Quotes About Beauty

I don't know when we'll see each other again or what the world will be like when we do. We may both have seen many horrible things. But I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.

I had to wonder if men were so blinded by beauty that they would feel privileged to live their lives with an actual demon, so long as it was a beautiful demon.

There are no better cosmetics than a severe temperance and purity, modesty and humility, a gracious temper and calmness of spirit and there is no true beauty without the signatures of these graces in the very countenance.

a single ideal of perfection, which is impossible to know through our senses, but is knowable through the soul of reason. If we can concentrate our minds instead on that higher standard, or what Socrates calls the Idea or Form of that virtue, defined as Courage or Beauty or Justice in Itself—or even Goodness, which is the highest Form of all, setting the standard of perfection for all the rest—then true wisdom will be ours.

No one can ever know true Justice or Beauty in his mortal lifetime. He can, however, make the search for that higher knowledge his life's work, just as Socrates did.

By a mental sleight of hand, Ficino effortlessly merged Plato's theory of love with Christian Neoplatonist ideas about divine love derived from familiar authors like Augustine or Saint Bernard—not to mention Italy's two most famous love poets, Dante and Petrarch. And Plato's doctrine of love as the desire for beauty had a peculiar attraction in quattrocento Florence.

What Ficino had proved (or at least seemed to prove) was that there was no real clash between Christian and pagan systems of theology. In the end, they arose from the same source: the soul's love of beauty and perfection and its relentless aspiration for knowledge of God and therefore of ourselves.

This meant various things, but two stand out. First, obviously, was that a church or a temple should look like a church or a temple, a house like a house, and not vice versa. But the Adam brothers would also assert that an architectural style must be flexible enough to compose and decorate any type of building. Therefore any building could be made to be beautiful, not only a town house or a commercial building, but even a warehouse—or a factory.

Better a crust of black bread than a mountain of paper confections, Better a daisy in earth than a dahlia cut and gathered, Better a cowslip with root than a prize carnation without it

Her beauty was sold for an old man's gold,She's a bird in a gilded cage.

Die Lucia is volmaakt!" "Dat zou je denken," Giacomo klinkt plotseling bedrukt. "Ze heeft alleen één ernstige tekortkoming." "Welke dan?" "Zij is te jong." Hij meende het, maar zijn broer moest lachen: "Wat een schitterend gebrek!

The arts, then, are man's difference, that which makes him to be what he is; and when he speaks through them he is using the utterance which is proper to him, as man. For, if we once set aside the "does it pay" nonsense, which is evidently nonsense and pestilent nonsense at that, we come clearly and freely to the truth that man is concerned with beauty, and with the ecstasy or rapture that proceeds from the creation of beauty and from the contemplation of it.

To win the secret of words, to make a phrase that would murmur of summer and the bee, to summon the wind into a sentence, to conjure the odour of the night into the surge and fall and harmony of a line; this was the tale of the long evenings, of the candle flame white upon the paper and the eager pen.

and suddenly, it seemed, he lay in the sunlight, beautiful with his olive skin, dark haired, dark eyed, the gleaming bodily vision of a strayed faun.

And there were other rocks that were like animals, creeping, horrible animals, putting out their tongues, and others were like words I could not say, and others like dead people lying on the grass. I went on among them, though they frightened me, and my heart was full of wicked song they put into it; and I wanted to make faces and twist myself about the way they did, and I went on and on a long way till at last I liked the rocks and they didn't frighten me any more

Strangeness which is the essence of beauty is the essence of truth, and the essence of the world. I have often felt that; when the ascent of a long hill brought me to the summit of an undiscovered height in London; and I looked down on a new land.

The woods hung dark on the hills; above, the sky violet, specked with minute feathery clouds, white as snowflakes.

Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.

One evening, I sat Beauty in my lap.—And I found her bitter.—And I cursed her.

I have bathed in the PoemOf the Sea…Devouring the green azures.

O seasons, O châteaux,What soul is without flaws?

The northern lights rise like a kiss to the sea

I have stretched ropes from bell-tower to bell-tower; garlands from window to window; chains of gold from star to star, and I dance.

In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.