Famous Quotes & Sayings

William Hazlitt

Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.

William Hazlitt

The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner.

Walter Pater

Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.

Vivienne Westwood

People have never looked so ugly as they do today. We just consume far too much.

Wayne Dyer

Beautiful thoughts build a beautiful soul. ...There's always something beautiful to be experienced wherever you are.

Virginia Woolf

loveliness is infernally sad.

Virginia Woolf

Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that

Virginia Woolf

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

William Blake

Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed.

William Blake

Exhuberance is Beauty.

William Blake

The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

Wallace Stevens

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

Samuel Richardson

Handsome husbands often make a wife's heart ache.

Samuel Richardson

Tho' Beauty is generally the creature of fancy, yet are there some who will be Beauties in every eye.

Samuel Richardson

Beauty is an accidental and transient good.

Samuel Beckett

All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The sense of beauty is intuitive, and beauty itself is all that inspires pleasure without, and aloof from, and even contrarily to interest.

Salvador Dali

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

Salma Hayek

I say that the most liberating thing about beauty is realizing that you are the beholder.

Whitney Houston

I believe that children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside.

Joseph Joubert

All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is true that genius takes its rise out of the mountains of rectitude; that all beauty and power which men covet are somehow born out of that Alpine district; that any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We call the beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean, escaping the dowdiness of the good and the heartlessness of the true.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thy dangerous glances make women of men; new-born, we are melting into nature again.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Go out of the house to see the moon, and 't is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who could ever clutch it? Go forth to find it, and it is gone: 't is only a mirage as you look from the windows of diligence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Personal beauty is then first charming and itself, when it dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story without an end; when it suggests gleams and visions, and not earthly satisfactions; when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel his right to it, though he were Caesar; he cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty through my senses stole; I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Without the great arts which speak to the sense of beauty, a man seems to me a poor, naked, shivering creature. These are his becoming draperies, which warm and adorn him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The most useful man in the most useful world, so long as only commodity was served, would remain unsatisfied. But, as fast as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A beautiful person among the Greeks, was thought to betray by this sign some secret favor of the immortal gods; and we can pardonpride, when a woman possesses such a figure that wherever she stands, or moves, or leaves a shadow on the wall, or sits for a portrait to the artist, she confers a favor on the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

And yet--it is not beauty that inspires the deepest passion. Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. Beauty, without expression, tires.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It does not hurt weak eyes to look into beautiful eyes never so long.