Quotes About Beauty

We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.

When you laugh, I want to transform the entire world so it will mirror you.

Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill.

She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer.

His heart missed a beat and never regretted the lovely loss.

He groped for his loafers and walked aimlessly for some time among the trees of the coppice where thrushes were singing so richly, with such sonorous force, such fluty fioriture that one could not endure the agony of consciousness, the filth of life, the loss, the loss, the loss.

I really knew nothing about her, blinded as I was by that burning loveliness which replaces everything else and justifies everything

A poet's purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor.

An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky. Surrounded, I note, by a diffuse tentacled black dampness where some dull dun dead leaves have stuck. Drowned, I should say, before the puddle had shrunk to its present size.

It's exactly my sense of existing - a fragment, a wisp of color.

I lied as a nightingale sings, ecstatically, self-obliviously; reveling in the new life-harmony which I was creating.

I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls ... There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl.

See you soon my strange joy, my tender night.

Now I shall spy on beauty as none has Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as None has cried out. Now I shall try what none Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done.

S]urely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with a weak chin and no imagination.

I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.

Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze. Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet Age: five thousand three hundred days.

photographs of girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall.

what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art

Did he like elms? Did he know Joyce's poem about the two washerwomen? He did, indeed. Did he like it? He did. In fact he was beginning to like very much arbors and ardors and Adas

Stilletos of a frozen stillicide [...] In the lovely line heading this comment the reader should note the last word. My dictionary defines it as 'a succession of drops falling from the eaves, eavesdrop, cavesdrop.' I remember having encountered it for the first time in a poem by Thomas Hardy. The bright frost has eternalized the bright eavesdrop.

When stripped and shiny in the mist of the bath house, his bold virilia contrasted harshly with his girlish grace. He was a regular faunlet.

From far below mounted the clink and tinkle of distant masonry work, and a sudden train passed between gardens, and a heraldic butterfly volant en arrière , sable, a bend gules, traversed the stone parapet, and John Shade took a fresh card.

No jewels, save my eyes, do I own, but I have a rose which is even softer than my rosy lips. And a quiet youth said: 'There is nothing softer than your heart.' And I lowered my gaze..." I wrote back telling Liza that her poems were bad and she ought to stop composing. Sometime later I saw her in another cafe, sitting at a long table, abloom and ablaze among a dozen young Russian poets. She kept her sapphire glance on me with a mocking and mysterious persistence.