Quotes About Beauty

Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call reality? -- not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier? Fair as is the gliding sloop on the shining sea, the wavering, trembling, unresting sail below is fairer still...All mirrors are magic mirrors. The commonest room is a room in a poem when I turn to the glass...There must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning.

God's finger can touch nothing but to mold it into loveliness.

Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed.

Let me, if I may, be ever welcomed to my room in winter by a glowing hearth, in summer by a vase of flowers. If I may not, let me think how nice they would be and bury myself in my work. I do not think that the road to contentment lies in despising what we have not got. Let us acknowledge all good, all delight that the worlds holds, and be content without it.

Bees and butterflies, moths and dragonflies, the flowers and the brooks and the clouds.

I looked, and saw: before her, cast from an unseen heavenly mirror, stood the reflection of herself, and beside it a form of splendent beauty. She trembled, and sank again on the floor helpless. She knew the one that God had intended her to be, the other that she had made herself.

A mountain is a strange and awful thing. In old times, without knowing so much of their strangeness and awfulness as we do, people were yet more afraid of mountains. But then somehow they had not come to see how beautiful they are as well as awful, and they hated them--and what people hate they must fear. Now that we have learned to look at them with admiration, perhaps we do not feel quite awe enough of them. To me they are beautiful terrors.

How old are you? Ten, answered Tangle. You don't look like it, said the lady. How old are you, please? returned Tangle. Thousands of years old, answered the lady. You don't look like it, said Tangle. Don't I? I think I do. Don't you see how beautiful I am!

Thou art beautiful because God created thee, but thou art a slave to sin... wickedness has made you ugly.

No; I'm not bad. But sometimes beautiful things grow bad by doing bad, and it takes some time for their badness to spoil their beauty. So little boys may be mistaken if they go after things because they beautiful.

A kind of love to the cheerful little stream arose in my heart. It was born in a desert; but it seemed to say to itself, I will flow, and sing, and lave my banks, till I make my desert a paradise.

Wherever there is anything to love, there is beauty in some form.

But in truth there was more expression in the flower than was yet in the face. The flower expressed what God was thinking of when He made it; the face, what the girl was thinking of her self. When she ceased thinking of herself, then, like the flower, she would show what God was thinking of when he made her.

That's a poet.' 'I thought you said it was a bo-at.' 'Stupid pet! Don't you know what a poet it?' 'Why, a thing to sail on the water in.' 'Well, perhaps you're not so far wrong. Some poets do carry people over the sea....' ... 'A poet is a man who is glad of something, and tries to make other people glad of it too.

But I never just quite liked that ryhme.' 'Why not, child?' 'Because it seems to say one's as good as another, or two new ones are better than one that's lost. . . . Somehow, when once you've looked into anybody's eyes, right deep down into them, I mean, nobody will do for that one any more. Nobody, ever so beautiful or so good, will make up for that one going out of sight.

My soul was like a summer evening, after a heavy fall of rain, when the drops are yet glistening on the trees in the last rays of the down-going sun, and the wind of the twilight has begun to blow.

I hurried away to the white hall of Phantasy heedless of the innumerable forms of beauty that crowded my way: these might cross my eyes, but the unseen filled my brain.

What if I should look ugly without being bad - look ugly myself because I am making ugly things beautiful? - What then?

The door closed behind them. They climbed out of the earth; and, still climbing, rose above it. They were in the rainbow. Far abroad, over ocean and land, they could see through its transparent walls the earth beneath their feet. Stairs beside stairs wound up together, and beautiful beings of all ages climbed along with them. They knew that they were going up to the country whence the shadows fall. And by this time I think they must have got there.

And Summer, dear Summer, hath years of June, With large white clouds, and cool showers at noon; And a beauty that grows to a weight like grief, Till a burst of tears is the heart's relief.

You see when he forgot his Self his mother took care of his Self, and loved and praised his Self. Our own praises poison our Selves, and puff and swell them up, till they lose all shape and beauty, and become like great toadstools. But the praises of father or mother do our Selves good, and comfort them and make them beautiful. They never do them any harm. If they do any harm, it comes of our mixing some of our own praises with them, and that turns them nasty and slimy and poisonous.

It was evening. The sun was below the horizon; but his rosy beams yet illuminated a feathery cloud, that floated high above the world. I arose, I reached the cloud; and, throwing myself upon it, floated with it in sight of the sinking sun. He sank, and the cloud grew gray; but the grayness touched not my heart. It carried its rose-hue within; for now I could love without needing to be loved again.

For essential beauty is infinite, and, as the soul of Nature needs an endless succession of varied forms to embody her loveliness, countless faces of beauty springing forth, not any two the same, at every one of her heart-throbs, so the individual form needs an infinite change of its environments, to enable it to uncover all the phases of its loveliness.

Love makes everything lovely: hate concentrates itself on the one thing hated.