Quotes About Beauty

The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce.

Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.

The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who ever could clutch it?

Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.

The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.

Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.

That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are, is cheerfulness, and courage, and the endeavor to realize our aspirations. Shall not the heart which has received so much, trust the Power by which it lives? May it not quit other leadings, and listen to the Soul that has guided it so gently, and taught it so much, secure that the future will be worthy of the past?

Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.

Never miss an opportunity of noticing anything of beauty ...

There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful.

Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is a million fathoms deep.

Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.

Beauty is its own excuse for being.

This love of beauty is Taste. Others have the same love in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is art.

See yonder leafless tree against the sky, How they diffuse themselves into the air, And ever subdividing separate, Limbs into branches, branches into twigs, As if they loved the element, & hasted To dissipate their being into it.

For flowers that bloom about our feet; For tender grass, so fresh, so sweet; For song of bird, and hum of bee; For all things fair we hear or see, Father in heaven, we thank Thee!

Then [good manners] must be inspired by the good heart. There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.

I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.

How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and monring dew

Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

To describe adequately is the high power & one of the highest enjoyments of man. She was beautiful and he fell in love with her. The thing has happened to millions, yet how few can tell the story. Try some of them, set them at the painting; each knows it all & can communicate nothing. Then comes Shakspeare [sic], & tells it point for point as it befel [sic], or better; and now we have two things, love & literature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson