Quotes About Beauty

that even within its ugliness, there lay a surprising beauty, breathtaking because it was so unexpected.

Justina Chen

For all its cleanliness — not a weed in sight — the place was bankrupt of anything beautiful. But it wasn't just the orphanage. All the surrounding buildings were dismal gray, as though beauty were a frivolity of the rich.

I had never defined myself as beautiful. I'd never be classically beautiful, never be modelesque. But I could see what the people who loved me saw.

Let the glossy spreads have their heart-stopping, head-turning kind of beauty. Give me the heart-filling beauty instead.

We didn't have to go all the way to China to see beauty. Or to have an adventure. They were both right here, literally in our backyard.

those before-and-after shots of women undergoing the knife and accepting poison to change themselves — the lines on their faces repaved like old roads, their bulbous noses whittled into aristocratic ridges.

I had always felt a foreigner in this made-up Land of Beautiful, and it was a relief to see Extreme Beauty for what it really was: fake, make-believe, insubstantial.

Which one looked more real? Which side more beautiful?

physical beauty was temporary. A vessel without soul. I didn't want to be a vessel anymore.

God, had I been following the wrong set of coordinates my entire life, my eyes set on Beauty instead of True Beauty

Beauty—real everlasting beauty—lives not on our faces, but in our attitude and our actions. It lives in what we do for ourselves and for others.

Flawed, we're truly interesting, truly memorable, and yes, truly beautiful.

I didn't know that the world could be so mind-blowingly beautiful.

That's when it struck me: how gorgeous we all were, even with cellulite (saw a lot of that) and stretch marks, scars and tattoos. Let me just say this, not single body was perfect, not even the fittest of women there.

Physical beauty wasn't the same as True Beauty, any more than pretty ugly meant truly ugly or Magnetic North meant True North.

That's exactly why nature always trumps gardens. Gardens are just reality pruned of chaos. What doesn't work you rip out.

True beauty] seeps into you. It doesn't make you forget yourself, but totally the opposite. It connects you with everything and fills you with awe that you share the same space with something that glorious. Like a sunrise or a clear blue day or the most extraordinary piece of glass. And then suddenly...you have this epiphany that there's more to the world than just you and what you want or even who you are.

What would it be like to look in the mirror and actually accept what you see? Not loathe the reflection, or despise it, or be resigned to it? But to like it?

Let the glossy spreads have their heart-stopping, head-turning kind of beauty. Give me the heart-filling beauty instead. Jolie laide, that's what I would choose. Flawed, we're truly interesting, truly memorable, and yes, truly beautiful.

Jolie laide = "pretty ugly" Draws you to it...bored into heart and mind.

Maybe we don't have the same definition of about what's beautiful. So define it. Define true beauty.

I didn't have the language to communicate that to this little girl -- or to communicate that beauty -- real everlasting beauty -- lives not on our faces, but in our attitude and our actions. It lives in what we do for ourselves and for others.

I understood now: how nothing looked more beautiful than that scar of his, that borderline that separated what Jacob could have been had he stayed in that orphanage from who he is.