c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Where do we begin this process of reevaluation of values? It makes sense to begin with our mind, which is the tool we use to evaluate. Once we make sure it is functioning as it should, we can feel confident in using it to think about our beliefs and priorities.
— Ilchi Lee, Change: Realizing Your Greatest Potential
Conscience is the true power. It resides within us. The intention to be absolutely truthful and the willingness to put the benefit of all before personal benefit hold the power to change the world. !is intention and willingness is of course ethical choice, but it is also the most natural, reasonable, and intelligent choice when we realize what we really are. If people begin to use the full power of conscience in all the choices they make in their everyday life, from presidential elections to purchasing things in the grocery store, the world will change.
— Ilchi Lee, Change: Realizing Your Greatest Potential
Basically it is your choice. No matter what spiritual path you have taken, no matter what experiences you have had, choice is still choice. Spiritual development doesn’t happen automatically. It is choosing the eye of Tao that sees both the whole view of things from a distance and the core of reality from deep inside.
— Ilchi Lee, Change: Realizing Your Greatest Potential
In order to recognize the Truth, you have to separate yourself from the Truth; and to explain the Truth, you have to separate yourself from the recognition. This is why a wordsmithed Truth is nothing but a shadow of the shadow of the Truth. If Buddha had yawned instead of holding up a fower, would that gesture have been any less representative of the Truth?
— Ilchi Lee, Change: Realizing Your Greatest Potential
James looked at the people around his table. He stared at each one of them as though he were looking at a magic-eye puzzle and he could see all of the different pieces and the colours but not beyond what was on the surface, and the more he tried, the depth, the revealing images, were kept away from him.
— Tan Redding, A Banquet Of Crumbs
If you want to do something that really changes someone’s life, the best thing you can do is make the person you’re trying to help a participant in the process.
— John Stahl-Wert, The Serving Leader: Five Powerful Actions to Transform Your Team, Business, and Community
The empty spaces of your soul are the ones you search for, pray for and want so desperately to be filled. They are also the spaces that will never be filled, until you are ready to do something you have never done.
— Shannon L. Alder
Just because a door appears closed it does not mean that it is locked - nor that it will not open with the right heart, call or touch
— Rasheed Ogunlaru
so far as you continue to entertain what makes you unhappy, you shall always dance to the tune of what will make you unhappy. A mindset change can cause a great change.
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
God is the burden crusher and the freedom fighter. He has the power to change lives.
— Tina Samples, Messed Up Men of the Bible
Leaders don’t call unhappy followers “ungrateful people”. They see them as “lesson teachers”. They find out why they are unhappy
—  perhaps it could be as a result of their attitudes. That informs them to change!
There are times when it is conservative to be a revolutionary, when the world must be turned on its head in order to be stood on its feet.
— Christopher Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports
You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
It is naive to think you know someone so well.To think that whatever time you have shared in knowing their habits, their history, their stories, their weaknesses, their strengths, their wounds, and deepest corners of their heart could ever sum them up-- is unjust.It is a shame to be unaware of the shifts and changes that happen every day, every moment, right before your eyes. The little crinkles around her eyes that get ever-so-slightly deeper and wiser. The silver linings of her hair. The wonders of time and how they show their presence in such ways. You may think that a flower is simply a flower. A flower that looks and smells just as simply as it always has. Or that the ocean is simply salt water and blue. The flower is always moving, changing, blossoming, and giving life to the birds and the bees. The ocean's tides rise and fall with the phases of the moon. The currents change direction. And depending on how the sun hits the water, the colors and shades of blue are in fact, infinite. Everything around you and everyone is always changing. Take time to smell the roses. Take time to watch the tide. Take time to see your love with new eyes. It would be a shame to miss it.
— Kayko Tamaki
The fall of the nation, there is no;Faithfulness, Kindness and Knowledge of God in your sacred land.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
As a leader, you will see things you may never like to see; yours is to correct those things so that next time you open your eyes, you will see better things you wish to be seeing always. Leaders learn to right the wrong of society.
— Israelmore Ayivor, Leaders' Ladder
If you read, you will transform your life.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Leaders don’t give excessive vocal orders. They humbly involve people and together cooperate with them to make a change happen.
— Israelmore Ayivor, Leaders' Ladder
At some stage of development an officer had to stop following orders and start generating them.
— Lois McMaster Bujold, Cetaganda
The author says one of the sources of resilience is the ability to measure and perceive early warning signs so as to adapt.
— Andrew Zolli, Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back
The difference between "I wish", and "I will" is two letters, get up and make that change.
— Alahdal A. Hussein
You can’t lead people if you aren’t going to focus on what’s relevant to you and them. Don’t worry about who is and who is not watching you. Consider what you have to watch.
— Israelmore Ayivor, Leaders' Ladder
Life is a dance more than it is an assertion and there is more health in dynamism or fluidity than there is rigidity and stasis.
— Oli Anderson, Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness
Systems, whether educational or political, are not changed mysteriously; they are transformed when there is a fundamental change in ourselves.
— Krishnamurti
We are transformed by every sacred-experience.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The sacred transformation
—  change life!
Life is ever changing. We can always adapt to the new changes.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Oh, sweetheart. What can anyone do? That's just the way things are. You really think you can change the world?
— Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado
Accept changes but be persistent with the process.
— Debasish Mridha
I always encourage my sisters to be fearless, it is never too late to stop the damage or accept change.
— Nisan Ahmado
Most fires made by underestimated sparks, the greatness fire inside ourselves is lit by the spark of the change, came across a small corner in our souls where the conscience still whispering.
— Ammar Moussa (عمار موسى), رحلة إلى ما وراء القمة
That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfeast cereals based on color instead of taste.
— John Green, Paper Towns
Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.
— Anne Frank
All little girls should be told they are pretty, even if they aren't.
— Marilyn Monroe
You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.
— Amy Bloom
What you do, the way you think, makes you beautiful.
— Scott Westerfeld, Uglies
There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.
— Edgar Allan Poe
Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.
— Confucius
But he who dares not grasp the thorn Should never crave the rose.
— Anne Brontë
Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
— Franz Kafka
Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
We are all born sexual creatures,thank God, but it's a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift.
— Marilyn Monroe
I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.
— Virginia Woolf
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I don't mind being burdened with being glamorous and sexual. Beauty and femininity are ageless and can't be contrived, and glamour, although the manufacturers won't like this, cannot be manufactured. Not real glamour; it's based on femininity.
— Marilyn Monroe
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.
— Oscar Wilde
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
— Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales
Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.
— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Summer afternoon—summer afternoon
—  to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
There are no bad pictures
—  that's just how your face looks sometimes.
Nature didn't need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.
— Scott Westerfeld, The Uglies Trilogy
Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
— Edgar Allan Poe
I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?
— Jean Kerr
Our task must be to free ourselves... by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and it's beauty.
— Albert Einstein
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson's Essays
Just because something is beautiful doesn´t mean it´s good.
— Alex Flinn, Beastly
The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.
— P.C. Cast, Betrayed
Is the spring coming?" he said. "What is it like?"..."It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine...
— Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
The first time I saw you, my heart fell. The second time I saw you, my heart fell. The third time fourth time fifth time and every time since, my heart has fallen.I stared at her.You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Your hair, your eyes, your lips, your body that you haven't grown into, the way you walk, smile, laugh, the way your cheeks drop when you're mad or upset, the way you drag your feet when you're tired. Every single thing about you is beautiful.I stared at her.When I see you the World stops. It stops and all that exists for me is you and my eyes staring at you. There's nothing else. No noise, no other people, no thoughts or worries, no yesterday, no tomorrow. The World just stops and it is a beautiful place and there is only you. Just you, and my eyes staring at you.I stared.When you're gone, the World starts again, and I don't like it as much. I can live in it, but I don't like it. I just walk around in it and wait to see you again and wait for it to stop again. I love it when it stops. It's the best fucking thing I've ever known or ever felt, the best thing, and that, beautiful Girl, is why I stare at you.
— James Frey, A Million Little Pieces
Beauty, to me, is about being comfortable in your own skin. That, or a kick-ass red lipstick.
— Gwyneth Paltrow
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
Beauty is not caused. It is.
— Emily Dickinson
No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal 
— John Donne, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose
Sometimes there is such beauty in awkwardness.
— Ruta Sepetys, Between Shades of Gray
She's kind of a walking poem, she's this perfect beauty...but at the same time very deep, very smart.
— Johnny Depp
You're arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that's a lie, and you know it.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
I suspect he's sweet on Sophie and doesn't like to see her work too hard.'Tessa was glad to hear it. She'd felt awful about her reaction to Sophie's scar, and the thought that Sophie had a male admirer - and a handsome one like that- eased her conscience slightly. 'Perhaps he's in love with Agatha', she said.'I hope not. I intend to marry Agatha myself. She may be a thousand years old, but she makes an incomparable jam tart. Beauty fades, but cooking is eternal.
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel
Women think of all colors except the absence of color. I have said that black has it all. White too. Their beauty is absolute. It is the perfect harmony.
— Coco Chanel, Chanel
Lady Katsa, is it?" "Yes, Lord Prince.""I've heard you have one eye green as the Middluns grasses, and the other eye blue as the sky.""Yes, Lord Prince.""I've heard you can kill a man with the nail of your smallest finger."She smiled. "Yes, Lord Prince.""Does it make it easier?""I don't understand you.""To have beautiful eyes. Does it lighten the burden of your Grace, to know you have beautiful eyes?
— Kristin Cashore, Graceling
You can be gorgeous at thirty, charmimg at forty, and irresistible for the rest of your life.
— Coco Chanel
But even though she was attractive, there was something else about her that caught his eye. She was intelligent, he could sense that right away, and confident, too, as if she were able to move through life on her own terms. To him, these were the things that really mattered. Without them, beauty was nothing.
— Nicholas Sparks, Message in a Bottle
It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.
— Maya Angelou
Beauty surrounds us.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
June has never looked more beautiful than she does now, unadorned and honest, vulnerable yet invincible.
— Marie Lu, Legend
The appearance of things changes according to the emotions; and thus we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Broken Wings
the voice of beauty speaks softly
—  it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls
Beauty fades, dumb is forever.
— Judy Sheindlin, Beauty Fades, Dumb is Forever
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942
These... things, householder, are welcome, agreeable, pleasant, & hard to obtain in the world:Long life is welcome, agreeable, pleasant, & hard to obtain in the world.Beauty is welcome, agreeable, pleasant, & hard to obtain in the world.Happiness is welcome, agreeable, pleasant, & hard to obtain in the world.Status is welcome, agreeable, pleasant, & hard to obtain in the world....Now, I tell you, these... things are not to be obtained by reason of prayers or wishes. If they were to be obtained by reason of prayers or wishes, who here would lack them? It's not fitting for the disciple of the noble ones who desires long life to pray for it or to delight in doing so. Instead, the disciple of the noble ones who desires long life should follow the path of practice leading to long life. In so doing, he will attain long l
— Gautama Buddha
The mind can go in a thousand directions, but on this beautiful path, I walk in peace. With each step, the wind blows. With each step, a flower blooms.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.
— Sophia Loren
Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: But a woman who fears the Lord,She shall be praised.(Proverbs 31:30 Modern King James Version)
— Anonymous, Modern King James Version of the Holy Bible
Live quietly in the moment and see the beauty of all before you. The future will take care of itself......
— Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi
Beauty is the illumination of your soul.
— John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.
— Clive Barker
The heads of strong old age are beautiful / Beyond all grace of youth
— Robinson Jeffers
There is a face beneath this mask, but it isn't me. I'm no more that face than I am the muscles beneath it, or the bones beneath that.
— Steve Moore, V for Vendetta
Butterflies are self propelled flowers.
— Robert A. Heinlein
Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.
— Charles Baudelaire
Beauty is a sign of intelligence.
— Andy Warhol
I wish every day could be Halloween. We could all wear masks all the time. Then we could walk around and get to know each other before we got to see what we looked like under the masks.
— R.J. Palacio, Wonder
Sadly, the signals that allow men and women to find the partners who most please them are scrambled by the sexual insecurity initiated by beauty thinking. A woman who is self-conscious can't relax to let her sensuality come into play. If she is hungry she will be tense. If she is "done up" she will be on the alert for her reflection in his eyes. If she is ashamed of her body, its movement will be stilled. If she does not feel entitled to claim attention, she will not demand that airspace to shine in. If his field of vision has been boxed in by "beauty"--a box continually shrinking--he simply will not see her, his real love, standing right before him.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Just because you are blind, and unable to see my beauty doesn't mean it does not exist.
— Margaret Cho
Men are visually aroused by women's bodies and less sensitive to their arousal by women's personalities because they are trained early into that response, while women are less visually aroused and more emotionally aroused because that is their training. This asymmetry in sexual education maintains men's power in the myth: They look at women's bodies, evaluate, move on; their own bodies are not looked at, evaluated, and taken or passed over. But there is no "rock called gender" responsible for that; it can change so that real mutuality--an equal gaze, equal vulnerability, equal desire--brings heterosexual men and women together.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Beauty awakens the soul to act.
— Dante Alighieri
I have an important message to deliver to all the cute people all over the world. If you're out there and you're cute, maybe you're beautiful. I just want to tell you somethin' — there's more of us UGLY MOTHERFUCKERS than you are, hey-y, so watch out.
— Frank Zappa
Being different is a revolving door in your life where secure people enter and insecure exit.
— Shannon L. Alder
All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Outer beauty attracts, but inner beauty captivates.
— Kate Angell, Squeeze Play
A pretty face may be enough to catch a man, but it takes character and good nature to hold him.
— Thomas More, Utopia
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless
—  peacocks and lilies for instance.
The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.
— Wallace Stevens
No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.
— Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
When in doubt, be ridiculous.
— Sherwood Smith, Firebirds: An Anthology of Original Fantasy and Science Fiction
It is foolish to wish for beauty. Sensible people never either desire it for themselves or care about it in others. If the mind be but well cultivated, and the heart well disposed, no one ever cares for the exterior.
— Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey
It was a sort of ferocious, quiet beauty, the sort that wouldn't let you admire it. The sort of beauty that always hurt.
— Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves
I hate slick and pretty things. I prefer mistakes and accidents. Which is why I like things like cuts and bruises - they're like little flowers. I've always said that if you have a name for something, like 'cut' or 'bruise,' people will automatically be disturbed by it. But when you see the same thing in nature, and you don't know what it is, it can be very beautiful.
— David Lynch
I am so beautiful, sometimes people weep when they see me. And it has nothing to do with what I look like really, it is just that I gave myself the power to say that I am beautiful, and if I could do that, maybe there is hope for them too. And the great divide between the beautiful and the ugly will cease to be. Because we are all what we choose.
— Margaret Cho
There is nothing more beautiful than someone who goes out of their way to make life beautiful for others.
— Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’.
— Erin McKean
Flawed, we're truly interesting, truly memorable, and yes, truly beautiful.
— Justina Chen, North of Beautiful
Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. Most women know this feeling of being more and more invisible everyday.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
A lovely girl gazing at the stars, and the stars who gazed back.
— Sarah J. Maas, Throne of Glass
The better you look, the more you see.
— Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama
You are ugly now, on the inside, where it matters most...you are beastly.
— Alex Flinn, Beastly
I don't take good pictures 'cause I have the kind of beauty that moves.
— Ani DiFranco
Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.
— Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colors
Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing,' wrote Tolstoy, 'can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.
— Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun
Which would you rather be if you had the choice--divinely beautiful or dazzlingly clever or angelically good?
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Screw pretty. I'd rather be strong. Pretty fades over time. Strength gets you through the bad shit.
— Thea Harrison, Oracle's Moon
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.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.
— Simone de Beauvoir
A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Beauty without expression is boring.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
When I lay my head on the pillow at night I can say I was a decent person today. That's when I feel beautiful.
— Drew Barrymore
If Jack's in love, he's no judge of Jill's beauty.
— Benjamin Franklin
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
— Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder
There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.
— Michael Cunningham, The Hours
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
— William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets
Always think of what is useful and not what is beautiful. Beauty will come of its own accord.
— Nikolai Gogol
A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the women try to imitate nowadays-how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they're just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They aren't born of human bodies; they hatch ready-made from the computers." ~The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
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
The mirror is the worst judge of true beauty
— Sophia Nam
Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world!
— Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
O! she doth teach the torches to burn bright It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear; Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.- Romeo -
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
This is beautiful," I said, ignoring the shop window to trace the gleaming stone walls fronting another boutique."You know what's funny?" Jacob asked. He didn't wait for my answer. "You can see beauty in everything, except for yourself."***I swallowed hard. Erik thought my body was beautiful, Karin that it was enviable. At random times, people had noted that my hands were beautiful, or my hair. The Twisted Sisters had called my art beautiful. Mom had the best intentions and always told me before and after my laser surgeries that I would be beautiful. But no one had ever said that I was beautiful, all my parts taken together, not just the bits and pieces.
— Justina Chen, North of Beautiful
The slow arrow of beauty. The most noble kind of beauty is that which does not carry us away suddenly, whose attacks are not violent or intoxicating (this kind easily awakens disgust), but rather the kind of beauty which infiltrates slowly, which we carry along with us almost unnoticed, and meet up with again in dreams; finally, after it has for a long time lain modestly in our heart, it takes complete possession of us, filling our eyes with tears, our hearts with longing. What do we long for when we see beauty? To be beautiful. We think much happiness must be connected with it. But that is an error.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
I saw the sky and sea and sand and the flickering flames of the bonfire through my tears. All at once, it rushed into my head with tremendous speed, and made me feel dizzy. It was beautiful. Everything that happened was shockingly beautiful, enough to make you crazy.
— Banana Yoshimoto, N.P
Beauty is a form of Genius--is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Outer beauty pleases the EYE. Inner beauty captivates the HEART.
— Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
...I don't just wish you rain, Beloved - I wish you the beauty of storms...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Horses make a landscape look beautiful.
— Alice Walker
Consider the fact that maybe…just maybe…beauty and worth aren’t found in a makeup bottle, or a salon-fresh hairstyle, or a fabulous outfit. Maybe our sparkle comes from somewhere deeper inside, somewhere so pure and authentic and REAL, it doesn’t need gloss or polish or glitter to shine.
— Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
Beauty should be edible, or not at all.
— Salvador Dalí
When a girl is beautiful, she gets to pick - she never has to wait for someone to choose her.
— Adriana Trigiani
Men didn't respect beauty...they used it.
— Nora Roberts, Montana Sky
We wear on our faces the results of what we believe and how we behave, and such behavior is most evident in the eyes and on the faces of those who have lived many years.
— Gordon B. Hinckley, Standing for Something: 10 Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes
Remember that there are two kinds of beauty: one of the soul and the other of the body. That of the soul displays its radiance in intelligence, in chastity, in good conduct, in generosity, and in good breeding, and all these qualities may exist in an ugly man. And when we focus our attention upon that beauty, not upon the physical, love generally arises with great violence and intensity. I am well aware that I am not handsome, but I also know that I am not deformed, and it is enough for a man of worth not to be a monster for him to be dearly loved, provided he has those spiritual endowments I have spoken of.
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Beauty shouldn’t be about changing yourself to achieve an ideal or be more socially acceptable. Real beauty, the interesting, truly pleasing kind, is about honoring the beauty within you and without you. It’s about knowing that someone else’s definition of pretty has no hold over you.
— Golda Poretsky
Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.
— Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
Some women feel the need to act like they're never scared, needy or hurt; like they're as hardened as a man. I think that's dishonest. It's ok to feel delicate sometimes. Real beauty is in the fragility of your petals. A rose that never wilts isn't a rose at all.
— Crystal Woods, Write like no one is reading 3
Crippled things are always more beautiful. It's the flaw that brings out beauty.
— Holly Black, Tithe
By choosing healthy over skinny you are choosing self-love over self-judgment. You are beautiful!
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
We feel cold, but we don't mind it, because we will not come to harm. And if we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn't feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin. It's worth being cold for that.
— Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass
When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?
— Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
People make such a big deal about looks, but after a while, when you know someone, you don´t even notice anymore...
— Alex Flinn, Beastly
What becomes of a man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her "beauty" his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
You look beautiful," Alodia says. I startle at the compliment. Then I smile. "I’m beautiful to the one person who matters."She nods. "Hector’s mouth is going to drop open when he sees you.”“I hope so. But I meant me. I’m beautiful to me.
— Rae Carson, The Bitter Kingdom
It's funny. When we were alive we spent much of our time staring up at the cosmos and wondering what was out there. We were obsessed with the moon and whether we could one day visit it. The day we finally walked on it was celebrated worldwide as perhaps man's greatest achievement. But it was while we were there, gathering rocks from the moon's desolate landscape, that we looked up and caught a glimpse of just how incredible our own planet was. Its singular astonishing beauty. We called her Mother Earth. Because she gave birth to us, and then we sucked her dry.
— Jon Stewart, Earth (The Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race
The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence
Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.
— Neal Stephenson, Anathem
Beauty was not simply something to behold
—  it was something one could do.
Having an eye for beauty isn't the same thing as a weakness.
— Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire
How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
They wore their strange beauty like war paint.
— Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility. 
— Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder
Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.
— Chuck Palahniuk
We do not have to spend money and go hungry and struggle and study to become sensual; we always were. We need not believe we must somehow earn good erotic care; we always deserved it. Femaleness and its sexuality are beautiful. Women have long secretly suspected as much. In that sexuality, women are physically beautiful already; superb; breathtaking.Many, many men see this way too. A man who wants to define himself as a real lover of women admires what shows of her past on a woman's face, before she ever saw him, and the adventures and stresses that her body has undergone, the scars of trauma, the changes of childbirth, her distinguishing characteristics, the light is her expression. The number of men who already see in this way is far greater than the arbiters of mass culture would lead us to believe, since the story they need to tell ends with the opposite moral.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.
— John Fowles, The Collector
If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
And when she started becoming a “young lady,” and no one was allowed to look at her because she thought she was fat. And how she really wasn’t fat. And how she was actually very pretty. And how different her face looked when she realized boys thought she was pretty. And how different her face looked the first time she really liked a boy who was not on a poster on her wall. And how her face looked when she realized she was in love with that boy. I wondered how her face would look when she came out from behind those doors.
— Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
In beauty of face no maiden ever equaled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream - an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the fantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos.
— Edgar Allan Poe, Ligeia
Somewhere out in the darkness, a phoenix was singing in a way Harry had never heard before: a stricken lament of terrible beauty. And Harry felt, as he had felt about phoenix song before, that the music was inside him, not without: It was his own grief turned magically to song..
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Yoga means addition - addition of energy, strength and beauty to body, mind and soul.
— Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspirations
Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the unbeautiful.
— Kahlil Gibran
I think the biggest lie the devil ever told was that beauty and goodness are the same.
— Daniel Nayeri, Another Faust
There are brown eyes in the world, after all, as well as blue, and one pair of brown that meant heaven to me as the blue had never done
— E. Nesbit
The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her "beauty.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
True beauty springs from the heart and dwells in the eyes.
— Judith McNaught
Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful?
— E.M. Forster
That which is really beautiful has no need of anything; not more than law, not more than truth, not more than benevolence or modesty.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction of costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don't know where. I only know it isn't where women think.
— Marguerite Duras, The Lover
Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.
— Søren Kierkegaard
Look at me--a big old black man under all of this makeup, and if I can look beautiful, so can you.
— RuPaul
One frequently only finds out how really beautiful a women is, until after considerable acquaintance with her.
— Mark Twain
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
— Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
Rose doesn’t like the flat country, but I always did – flat country seems to give the sky such a chance.
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
When I was just a cute little caterpillar, you loved me. So I became a butterfly so you would never leave.
— Crystal Woods, Write like no one is reading 3
The beautiful is as useful as the useful." He added after a moment’s silence, "Perhaps more so.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
I want to change the world, and do something valuable and beautiful. I want people to remember me before I'm dead, and then more afterwards.
— Russell Brand, My Booky Wook
Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.
— Sophia Loren
He stood staring into the wood for a minute, then said: "What is it about the English countryside — why is the beauty so much more than visual? Why does it touch one so?"He sounded faintly sad. Perhaps he finds beauty saddening — I do myself sometimes. Once when I was quite little I asked father why this was and he explained that it was due to our knowledge of beauty's evanescence, which reminds us that we ourselves shall die. Then he said I was probably too young to understand him; but I understood perfectly.
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its 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
The full moon, well risen in a cloudless eastern sky, covered the high solitude with its light. We are not conscious of daylight as that which displaces darkness. Daylight, even when the sun is clear of clouds, seems to us simply the natural condition of the earth and air. When we think of the downs, we think of the downs in daylight, as with think of a rabbit with its fur on. Stubbs may have envisaged the skeleton inside the horse, but most of us do not: and we do not usually envisage the downs without daylight, even though the light is not a part of the down itself as the hide is part of the horse itself. We take daylight for granted. But moonlight is another matter. It is inconstant. The full moon wanes and returns again. Clouds may obscure it to an extent to which they cannot obscure daylight. Water is necessary to us, but a waterfall is not. Where it is to be found it is something extra, a beautiful ornament. We need daylight and to that extent it us utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms. It falls upon the banks and the grass, separating one long blade from another; turning a drift of brown, frosted leaves from a single heap to innumerable flashing fragments; or glimmering lengthways along wet twigs as though light itself were ductile. Its long beams pour, white and sharp, between the trunks of trees, their clarity fading as they recede into the powdery, misty distance of beech woods at night. In moonlight, two acres of coarse bent grass, undulant and ankle deep, tumbled and rough as a horse's mane, appear like a bay of waves, all shadowy troughs and hollows. The growth is so thick and matted that event the wind does not move it, but it is the moonlight that seems to confer stillness upon it. We do not take moonlight for granted. It is like snow, or like the dew on a July morning. It does not reveal but changes what it covers. And its low intensity---so much lower than that of daylight---makes us conscious that it is something added to the down, to give it, for only a little time, a singular and marvelous quality that we should admire while we can, for soon it will be gone again.
— Richard Adams, Watership Down
Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.
— Maggie Nelson, Bluets
Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint.
— Pablo Picasso
A rose trapped inside a fist.
— Henry Rollins, The Portable Henry Rollins
All this beauty exists so you and I can see His glory, His artwork. It's like an invitation to worship Him, to know Him.
— Donald Miller, To Own a Dragon: Reflections on Growing Up Without a Father
True beauty is a rayThat springs from the sacred depths of the soul,and illuminates the body, just as lifesprings from the kernel of a stone andgives colour and scent to a flower.
— Kahlil Gibran, Love Letters in the Sand: The Love Poems of Khalil Gibran
Meditation is realizing and expanding your inner beauty in every direction.
— Amit Ray
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.
— John Ruskin
...gracious your form and your eyes as honey : desire is poured upon your lovely face Aphrodite has honored you exceedingly...
— Sappho
At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.
— Toni Morrison, Tar Baby
The greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe.
— Robinson Jeffers
Proportion is the heart of beauty.
— Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth
Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I
Wow Kelsey!" Kishan whistled. "I'm going to have to beat the other guys of with a stick!
— Colleen Houck, Tiger's Curse
She wins who calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change to truly see her.
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
There is beauty everywhere; even in the dark, there is light, and that is the rarest kind of all.
— Catherine Doyle, Vendetta
She is a peacock in everything but beauty!
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient
—  more beautiful than it is useful
And the worst thing was, there were no mirrors out there in the wild, so the princess was left wondering whether she in fact was still beautiful... or if the fall had changed the story completely.
— Scott Westerfeld, Pretties
All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Finally someone takes me seriously enough to ask for my word of honor, and it’s a villain.
— Sherwood Smith, Remalna's Children
He was depressed. He was addicted to heroin. And I think there comes a time when all the beauty in the world just isn’t enough.
— Antony John, Five Flavors of Dumb
There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle.
— George Eliot, Adam Bede
You are a pool of clear water where the light plays
— Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray