Quotes About Beauty

Nothing is so logical and nothing appears so absurd as the ocean.

He loved to saunter through fields of wild oats and corn-flowers, and busied himself with clouds nearly as much as with events.

To breath the air of Paris preserves the soul.

After the dazzling orgies in form and color of the eighteenth century, art was put on a diet, and allowed nothing but the straight line. This sort of progress ended in ugliness. Art reduced to a skeleton, was the result. This was the advantage of this kind of wisdom and abstinence; the style was so sober that it became lean.

Monseigneur, you who turn everything to account have, nevertheless, one useless plot. It would be better to grow salads there than bouquets. Madame Magloire, retorted the Bishop, you are mistaken. The beautiful is as useful as the useful. He added after a pause, More so, perhaps.

The beautiful is as useful as the useful." He added after a moment's pause, "Perhaps more so.

Why, there's the air, the sky, the morning, the evening, moonlight, my friends, women, the beautiful architecture of Paris to study, three big books to write and all sorts of other things. Anaxagoras used to say that he was in the world in order to admire the sun. And then I have the good fortune to be able to spend my days from morning to night in the company of a man of genius - myself - and it's very pleasant.

Es que tiene en el alma una perla, la inocencia; y las perlas no se disuelven en el fango. [...] Se revuelca en estiércol y sale de él recubierto de estrellas.

would go somewhere, we would seek that spot on earth, where the sun is brightest, the sky the bluest, where the trees are most luxuriant. We would love each other, we would pour our two souls into each other, and we would have a thirst for ourselves which we would quench in common and incessantly at that fountain of inexhaustible love. She interrupted with a terrible and thrilling laugh. Look, father, you have blood on your fingers!

Or, donner la grosse cloche en mariage à Quasimodo, c'était donner Juliette à Roméo.

Women play on their beauty as children play with their knives. And they hurt themselves on it, too.

Cosette, by learning that she was beautiful, lost the grace of not knowing it; an exquisite grace, for beauty heightened by artlessness is ineffable, and nothing is so adorable as dazzling innocence, going on her way, and holding in her hand, all unconsciousness, the key of a paradise.

He fell to the seat, she by his side. There were no more words. The stars were beginning to shine. How was it that their lips met? How is it that the birds sing, the the snow melts, that the rose opens, that May blooms, that the dawn whitens behind the black trees on the shivering summit of the hills?

Indeed, what more could you want? A little garden to amble about in, and infinite space to dream in. At his feet, whatever could be grown and gathered; over his head, whatever could be studied and meditated upon; a few flowers on the ground and all the stars in the sky.

Great perils share this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

The ideal is nothing but the culminating point of logic, the same as the beautiful is nothing but the summit of the true. Artistic peoples are also consistent peoples. To love beauty is to see the light.

The prosperity of right is that it is always beautiful and pure.

She went back down to the garden, feeling like a queen, hearing the birds sing—this was in winter—seeing the sky all golden, the sun in the trees, flowers among the shrubs, bewildered, wild, giddy with inexpressible rapture.

When we reach out to pluck a flower the stem trembles, seeming both to shrink and to offer itself. The human body has something of this tremor at the moment when the mysterious hand of death reaches out to pluck a soul.

exquisite--such was Fantine; and beneath these feminine adornments and these ribbons one could divine a statue, and in that statue a soul.

Las mujeres juegan con su belleza como los niños con un cuchillo, y se hieren.

He fell to the seat, she by his side. There no more words. The stars were beginning to shine. How was it that their lips met? How is it that the birds sing, the the snow melts, that the rose opens, that May blooms, that the dawn whitens behind the black trees on the shivering summit of the hills?

Sometimes, beautiful as Cosette was, Marius shut his eyes in her presence. The best way to look at the soul is through closed eyes.

He felt as though his brain were on fire. She had come to him, what joy! And then, how she had looked at him! She seemed more beautiful than ever before. Beautiful with a beauty that combined all of the woman with all of the angel, a beauty that would have made Petrarch sing and Dante kneel. He felt as though he were swimming in the deep blue sky. At the same time he was horribly disconcerted, because there was dust on his boots.