Beauty

Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), British author. Ashenden, contesting the romanticization of beauty, in Cakes and Ale, ch. 11 (1930).

 

Beauty

All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory— of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.

Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), French poet. Curiosités Esthétiques, “Salon of 1846,” sct. 18 (1868; repr. in The Mirror of Art, ed. by Jonathan Mayne, 1955).

 

Beauty

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.

Simone Weil (1909–43), French philosopher, mystic. “Human Personality” (written 1943; published in La Table Ronde, Dec. 1950; repr. in Selected Essays, ed. by Richard Rees, 1962).

 

Beauty

Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.

Eugène Ionesco (1912–94), Rumanian-born French playwright. Present Past— Past Present, ch. 5 (1968).

 

Beauty

Beauty is as relative as light and dark. Thus, there exists no beautiful woman, none at all, because you are never certain that a still far more beautiful woman will not appear and completely shame the supposed beauty of the first.

Paul Klee (1879–1940), Swiss artist. The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918, no. 871 (1957; tr. 1965), 1910 entry.

 

Beauty

Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.

Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930), French filmmaker, author. “Defence and Illustration of Classical Construction,” in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris, 15 Sept. 1952; repr. in Godard on Godard, ed. and tr. by Tom Milne, 1968).

 

Beauty

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931), Lebanese poet, novelist. The Prophet (1923).

 

Beauty

Beauty is ever to the lonely mind
A shadow fleeting; she is never plain.
She is a visitor who leaves behind
The gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.

Robert Nathan (1894–1985), U.S. novelist. Beauty Is Ever to the Lonely Mind.

Beauty

Beauty is only the promise of happiness.

Stendhal (1783–1842), French author. De l’Amour, ch. 17, Footnote (1822).

 

Beauty

Beauty is the still birth of suffering, every woman knows that.

Emily Prager (b. 1948), U.S. journalist, author. Lao Bing, in “A Visit from the Footbinder,” in Close Company: Stories of Mothers and Daughters (ed. by Christine Park and Caroline Heaton, 1987).

 

Beauty

Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–45), U.S. poet, critic, short-story writer. “The Rationale of Verse,” in The Pioneer (March 1843).

 

Beauty

Beauty. The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914), U.S. author. The Devil’s Dictionary (1881–1906).

 

Beauty

I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful.

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Anglo-Irish playwright, author. The Value of Art in Modern Life (1884).

 

Beauty

I have often asked myself what could be the point of this mystification we call life. It is to recognize what is beautiful, it is to love. Those who do not love and do not recognize beauty are really and truly the mystified ones. As for us, we have the right to whistle at the great mystificator.

Hector Berlioz (1803-69), French composer. Letter to Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, Paris, 20 June 1859, tr. Roger Nichols, in Selected Letters of Hector Berlioz, ed. Hugh Macdonald, Faber and Faber Ltd, London, 1995.

 

Beauty

It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But . . . it is better to be good than to be ugly.

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Anglo-Irish author. Lord Henry, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch. 17 (1891).

 

Beauty

It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the “dear deceit” of beauty.

George Eliot (1819–80), English novelist. Adam Bede, bk. 1, ch. 15 (1859).

 

Beauty

I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want— an adorable pancreas?

Jean Kerr (b. 1923), U.S. author, playwright. The Snake Has All the Lines, “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall” (1958).

 

Beauty

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), English feminist writer. A Vindication of the Rights of Women, ch. 3 (1792).

 

Beauty

The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.

Naomi Wolf (b. 1962), U.S. author. The Beauty Myth, “Sex” (1990).

 

Beauty

The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.

George Sand (1804–76), French novelist. Handsome Lawrence, ch. 1 (1872).

 

Beauty

The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), German critic, philosopher. The Image of Proust, sct. 1 (1929; repr. in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, 1968).

 

Beauty

The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.

Northrop Frye (1912–91), Canadian literary critic. Anatomy of Criticism, “Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype” (1957).

 

Beauty

The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one’s own— even more, one’s own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980), U.S. short-story writer, novelist. Herr Freytag, in Ship of Fools, pt. 3 (1962).

 

Beauty

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles . . . but there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief— a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you.

George Eliot (1819–80), English novelist. Adam Bede, bk. 1, ch. 7 (1859), describing the beauty of Hetty Sorrel.

 

Beauty

To me, fair friend, you never can be old
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616), English dramatist, poet. Sonnet 104.

 

Beauty

White teeth, white hands, and neck as ivory white,
Black eyes, black brows, black hairs that hide
 delight:
Red lips, red cheeks, and tops of nipples red,
Long legs, long fingers, long locks of her head,
Short feet, short ears, and teeth in measure short,
Broad front, broad breast, broad hips in seemely
 sort,
Straight legs, straight nose and straight her
 pleasures place,
Full thighs, full buttocks, full her belly’s space,
Thin lips, thin eyelids, and hair thin and fine,
Small mouth, small waist, small pupils of her
 eyes.

John Florio (c. 1553–1625), English author, translator. Second Frutes, ch. 8 (1591), James’s notion of beauty in a woman.

 

 

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