Quotes About Beauty

and in this shallow world a pretty face means everything.

Loyal Hanneke," Alma said fondly, "let us be honest with ourselves. Who will ever put a ring on these fishwife's hands of mine? Who will ever kiss this encyclopedia of a head?

Venice is beautiful, but like a Bergman movie is beautiful; you can admire it, but you don't really want to live in it.

Never buy inexpensive or poorly made gloves," Edna instructed us. "That's not the place to save your money. Whenever you are faced with the prospect of purchasing gloves, you must ask yourself if you would be bereft to lose one of them in the back of a taxicab. If not, then don't buy them. You should only buy gloves so beautiful that to lose one of them would break your heart.

One year, Alma bought Prudence- who liked to draw flowers (beautifully, though not 'accurately')- a lovely book on botanical illustration called Every Lady Her Own Drawing Master: A New Treatise on Flower Painting. That same year, Prudence made for Alma an exquisite satin pincushion, rendered in Alma's favorite color, aubergine.

The unnecessary and superfluous volume of pure beauty around here is not to be believed. I can pick papayas and bananas right off the trees outside my bedroom window. There's a cat who lives here who is enormously affectionate to me for half an hour everyday before I feed him, then moans crazily the rest of the time likes he's having Vietnam war flashbacks. Oddly, I don't mind this. I don't mind anything these days. I can't imagine or remember discontent.

It's not difficult to compliment people in order to try to win their affections. What is difficult is to do it in the right way. Everyone told Celia she was beautiful, but nobody had ever told her she had the carriage of a trained ballerina. Nobody had ever told her she had a face made for her times.

How do I know? How does anyone know? It's all so wildly subjective, and, anyhow, life has surprised me too many times in this realm. On one hand, I've known brilliant people who created absolutely nothing from their talents. On the other hand, there are people whom I once arrogantly dismissed who later staggered me with the gravity and beauty of their work. It has all humbled me far beyond the ability to judge anyone's potential, or to rule anybody out.

My old man also said this about Martha Knox: "She's not beautiful, but I think she knows how to sell it." Well, it's true that I wanted to hold her braid. I always had wanted to from first seeing it and mostly I wanted to in that dance, but I didn't reach for it and I didn't set down my beer bottle. Martha Knox wasn't selling anything. We didn't dance again that night or again at all, because

Groceries, baby, listen to your friend Richard. You go set your lily-white ass down in that meditation cave every day for the next three months and I promise you this--you're gonna start seeing some stuff that's so damn beautiful it'll make you wanna throw rocks at the Taj Mahal.

It helped that Celia Ray could walk into a joint like nobody I've ever seen. She would throw her resplendence into a room ahead of her, the way a soldier might throw a grenade into a machine gunner's nest, and then she would follow her beauty right on in and assess the carnage.

The cave was so beautiful that it made her bones ache with longing. She had never before coveted anything as much as she coveted this glimmering spectacle of mosses. She wanted to be swallowed by it. Already—although she was standing right there—she began to miss this place. She knew she would miss it for the rest of her days.

The day is ending. It's time for something that was beautiful to turn into something else that is beautiful. Now, let go.

Scandal or no scandal, I believe that our friendship was always destined to have been momentary—a collision of two vain young girls who intersected at the zenith of their beauty and the nadir of their intelligence, and who had blatantly used each other to acquire status and turn men's heads. That's all it had ever been, really, and that was perfect. That's all it had ever needed to be. I'd found deeper and richer female friendships later on in life

itself. Although we never lived together or shared a bed, he was always a part of me. I saved stories for him all week, so I would have good things to tell him. I asked for his opinions, because I respected his ethics. I came to cherish his face precisely because it was his. Even his burn scars became beautiful to my eye.

My spiritual investigations interest my sister mostly from a point of intellectual curiosity. 'I think that kind of faith is so beautiful,' she whispers to me in the church, 'but I can't do it, I just can't...

En un mundo dominado por el desorden y el desastre y el fraude tal vez sólo se pueda confiar en la belleza.

l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle...

The unnecessary and superfluous volume of pure beauty around here is not the be believed.

In the end, it's all just violets trying to come to light.

I would like to be like Rome when I am an old lady.

when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt—this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.

This life is a tentative and difficult experiment. Sometimes there will be victory after suffering—but nothing is promised. The most precious or beautiful individual may not be the most resilient. The battle of nature is not marked by evil, but by this one mighty and indifferent natural law: that there are simply too many life forms, and not enough resources for all to survive.

She had envisaged them traveling to Boston together, or perhaps even beyond--as far away as the Alps, climbing over boulders to hunt for pasqueflowers and rock-jasmine. He would say to her, What do you make of this specimen? and she would say, It is fine and rare.