The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor even touched, but just felt in the heart.
—Helen Keller (1880–1968) American Author
Plainness has its peculiar temptations quite as much as beauty.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) (1819–80) English Novelist
When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.
—Chinese Proverb
Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clear to the bone.
—Anonymous
Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity.
—Plato (428 BCE–347 BCE) Ancient Greek Philosopher, Mathematician, Educator
Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God’s handwriting—a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
A beautiful woman should break her mirror early.
—Baltasar Gracian (1601–58) Spanish Scholar, Prose Writer
Beauty is as summer fruits, which are easy to corrupt and cannot last; and for the most part it makes a dissolute youth, and an age a little out of countenance; but if it light well, it makes virtues shine and vice blush.
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English Philosopher
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
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all
Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.
—John Keats (1795–1821) English Poet
By plucking her petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower.
—Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali Poet, Polymath
Exuberance is beauty.
—William Blake (1757–1827) English Poet, Painter, Printmaker
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) Irish Poet, Playwright
Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being. We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order; knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.
—Plotinus (c.205–270 CE) Greek Philosopher, Founder of Neoplatonism
Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.
—Anne Frank (1929–45) Holocaust Victim
There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
Beauty is a primeval phenomenon, which itself never makes its appearance, but the reflection of which is visible in a thousand different utterances of the creative mind, and is as various as nature herself.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German Poet
O, thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
—Christopher Marlowe (1564–93) English Playwright, Poet, Translator
Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God.
—Jean Anouilh (1910–87) French Dramatist
Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German Poet
Beauty is the first present nature gives to women and the first it takes away.
—George Brossin Mere (c.1610–85) French Intellectual, Author
A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen. But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul’s own doing.
—Marie Stopes (1880–1958) British Author, Social Activist
But what Kezia liked more than anything, what she liked frightfully, was the lamp. It stood in the middle of the dining-room table, an exquisite little amber lamp with a white globe. It was filled all ready for lighting, though, of course, you couldn’t light it. But there was something inside that looked like oil and moved when you shook it.
The father and mother dolls, who sprawled very stiff as though they had fainted in the drawing-room, and their two little children asleep upstairs, were really too big for the doll’s house. They didn’t look as though they belonged. But the lamp was perfect. It seemed to smile at Kezia, to say, ‘I live here.’ The lamp was real.
—Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) New Zealand-born British Author
The love of beauty in its multiple forms is the noblest gift of the human cerebrum.
—Alexis Carrel (1873–1944) American Surgeon, Biologist
A woman who could always love would never grow old; and the love of mother and wife would often give or preserve many charms if it were not too often combined with parental and conjugal anger. There remains in the faces of women who are naturally serene and peaceful, and of those rendered so by religion, an after-spring, and later an after-summer, the reflex of their most beautiful bloom.
—Jean Paul (1763–1825) German Novelist, Humorist
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American First Lady, Diplomat, Humanitarian
Beauty is an outward gift which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.
—Edward Gibbon (1737–94) English Historian, Politician
Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail.
—Anonymous