How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness?—from the covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born.
— Berenice
Quotes About Beauty
He raised himself on his hands and looked at Irene's face: the nudity of that feminine body had risen into her face, the body had reabsorbed it, as nature reabsorbs forsaken gardens.
— The Reprieve
There is a certain standard of grace and beauty which consists in a certain relation between our nature... and the thing which pleases us.
— Pensées
You are the trembling of time, that passesbetween vertical light and darkened sky,
— 100 Love Sonnets
Can human folly harbour a more arrogant or ungrateful thought than the notion that whereas God makes man beautiful in body, man makes himself pure in heart?
— Select Letters
It seems to me that whatever else is beautiful apart from absolute Beauty is beautiful because it partakes of that absolute Beauty, and for no other reason... [I]t is by Beauty that beautiful things are beautiful.
— Apology, Crito and Phaedo of Socrates.
In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.
— Critique of Judgment
Henceforth an individual solace dear; Part of my Soul I seek thee, and thee claim My other half: with that thy gentle hand Seisd mine, I yielded, and from that time see How beauty is excelld by manly grace.
— Paradise Lost
Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.
— Stray Birds
If the painter wishes to see beauties that charm him, it lies in his power to create them, and if he wishes to see monstrosities that are frightful, ridiculous, or truly pitiable, he is lord and God thereof.
— Leonardo's Notebooks
I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.
— Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du mal: A Bilingual Edition
I don't think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains.
— The Diary of a Young Girl
Instead of imposing new obligations, (Christians) should appear as people who wish to share their joy, who point to a horizon of beauty and who invite others to a delicious banquet.
— Evangelii Gaudium: The Joy of the Gospel
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
— Death in Venice and Other Tales
How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
— The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
Virtue is excellence, something uncommonly great and beautiful, which rises far above what is vulgar and ordinary.
— The Theory of Moral Sentiments
It is a beautiful and delightful sight to behold the body of the Moon.
— The Starry Messenger, Venice 1610: "From Doubt to Astonishment"
It doesn't matter if you're born in a duck yard, so long as you are hatched from a swan's egg!
— The Ugly Duckling
Describe plum-blossoms? Better than my verses...white / Wordless Butterflies
— Japanese Haiku
Beauty itself is a painful convulsion in the heart, an abundance of vitality in the soul, and a mad chase undertaken by the spirit until it encounters the heavens.
— Palace of Desire
The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with joy are goodness, beauty, and truth.
Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint.
And yonder sits a maiden, The fairest of the fair, With gold in her garment glittering, And she combs her golden hair.
Only through Beauty's morning-gate, dost thou penetrate the land of knowledge.