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Quotes about beauty

144 quotes from 110 people

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Beauty is all very well at first sight; but whoever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
George Bernard Shaw1856–1950
Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred.
Mary Shelley1797–1851Frankenstein (1818), Chapter XVIn context
- God
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Percy Bysshe Shelley1792–1822A Defence of Poetry (1821)
- Poetry
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
Percy Bysshe Shelley1792–1822A Defence of Poetry (1821)
- Poetry
Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.
Socrates470–399 BC
I have always been offended by the song that says, ‘Everything is beautiful in its own way.’ If everything is beautiful, then the word ‘beautiful’ has no meaning. If everything were purple, there would be no word ‘purple’ in the language because it would not distinguish one thing from another.
Thomas Sowellborn 1930
The saying that beauty is but skin deep is but a skin-deep saying.
Herbert Spencer1820–1903Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (1891), Vol. 2, Ch. XIV, Personal Beauty
Perfection and imperfection are names which do not differ much from the names beauty and ugliness.
Baruch Spinoza1632–1677Letter to Hugo Boxel (October 1674) The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza (1891) Tr. R. H. M. Elwes, Vol. 2, Letter 58 (54).
Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.
Stendhal1783–1842De L’Amour (On Love) (1822), Ch. 17, footnote
- Happiness
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
Wallace Stevens1879–1955Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (1917)In context
Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.
Nassim Nicholas Talebborn 1960The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 24
- Age
What is fair in men, passes away, but not so in art.
Leonardo da Vinci1452–1519IX The Practice of Painting
- Art
Beauty is a sign of intelligence.
Andy Warhol1928–1987
- Intelligence
There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.
H. G. Wells1866–1946A Modern Utopia (1905), Ch. 3, sect. 8
- Technology
Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.
Walt Whitman1819–1892Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Starting from Paumanok. 12
- Life & Death