to love and embrace others. Tell them they are beautiful; they may grow up to be stars one day, and "beautiful" will never mean as much in a magazine as it will coming from you.
— Kaiden Blake
I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic, and a progressive religious experience.
— Shelley Winters
It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power, the same way money is power, the same way a gun is power.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.
— Kate Moss
But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.
— Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides
But there are people who take salt with their coffee. They say it gives a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance, to which the inevitable disillusionment you experience on seeing them gives a singular spice. You had expected something wholly beautiful and you get an impression which is infinitely more complicated than any that beauty can give you. It is the weakness in the character of a great man which may make him less admirable but certainly more interesting. Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu...
— W. Somerset Maugham
I used to think that if I were a certain kind of person I would spend all my time creating something beautiful. Well, it turns out I am, and I am.
— Jason Letts
But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
And if you can’t see anything beautiful about yourself, get a better mirror. Look a little closer. Stare a little longer. Because there’s something inside you that made you keep trying despite everyone who told you to quit.
— Shane L. Koyczan, To This Day: For the Bullied and Beautiful
Comfort is beauty muted by heroin. Sadness is beauty drained by lack of it.
— Luke Davies, Candy
It was the sort of beauty you feel so deeply it becomes contagious and somehow makes you feel beautiful too.
— Alice Hoffman, Local Girls
When people first discover beauty, they tend to linger. Even if they don’t at first recognize it for what it is.
— Sherwood Smith
Friendship is constant in all other thingsSave in the office and affairs of love.Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues.Let every eye negotiate for itself,And trust no agent; for beauty is a witchAgainst whose charms faith melteth into blood.
— William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
Beauty appears when something is completely and absolutely and openly itself.
— Deena Metzger
There's no such thing as effortless beauty--you should know that.There's no effort which is not beautiful--lifting a heavy stone or loving you.Loving you is like lifting a heavy stone. It would be easier not to do it and I'm not quite sure why I am doing it. It takes all my strength and all my determination, and I said I wouldn't love someone again like this. Is there any sense in loving someone you can only wake up to by chance?
— Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook
The fairy tale is not the conclusion, but the doorway to a more brilliant reality. Pushed onto a pedestal as the final answer their worth is misshapen and distorted. The world’s story may end with a couple living happily ever after but our life in Christ enables the intimacy of the human relationship to illuminate an eternal perfection. In a balanced perspective, neither denigrated nor exalted from their intended place, fairy tales are a lovely and exhilarating part of life.
— Natalie Nyquist, Quest for the High Places: Encouragement for the Waiting Heart
You are the trembling of time, that passesbetween vertical light and darkened sky,
— Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets
When I feel the beauty in words, I am sensing the logic of heart.
— Toba Beta
Even so, there were times I saw freshness and beauty. I could smell the air, and I really loved rock 'n' roll. Tears were warm, and girls were beautiful, like dreams. I liked movie theaters, the darkness and intimacy, and I liked the deep, sad summer nights.
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
But the beauty is in the walking -- we are betrayed by destinations.
— Gwyn Thomas
I couldn't imagine owning beauty like my mothers. I wouldn't dare.
— Janet Fitch, White Oleander
I've enjoyed every age I've been, and each has had its own individual merit. Every laugh line, every scar, is a badge I wear to show I've been present, the inner rings of my personal tree trunk that I display proudly for all to see. Nowadays, I don't want a "perfect" face and body; I want to wear the life I've lived.
— Pat Benatar, Between a Heart and a Rock Place: A Memoir
A community is only being created when its members accept that they are not going to achieve great things, that they are not going to be heroes, but simply live each day with new hope, like children, in wonderment as the sun rises and in thanksgiving as it sets. Community is only being created when they have recognized that the greatness of man is to accept his insignificance, his human condition and his earth, and to thank God for having put in a finite body the seeds of eternity which are visible in small and daily gestures of love and forgiveness. The beauty of man is in this fidelity to the wonder of each day.
— Jean Vanier, Community And Growth
Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Looking for Your FaceFrom the beginning of my lifeI have been looking for your facebut today I have seen itToday I have seenthe charm, the beauty,the unfathomable graceof the facethat I was looking forToday I have found youand those who laughedand scorned me yesterdayare sorry that they were not lookingas I didI am bewildered by the magnificenceof your beautyand wish to see youwith a hundred eyesMy heart has burned with passionand has searched foreverfor this wondrous beautythat I now beholdI am ashamedto call this love humanand afraid of Godto call it divineYour fragrant breathlike the morning breezehas come to the stillness of the gardenYou have breathed new life into meI have become your sunshineand also your shadowMy soul is screaming in ecstasyEvery fiber of my beingis in love with youYour effulgencehas lit a fire in my heartand you have made radiantfor methe earth and skyMy arrow of lovehas arrived at the targetI am in the house of mercyand my heartis a place of prayer
— Jalaluddin Rumi, The Love Poems of Rumi
Kisses, even to the air, are beautiful.
— Drew Barrymore
Beauty isn't made of sugar.
— Diana Wynne Jones, The Game
Beauty exists, even in unlikely places. The key isn't to open your eyes but to open your heart.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
I snorted "oh, beauty. What's that good for?"Mary stared, her eyes round."It won you the prince, did it not?"I snorted again, I prefer to think that he was captivated by my charming personality." I giggled to let Mary know I was trying to make fun of myself.
— Margaret Peterson Haddix, Just Ella
What a beautiful woman. She moved with grace, she was entirely feminine, and yet, she possessed incredible inner strength. She’s a survivor.
— Jan Moran, Scent of Triumph
She perched on her windowsill, gazing at the lurid sun soaking into the Caldera, trying to appreciate it even though she couldn’t have it. Why did she always feel she had to do something in the face of beauty?
— Ann Brashares, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
What swells inside me is a love so boundless, I am the sunrise and sunset. I am Liberty Bell in the Cascades. I am Beihai Lake. I am every beautiful, truly beautiful, thing I've ever seen, captured in my personal Geographia, the atlas of myself.
— Justina Chen, North of Beautiful
She trailed after him, admiring the line of his back. He began climbing the stairs, and she sighed with pleasure. Every bit of him was gorgeous. “Do you mind if I objectify you?”“Please do,” he said over his shoulder. “Particularly my knees, as they are oft-neglected.”“Maybe if you ever got your pants off, they wouldn’t be.”“It hardly matters, sweet; once they’ve come off, the attention isn’t likely to center on my absurdly handsome knees.
— Meljean Brook, Demon Moon
Your brothers are the foolish ones for not seeing the strength in beautiful things.
— Kristin Cashore, Graceling
All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.
— Edward Abbey, The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West
On the horizon, he saw the full moon. God dropped it there, he was sure, as a reminder of our small place in the world. A reminder that what is beautiful is fleeting.
— Ben Sherwood
I think the most profound beauty is found in what our hearts love.
— Julianne Donaldson, Blackmoore
The beauty of the universe consists not only of unity in variety, but also of variety in unity.
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'hierarchies? and even if one of thempressed me against his heart: I would be consumedin that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothingbut the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,and we are so awed because it serenely disdainsto annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
The true way to live is to enjoy every moment as it passes, and surely it is in the everyday things around us that the beauty of life lies.
— Laura Ingalls Wilder, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist: Writings from the Ozarks
The humblest tasks get beautified if loving hands do them.
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Everything is connected. The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his hozro, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him.
— Tony Hillerman, The Ghostway
She lacks the core of sureness, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on reflections of herself in others' eyes. She does not dare to be herself.
— Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
As coal pressured into pearls by our weighty existence. Beauty that arose out of pain.
— Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire
But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know--from experience--how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and . . .
— Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
But she knew that no matter what beauty lay behind, it must remain there. No one could go forward with a load of aching memories.
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
If you look at old pictures, Irene Casey is so pretty. Not just young, but pretty the way you look when your face goes smooth, the skin around your eyes and lips relaxed, the pretty you only look when you love the person taking the picture.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Rant
For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms.
— Anne Lamott
That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.
— Edgar Allan Poe, Poems and Essays
You can only possess beauty through understanding it.
— John Ruskin
The sight of such aching beauty would infuse his soul with pain.
— Tabitha Suzuma, A Note of Madness
You can see where it was, years ago. Like an old woman who was once beautiful, but time has taken her beauty away.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Bones
Beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,But rather a heart inflamed and a soul enchanted.It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a win attached to a claw,But rather a garden forever in bloom and a flock of angels forever in flight.Beauty is life when life unveils her holy face. But you are life and you are the veil.Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in the mirror.But you are eternity and you are the mirror.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
To say she is only a woman is to say a violin is a piece of wood with strings, and Dante is mere ink printed on paper.
— Bruce Crown, Forlorn Passions
We get so worried about being pretty. Let’s be pretty kind. Pretty funny. Pretty smart. Pretty strong.
— Britt Nicole
You are not born with beauty, your beauty is created by who you are. Your inner beauty is more important than how people see you on the outside.
— Emily Coussons
Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long.
— Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter
There were far worse strategies in life than to try to make each aspect of one's existence a minor work of art.
— Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline
My father says that there is only one perfect view — the view of the sky straight over our heads, and that all these views on earth are but bungled copies of it.
— E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men's sexual--and hence social--confidence while undermining that of women.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
We do not want merely to see beauty... we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves.
— C.S. Lewis
He Is looking at me through the smoke, across the fence. He never takes his eyes off me. His hair Is a crown of leaves, of thorns, of flames. His eyes are blazing with light, more light than all the lights in every city in the whole world, more light than we could ever invent If we had ten thousand billion years.
— Lauren Oliver, Delirium
Beauty is life when life unveils her holy face. But you are life and you are the veil. Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
The ugliest thing in the world is a beautiful woman without the brains or courage to know that [beauty] is nothing more than an accident.
— Charlie Fletcher, Silvertongue
I would wear pink because I knew my future was anything but rosy. I would accessorize myself to the hilt, and I would wear flirty shoes because my world needed more beauty to counter all the ugliness in it. I would wear pink because I hated gray, I didn’t deserve white, and I was sick of black.
— Karen Marie Moning, Bloodfever
She is not truly beautiful but something about her draws the eye.
— George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords
No matter what a woman's appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize - as her personal problem - observations she makes about the beauty myth in society.
— Naomi Wolf
I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window.… Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
As beauty lies in eyes of beholder, struggling lies in reaching further. 
— Santosh Kalwar
He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and it's beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.
— Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Great beauty is often perceived by human senses as pain.
— Susan  Kay
A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm,waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm likeworship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, theirsongs never cease. -John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)
— John Muir
Beauty is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight,or springtime, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you...Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed...Ah! realise your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar...Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing...The world belongs to you for a season...how tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is such a little time that your youth will last. The common hillflowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to...Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
And because people are stupid and use their noses only for blowing, but believe absolutely anything they see with their eyes, they will say it is because this is a girl with beauty and grace and charm.
— Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Picture to yourself the most beautiful girl imaginable! She was so beautiful that there would be no point, in view of my meagre talent for storytelling, in even trying to put her beauty into words. That would far exceed my capabilities, so I'll refrain from mentioning whether she was a blonde or a brunette or a redhead, or whether her hair was long or short or curly or smooth as silk. I shall also refrain from the usual comparisons where her complexion was concerned, for instance milk, velvet, satin, peaches and cream, honey or ivory, Instead, I shall leave it entirely up to your imagination to fill in this blank with your own ideal of feminine beauty.
— Walter Moers, The Alchemaster's Apprentice: A Culinary Tale from Zamonia by Optimus Yarnspinner
You look beautiful - David
— Scott Westerfeld, Extras
Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty....A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. His outrage grew and felt like power. For the first time he honestly wished he could work miracles.
— Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Beauty without grace is like a fish far displaced from the water and looking at this kind of beauty is like watching that fish die right there on the cement in front of you.
— C. JoyBell C.
For me, life offers so many complexly appealing moments that two beautiful objects may be equally beautiful for different reasons and at different times. How can one choose?
— Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses
It's funny how, when things seem the darkest, moments of beauty present themselves in the most unexpected places.
— Karen Marie Moning, Dreamfever
A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge men's appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique, penis size, personal grooming, or taste in clothes--all of which we do. The fact is that women are able to view men just as men view women, as objects for sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male "ideal" from a lineup and if we could have male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no. But so what? Given all that, women make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Why should her lover, just because he is male, be in a position to judge her against other women? Why must she need to know her position and hate needing to, and hate knowing? Why should his reply have such exaggerated power? And it does. He does not know that what he says will affect the way she feels when they next make love. She is angry for a number of good reasons that may have nothing to do with this particular man's intentions. The exchange reminds her that, in spite of a whole fabric of carefully woven equalities, they are not equal in this way that is so crucial that its snagged thread unravels the rest.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance - for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light .... Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it? .... 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.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
There is something beautiful about a blank canvas, the nothingness of the beginning that is so simple and breathtakingly pure. It’s the paint that changes its meaning and the hand that creates the story. Every piece begins the same, but in the end they are all uniquely different.
— Piper Payne
Beauty is startling. She wears a gold shawl in the summer and sells seven kinds of honey at the flea market. She is young and old at once, my daughter and my grandmother. In school she excelled in mathematics and poetry. . . Beauty will dance with anyone who is brave enough to ask her.
— J. Ruth Gendler, The Book of Qualities
The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared. Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realise. 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
The beauty of that June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming was in bloom and blossom. The sunlight was a benediction. The breezes were so caressingly soft and intimate on the skin as to be embarrassing.
— Dan Simmons, Drood
The women laughed and wept; the crowd stamped their feet enthusiastically, for at that moment Quasimodo was really beautiful. He was handsome — this orphan, this foundling, this outcast.
— Victor Hugo, The Hunchback Of Notre Dame
both you and paintings are layered… first, ephemera and notations on the back of the canvas. Labels indicate gallery shows, museum shows, footprints in the snow, so to speak. Then pencil scribbles on the stretcher, usually by the artist, usually a title or date. Next the stretcher itself. Pine or something. Wooden triangles in the corners so the picture can be tapped tighter when the canvas becomes loose. Nails in the wood securing the picture to the stretcher. Next, a canvas: linen, muslin, sometimes a panel; then the gesso - a primary coat, always white. A layer of underpaint, usually a pastel color, then, the miracle, where the secrets are: the paint itself, swished around, roughly, gently, layer on layer, thick or thin, not more than a quarter of an inch ever -- God can happen in that quarter of an inch -- the occasional brush hair left embedded, colors mixed over each other, tones showing through, sometimes the weave of the linen revealing itself. The signature on top of the entire goulash. Then varnish is swabbed over the whole. Finally, the frame, translucent gilt or carved wood. The whole thing is done.
— Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty
Europeans condemned Chinese foot binding, but any society that had invented the corset had a lot to answer for.
— Mary Jo  Putney, The China Bride
I had to clear up my messy life. By letting go of the debris and filth, I have come to a deeper, more soulful beauty and clarity like an oasis in the desert. From that place of clarity, a vision of what I could have, what I could do, who I could be has emerged if I allow my heart to become a place of compassion, acceptance and forgiveness.
— Sharon E. Rainey, Making a Pearl from the Grit of Life
Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.
— Michelangelo Buonarroti
I believe women are too hard on themselves. I believe that when you love someone, she becomes beautiful to you. I believe the eyes see everything through the heart. Nothing in the world feels as good as resting them on someone you love.
— Katherine Center, Everyone Is Beautiful
The new acts' major influences were movies and their curvy queens Brigitte Bardot and Marilyn Monroe. With their big blonde hair, ample breasts, and highly fertile hips, these bombshells inspired women everywhere to exxagerate their own voluptuousness.
— Dita Von Teese, Burlesque and the Art of the Teese / Fetish and the Art of the Teese
I am quite likely to re-act to the opposite extreme - to feel rapturously that the world is beautiful and mere existence something to thank God for. I suppose our 'blues' are the price we have to pay for our temperament. 'The gods don't allow us to be in their debt.' They give us sensitiveness to beauty in all its forms but the shadow of the gift goes with it.
— L.M. Montgomery, My Dear Mr. M: Letters to G.B. Macmillan from L.M. Montgomery
Many a man who falls in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.
— Evan Esar
Starlets were always turning up dead in people's pools. They fished them out like goldfish. Nobody seemed to find it unusual that so many young, beautiful women wanted to die.
— Jonathan Rosen, Eve's Apple
There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
The beauty on the inside, will determine the ugly on the outside.
— Anthony Liccione
Beauty has a persuasive power all its own.
— Janette Rallison, How to Take the Ex Out of Ex-Boyfriend
She saw how he was staring at it, the bright red hue beneath her bonnet. She could not bear to see the way he was looking at her—right through her—without seeing her. He did not see a woman. He did not see Jane, the woman he had been so passionate with two days before. He saw… Jane swallowed hard and lookedaway, hating the weakness of her spirit. She was more than this, a wilting flower. She was stronger than this. But damn it, this hurt.It hurt because he was the man responsible for making her burn. For making her feel like a woman. It hurt because it had been a trick. An illusion. And it hurt most of all because he did not see her, the woman she was behind the unfashionable spectacles and garish hair.
— Charlotte Featherstone, Sinful
Ladies, stress shows on your face. Happiness is the true beauty we
— Susan Sarandon
O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you. . . .She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comesIn shape no bigger than an agate stoneOn the forefinger of an alderman,Drawn with a team of little atomiAthwart men’s noses as they lie asleep.
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.
— Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman
[B]eauty is that quality which, next to money, is generally the most attractive to the worst kinds of men; and, therefore, it is likely to entail a great deal of trouble on the possessor.
— Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall