Quotes About Beauty

Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.

I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.

The moon in her chariot of pearl

But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.

People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Now produce your explanation and pray make it improbable.

Be happy, cried the Nightingale, be happy; you shall have your red rose. I will build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with my own heart's-blood. All that I ask of you in return is that you will be a true lover, for Love is wiser than Philosophy, though she is wise, and mightier than Power, though he is mighty. Flame-coloured are his wings, and coloured like flame is his body. His lips are sweet as honey, and his breath is like frankincense.

I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous.

I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women's husbands.

He is really not so ugly after all, provided, of course, that one shuts one's eyes, and does not look at him.

We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.

Genius lasts longer than beauty

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think.

She lives in the poetry she cannot write.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.

Dear Prince, I must leave you, but I will never forget you, and next spring I will bring you back two beautiful jewels in place of those you have given away. The ruby shall be redder than a red rose, and the sapphire shall be as blue as the great sea.

Would you be in any way offended if I said that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection?

I hope you hair curls naturally, does it? Yes, darling, with a little help from others.

And, after all, what is a fashion? From the artistic point of view, it is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

The world seemed to me fine because you were in it, and goodness more real because you lived.

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.