Quotes About Beauty

Death is the mother of beauty. And what is beauty? Terror. Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming. And if beauty is terror, then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it? To live. To live forever.

She was a masterpiece of composure; nothing ever ruffled her or made her upset, and though she was not beautiful her calmness had the magnetic pull of beauty—a stillness so powerful that the molecules realigned themselves around her when she came into a room.

beauty is terror. whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it

I'd be perfectly happy if I could sit looking at the same half dozen paintings for the rest of my life. I can't think of a better way to go insane.")

But Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial.

But Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial. It

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before

Mr. MacNatt was an auto-parts salesman; Mrs. MacNatt was shaped like a pigeon and sold Avon.

Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.

And what is beauty? Terror. And if beauty is terror, then what is desire? To live. To live forever.

They really knew how to work this edge, the Dutch painters?ripeness sliding into rot. The fruit's perfect but it won't last, it's about to go. And see here especially," she said, reaching over my shoulder to trace the air with her finger, "this passage?the butterfly." The underwing was so powdery an delicate it looked as if the color would smear if she touched it. "How beautiful he plays it. Stillness with a tremble of movement.

It's beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.

exactly that girl, not the prettiest, but the no-makeup and kind of ordinary-looking girl he'd chosen to be happy

achingly conscious that I was alive and young on a beautiful day;

I look at the blanked-out faces of the other passengers--hoisting their briefcases, their backpacks, shuffling to disembark--and I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.

Where's the nobility in patching up a bunch of old tables and chairs? Corrosive to the soul, quite possibly. I've seen too many estates not to know that. Idolatry! Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn't it? And isn't the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?

The shock of first seeing a birch tree at night, rising up in the dark as cool and slim as a ghost. And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.

La belleza es terror. Temblamos ante todo lo que llamamos bello.

La línea de la belleza no cambia por mucho que haya pasado cientos de veces por una fotocopiadora.

It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

Cinnamon-colored walls, rain on the windowpanes, vast quiet and a sense of depth and distance, like the varnish over the background of a nineteenth-century paintings. Rugs worn to threads, painted Japanese fans and antique valentines flickering in candlelight, Pierrots and doves and flowergarlanded hearts.

Una cosa era ver un cuadro en un museo, pero contemplarlo bajo todas esas luces, estados anímicos y estaciones diferentes era apreciarlo de mil formas distintas; guardarlo encerrado en la oscuridad —un objeto hecho de luz, que solo vivía en la luz— no estaba bien por muchas razones que no sabría explicar.

And the strange thing was: I knew that most people didn't see her as I did — if anything, found her a bit odd-looking with her off-kilter walk and her spooky redhead pallor. For whatever dumb reason I had always flattered myself that I was the only person in the world who really appreciated her— that she would be shocked and touched and maybe even come to view herself in a whole new light if she knew just how beautiful I found her.

What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted —? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?