Quotes About Beauty

Her mother, who, since the death of the King, her father, had nothing in the world she cared for so much as this little Princess, was so terribly afraid of losing her that she quite spoiled her, and never tried to correct any of her faults. The consequence was that this little person, who was as pretty as possible, and was one day to wear a crown, grew up so proud and so much in love with her own beauty that she despised everyone else in the world.

Life is beautiful. Life is worth fighting for. It's not what happens to you, it's what you do with it.

I believe they taught me as much about the infinite capacity of things to be surprising—and a great deal about the power of beauty.

we seek here to maintain that unity in humility and love. Those who love most are the most ready for His coming. Love to each other is the life and beauty of His bride, the church.

The one foolproof test of our holiness will be the humility we demonstrate before God and men. Humility is the bloom and beauty of holiness.

Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?

Less knows so well the pleasures of youth—danger, excitement, losing oneself in a dark club with a pill, a shot, a stranger's mouth—and, with Robert and his friends, the pleasures of age—comfort and ease, beauty and taste, old friends and old stories and wine, whiskey, sunsets over the water. His entire life, he has alternated between the two.

Here was a thing that would grow old; here was a thing that would turn beautiful and lose that beauty, that would inherit the grace but also the bad ear and flawed figure of her mother, that would smile too much and squint too often and spend the last decades of her life creaming away the wrinkles made in youth until she finally gave up and wore a collar of pears to hide a wattle; here was the ordinary sadness of the world.

Bougainvillea bloomed on their porch like a discarded prom dress.

The garden was planted four hundred years ago, when the surrounding area was poplar. The woman makes a sweeping gesture, and he nods in appreciation. And now, Less says, it's unpoplar.

Maybe I'm a bad writer." "No. You're a very good writer. Kalipso was a chef d'oeuvre. So beautiful, Arthur. I admired it a lot." Now Less is stumped. He probes his weaknesses. Too magniloquent? Too spoony? "Too old?" he ventures. "We're all over fifty, Arthur. It's not that you're a bad writer." Finley pauses for effect. "It's that you're a bad gay.

As the Japanese will tell you, one can train a rose to grow through anything, to grow through a nautilus even, but it must be done with tenderness.

Then I traveled. Quite a bit, in fact. You have to stockpile a few beautiful vistas in your memory, Pearlie. In case we're rationed again.

Maybe he never did. Less knows so well the pleasures of youth—danger, excitement, losing oneself in a dark club with a pill, a shot, a stranger's mouth—and, with Robert and his friends, the pleasures of age—comfort and ease, beauty and taste, old friends and old stories and wine, whiskey, sunsets over

The shock was akin to that of buying, out of duty, a novel written by a dull and uninspired acquaintance and finding there passages of heartrending beauty and rapture that one could never imagine coming from such a tedious person.

A burned-out face trying not to break open at the horror he has seen. The way they look at you, those poor broken men; it's not empty or terrified at all. It's as if you were the first sign of life, of beauty, after a long, long winter. Does love always form, like a pearl, around these hardened bits of life?

The beauty of his youth somehow taken from its winter storage and given back to him in middle age.

One person after another came up and said his mother was at peace. His mother's friends: each with her own peculiar spiked or curled white hairdo, like a dahlia show.

Arthur Less is the first homosexual ever to grow old. That is, at least, how he feels at times like these. Here, in this tub, he should be twenty-five or thirty, a beautiful young man naked in a bathtub. Enjoying the pleasures of life. How dreadful if someone came upon naked Less today: pink to his middle, gray to his scalp, like those old double erasers for pencil and ink.

It's like fitting a hand-me-down suit. It's luck. Not love. Not that it isn't nice to have luck. Maybe the only way to think of it is being at the center of all beauty. Just by chance, today we get to be in the center of all beauty.

river and is very old and water stained in ways that would delight a painter and trouble a contractor;

As with almost every sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up.

Where did the genius come from? Where did it go? Like allowing another lover into the house to live with you, someone you'd never met but whom you knew he loved more than you. Poetry every day. A novel every few years. Something happened in that room, despite everything; something beautiful happened. It was the only place in the world where time made things better.

He goes to the Musée Carnavalet and admires the decor of crumbled palaces restored, room by room