Quotes About Beauty

As Michel de Montaigne observed, The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced. p 233

Gertrude Stein remarked, "Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.

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. —Toni Morrison, Tar Baby

It's true that novelty and challenge bring happiness...but routine can also bring happiness. The pleasure of doing the same thing in the same way every day...take[s] on a certain beauty and provide[s] a kind of invisible architecture...

A day goes by. Every shiver of grass counts. The shallows and dapples in air that give grass life are like water. The bobcat returns nightly. During easy jags of sleep the dog's dream-paws chase coyotes. I ride to the sheep. Empty sky, an absolute blue. Empty heart. Sunburned face blotches brown. Another layer of skin to peel, to meet myself again in the mirror. A plane passes overhead—probably the government trapper. I'm waving hello, but he speeds away.

Ice lies on water as far as the eye can see: scattered rhinestones, spiral arms of ice, ice walls and icebergs, and bits of ice that have splintered off larger pieces whose translucent edges are shaped like miniature whales.

All the words I have to say have turned into stars.

those works that don't touch the heart, it seems to me, miss the true aim of Art.

All art is erotic.

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.

Love art. Of all lies, it is the least untrue.

Never have things of the spirit counted for so little. Never has hatred for everything great been so manifest – disdain for Beauty, execration of literature. I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.

He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze; he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height

My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid.

She loved the sea only for its storms, and greenery only when it was scattered among ruins.

How oft the warmth of the sun above Makes a pretty young girl dream of love.

Oh, if somewhere there were a being strong and handsome, a valiant heart, passionate and sensitive at once, a poet's spirit in an angel's form, a lyre with strings of steel, sounding sweet-sad epithalamiums to the heavens, then why should she not find that being?

Beautiful things spoil nothing.

It seemed to her that certain parts of the world must produce happiness as they produced peculiar plants which will flourish nowhere else.

I envision a style: a style that would be beautiful, that someone will invent some day, ten years or ten centuries from now, one that would be rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep-voiced as a cello, tipped with flame: a style that would pierce your idea like a dagger, and on which your thought would sail easily ahead over a smooth surface, like a skiff before a good tail wind.

Yet she resigned herself: reverently she put away in the chest of drawers her beautiful dress and even her satin shoes, whose soles had been yellowed by the slippery wax of the dance floor. Her heart was like them: contact with wealth had laid something over it that would not be wiped away.

Coming joys, like tropical shores, throw over the immensity before them their inborn softness, an odorous wind, and we are lulled by this intoxication without a thought of the horizon that we do not even know.

Pellerin used to read every available book on aesthetics, in the hope of discovering the true theory of Beauty, for he was convinced that once he had found it he would be able to paint masterpieces.