Quotes about beauty

While the womanly god demands our veneration, the godlike woman kindles our love; but while we allow ourselves to melt in the celestial loveliness, the celestial self-sufficiency holds us back in awe.

It is through beauty that we arrive at freedom.

The beauty of nature lies in detail; the message, in generality.

"A pretty girl is like a melody," hummed Roger. "Excuse me," said Cobbler, turning toward him, "but I must contradict you. A pretty girl is nothing of the kind. A melody, if it is any good, has a discernible logic; a pretty girl can exist without the frailest vestige of sense."

Now, I'm very vulnerable to female beauty, as you know. Everybody's defenseless against something, and that's it for me. I see it and it blinds me to everything else. They come to my first class, and I know almost immediately which is the girl for me. There is a Mark Twain story in which he runs from a bull, and the bull looks up to him when he's hiding in a tree, and the bull thinks, "You are my meat, sir." Well, that "sir" is transformed into "young lady" when I see them in class.

Do not go to the garden of flowers!

O Friend! go not there;

In your body is the garden of flowers.

Take your seat on the thousand petals of the lotus, and there gaze on the Infinite Beauty.

What we think of as ‘Physical beauty’ is almost certainly a tag for a complex of useful survival characteristics. Smartness—intelligence—among them.

Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.

Did you appreciate that each column of the Parthenon makes a very slight inward incline, so that if projected upward into space they would eventually steeple themselves together at a symmetrical point in the empyrean? The “rightness” is located somewhere between the beauty of science and the science of beauty.

A single question remained, the age-old cry of anguish: “How could one so beautiful be so base?”

Beauty compelled admiration and erotic yearning; such was its organic function. But never by itself could it command love.

There’s ample human achievement in the universe, but not nearly enough beauty.