Quotes About Beauty

Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so.

Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?

We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a social need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.4

Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower? "She's beautiful," he murmured. "She's a meter across the hips, easily," said Julia. "That is her style of beauty," said Winston.

That's her style of beauty.

It would probably be quite easy to extract a sort of beauty, as Arnold Bennett did, from the blackness of the industrial towns; one can easily imagine Baudelaire, for instance, writing a poem about a slag-heap. But the beauty or ugliness of industrialism hardly matters.

When a novel lacks the indefinable, unmistakable thing we call beauty, one looks in it for sound delineation of character, or humour of situation, or verbal wit.

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.

No place is ugly to those who understand the virtues and sweetness of everything that God has made.

I love everything that makes up a milieu, the rolling of the carriages and the noise of the workmen in Paris, the cries of a thousand birds in the country, the movement of the ships on the waters. I love also absolute, profound silence, and, in short, I love everything that is around me, no matter where I am.

La beauté qui parle aux yeux, reprit-elle, n'est que le prestige d'un moment; l'œuil du corps n'est pas toujours celui de l'âme. (The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes, she continued, is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.) [Le beau Laurence]

Autumn is a melancholy and graceful andante, that prepares beautifully solemn adagio of winter

Une jolie femme n'est pas toujours aussi rangée qu'une autre.

All our days are the same; they are all calm and beautiful; they pass swiftly and purely like those of our childhood.

La nature est éternellement jeune, belle et généreuse. Elle verse la poésie et la beauté à tous les êtres, à toutes les plantes, qu'on laisse s'y développer.

j'ai bien senti le beau dans le simple

Nous croyons que la mission de l'art est une mission de sentiment et d'amour

Corambé debía tener, por lo tanto, todos los atributos de la belleza física y moral: el don de la elocuencia, el encanto poderoso de las artes y, sobre todo, la magia de la improvisación musical.

La nature est une oeuvre d'art, mais Dieu est le seul artiste qui existe, et l'homme n'est qu'un arrangeur de mauvais goût. La nature est belle, le sentiment s'exhale de tous ses pores; l'amour, la jeunesse, la beauté y sont impérissables. Mais l'homme n'a pour les sentir et les exprimer que des moyens absurdes et des facultés misérables. Il vaudrait mieux qu'il ne s'en mêlat pas, qu'il fût muet et se renfermât dans la contemplation.

The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.

To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.

The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard.