Quotes About Beauty

A world of grief and pain, but the flowers bloom even then

The world of dew is the world of dew. And yet, and yet--

Take this single tree. They could cut it down and make half of it into an incense tray, decorate it with lacquer set with gold or silver filigree, and set it in an alcove of an aristocrat or man of high rank as a tasteful ornament. The other half they could make into wooden clogs for stepping through the mud. When you look at the two different shapes, one is admired while the other is considered mean, but they're the same in terms of the cutting down of a living tree.

Whatever kind of gentlemen you may be, you have a shabby appearance. Yet even in front of the extraordinary beauty of the exalted Seven Gods of Good Fortune, you show no reserve, but deliberately gather and entertain yourselves with elegance.

You only have to start saying of something : 'Ah, how beautiful ! We must photograph it !' and you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it never existed, and therefore in order to really live you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life.

The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow." - from "The Adventure of a Photographer

New York is perhaps the only place in America where you feel at the centre and not at the margins, in the provinces, so for that reason I prefer its horror to this privileged beauty, its enslavement to the freedoms which remain local and privileged and very particularized, and which do not represent a genuine antithesis.

At times the mirror increases a thing's value, at times denies it.

Her friends' lips were red, their teeth white, and their tongues and gums were pink. Pink, too, were the tips of their breasts. Their eyes were aquamarine blue, cherry-black, hazel and maroon.

To write, for example, a crime that is horrible but which somehow 'resembles' the butterfly, which would be light and fine like the butterfly. I could also describe the butterfly, but bearing in mind the horrible scene of a crime, so that the butterfly would become something frightful.

Reality, ugly or beautiful as it may be, is something I cannot change

In the Ondariva gardens the branches spread out like the tentacles of extraordinary animals, and the plants on the ground opened up stars of fretted leaves like the green skins of reptiles, and waved feathery yellow bamboos with a rustle like paper.

There: the white butterfly has crossed the whole valley, and from the reader's book has flown here, to light on the page I am writing.

In short, what you are doing is very beautiful but grammatically it doesn't change a thing. At the moment when you most appear to be a united voi, a second person plural, you are two tu's, more separate and circumscribed than before.

E poi non sapevo più cosa guardare e guardai il cielo.

Everything in the garden was like that: lovely but impossible to enjoy properly, with that worrying feeling inside that they were only there through an odd stroke of luck, and the fear that they'd soon have to give an account of themselves.

I had seen much more than that, I had visited the world of the things that could have been, and I couldn't drive it from my mind. And I had known the beauty kept prisoner in the heart of that world, the beauty lost for me and for all of us, and I had fallen in love with it.

Ayl was a happy inhabitant of the silence that reigns where all vibration is excluded; for her anything that looked likely to break the absolute visual neutrality was a harsh discord; beauty began for her only where the greyness had extinguished even the remotest desire to be anything other than grey.

or else we contemplated the stars beyond the Moon, big as pieces of fruit, made of light, ripened on the curved branches of the sky, and everything exceeded my most luminous hopes ...

I still look for her as soon as the first sliver appears in the sky, and the more it waxes, the more clearly I imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them.

If you compare yourself with the limitations that came afterwards, if you think of how having one form excludes other forms, of the monotonous routine where you finally feel trapped, well, I don't mind saying, life was beautiful in those days.

Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone's gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly.

There must be fidelity to a goal and purity of heart, values fundamental to salvation and triumph. There must also be beauty, a sign of grace that can be masked by the humble, ugly guise of a frog; and above all, there must be present the infinite possibilities of mutation, the unifying element in everything: men, beasts, plants, things.

tal como todavía la recuerdo, tal como incluso ahora que la Luna se ha convertido en ese pequeño círculo plano y lejano, siempre la voy buscando con la mirada en cuanto en el cielo aparece el primer gajo; y cuanto más crece más me imagino verla, a ella o alguna cosa de ella pero nada más que a ella, en cien, en mil vistas distintas, a ella que hace Luna a la Luna y que en cada luna llena obliga a los perros a aullar durante toda la noche y a mí con ellos.