beauty quotes

Albert Camus: 

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

Albert Einstein: 

The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. . . . The ordinary objects of human endeavour -- property, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.

Albert Einstein: 

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. 
Living Philosophies, 1931


Albert Einstein: 

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Anais Nin: 

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

Buckminster Fuller: 

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

Candace Bergen: 

People see you as an object, not as a person, and they project a set of expectations onto you. People who don't have it think beauty is a blessing, but actually it sets you apart.

Chinese proverb: 

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.

Frederick Turner: 

To those who followed Columbus and Cortez, the New World truly seemed incredible because of the natural endowments. The land often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the ocean. Giovanni di Verrazano in 1524 smelled the cedars of the East Coast a hundred leagues out. The men of Henry Hudson's Half Moon were temporarily disarmed by the fragrance of the New Jersey shore, while ships running farther up the coast occasionally swam through large beds of floating flowers. Wherever they came inland they found a rich riot of color and sound, of game and luxuriant vegetation. Had they been other than they were, they might have written a new mythology here. As it was, they took inventory.

Georgia O'Keeffe: 

I said to myself -- I'll paint what I see -- what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it -- I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.

Helen Keller: 

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen, nor touched ... but are felt in the heart.

Henry Miller: 

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.

Jean Kerr: 

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

John Keats: 

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

John Ruskin: 

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for example.

Kahlil Gibran: 

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

Kalidasa: 

Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the 
Verities and Realities of your Existence.
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty;
For Yesterday is but a Dream,
And To-morrow is only a Vision;
But To-day well lived makes 
Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness,
And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well therefore to this Day!
Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!

Kenneth Patton: 

The day I see a leaf is a marvel of a day.

Oscar Hammerstein, II: 

Do you love me because I'm beautiful, 
or am I am beautiful because you love me?

Pierre Auguste Renoir: 

The pain passes, but the beauty remains.

Rachel Carson: 

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.

Rachel Carson: 

It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know of wonder and humility.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

The moral sense reappears today with the same morning newness that has been from of old the fountain of beauty and strength. You say there is no religion now. 'Tis like saying in rainy weather, There is no sun, when at that moment we are witnessing one of its superlative effects.

Robert Louis Stevenson: 

It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.

Rudyard Kipling: 

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing: -- "Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade.

Sir Walter Scott: 

Nothing is more the child of art than a garden.

Sophia Loren: 

Sex appeal is fifty percent what you've got and fifty percent what people think you've got.

Virginia Woolf: 

The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

Willa Cather: 

Oh, this is the joy of the rose: / That it blows, / And goes.