"...I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen ...."
Submitted by Quonation
Category: Beauty
"There is a certain standard of grace and beauty which consists in a certain relation between our nature, such as it is, weak or strong, and the thing which pleases us. Whatever is formed according to this standard pleases us, be it house, song, discourse, verse, prose, woman, birds, rivers, trees, room, dress, and so on. Whatever is not made according to this standard displeases those who have good taste."
"As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry."
"Does he who loves someone on account of beauty really love that person? No, for smallpox, which will kill beauty without killing the person, will cause him to love the person no more. And if one loves me for my judgment, for my memory, he does not love me, for I can lose these qualities without losing myself. Where, then, is this myself, if it be neither in the body nor in the soul?"
"Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics."
"What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects."
"For with this desire of physical beauty mingled itself early the fear of death--the fear of death intensified by the desire of beauty."
"I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!"
"...I wasn't at all prepared for the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me. You would have thought I had murdered someone, andperhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live. It was a very sad business indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair."
"The good is the beautiful."
"It seems to me that whatever else is beautiful apart from asbsolute beauty is beautiful because it partakes of that absolute beauty, and for no other reason. Do you accept this kind of causality?"
"Semi-Saracenic architecture, sustaining itself as if by miracle in mid air; glittering in the red sunlight with a hundred oriels,minarets, and pinnacles; and seeming the phantom handiwork, conjointly, of the Sylphs,... the Fairies,... the Genii, and ... the Gnomes."
"There might be a class of beings, human once, but now to humanity invisible, for whose scrutiny, and for whose refined appreciation of the beautiful, more especially than for our own, had been set in order by God the great landscape-garden of the whole earth."
"There is no exquisite beauty," says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and genera of beauty, "without some strangeness in the proportion."
"The death ... of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world."
"We have ... a thirst unquenchable, to allay which he has not shown us the crystal springs. This thirst belongs to the immortalityof Man.... It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us--but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above."
"The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own--even more, one's own, for that has been put in our careand we are responsible for its well-being."
"As white their bark, so white this lady's hours."
"Then, bringing me the joy we feel when wee see a work by our favorite painter which differs from any other that we know, or if weare led before a painting of which we have until then only seen a pencil sketch, if a musical piece heard only on the piano appears before us clothed in the colors of the orchestra, my grandfather called me the [hawthorn] hedge at Tansonville, saying, "You who are so fond of hawthorns, look at this pink thorn, isn't it lovely?"
"Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful world,"
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