Quotes about beauty

Beauty cannot be defined by abscissas and ordinates; neither are circles and ellipses created by their geometrical formulas.

Beauty is something animal, the beautiful is something celestial.

What good is modesty? — It makes us seem more beautiful when we are beautiful, and less ugly when we are ugly.

Eyes raised towards Heaven are always beautiful, whatever they be.

Perhaps she wasn't even pretty, but she had the glow that makes men follow a woman in the hope of reflecting a little of it.

"Why is everyone here so happy except me?"

"Because they have learned to see goodness and beauty everywhere," said the Master.

"Why don't I see goodness and beauty everywhere?"

"Because you cannot see outside of you what you fail to see inside."

Science was a social construct, but it was also and most importantly its own space, conforming to reality only; that was its beauty. Truth is beauty, as the poet had said, speaking of science. And it was; the poet had been right (they weren’t always).

Thinking it over, Sax said,”Do you ever worry that work on a realm so far beyond the reach of experiment will turn out to be a kind of house of cards—knocked over by some simple discrepancy in the math, or some later different theory that does the job better, or is more confirmable?”

“No,” Bao said. “Something so beautiful as this has to be true.”

Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real.

“The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind,” he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. “Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That’s what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides.”

“Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often,” he grinned and pushed at her belly, “expressed in curves.”

How was it that destruction could be so beautiful? Was there something in the scale of it? Was there some shadow in people, lusting for it? Or was it just a coincidental combination of the elements, the final proof that beauty has no moral dimension?