A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.


A beautiful woman should break her mirror early.


A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.


A poor beauty finds more lovers than husbands.


A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness; but still will keep a bower quiet for us, and a sleep full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing…


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.


All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable.


Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers. What we call art is a game.


As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.


At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise… that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.


Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.


Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.


Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.


Beauty can't amuse you, but brainwork — reading, writing, thinking–can.


Beauty depends on size as well as symmetry. No very small animal can be beautiful, for looking at it takes so small a portion of time that the impression of it will be confused. Nor can any very large one, for a whole view of it cannot be had at once, and so there will be no unity and completeness.


Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.


Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.


Beauty in not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.


Beauty is a form of genius — is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.


Beauty is a good letter of introduction.

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