Quotes about beauty

It was beautiful at this distance. The cities nothing but firefly twinkles on the dark side. Where the sun struck the Earth, almost nothing man had made was visible from the lunar orbit. The planet looked clean, unspoiled.

It was a pretty lie.

Seemed like a fact of the universe that the closer you got to anything, the worse it looked. Take the most beautiful person in the solar system, zoom in on them at the right magnification and they were an apocalyptic cratered landscape crawling with horrors. That’s what the Earth was. A shining jewel from space, up close a blasted landscape covered with mites living by devouring the dying.

She knew intellectually that he was beautiful, the way the iridescent wings of a carrion fly would be.

Sit here, now, and look. The water, the surf, the colors on the shore. You think they make the beauty of the tropical sea, aye, lad? They do not. 'Tis the knowledge of what lurks below the surface of it, that awful-looking thing, as you call it, that carries death with every move that it makes. So it is, so it is with all beauty. So it is with Mexico. I hope you never forget it.

He knows that he is beautiful and somehow this makes him ugly.

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll;

Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare,

And beauty draws us with a single hair.

If to her share some female errors fall,

Look on her face, and you'll forget 'em all.

Better to be strong than pretty and useless.

"If you could just for a moment come out of yourself and see what I see...you wouldn't stop looking at yourself. But unfortunately you need a mirror to do it, my poor beauty.” (p148)

Symmetry, of course, was the scientific formula of beauty.

If I could only have seen her when I was a young man! The contemplation of her beauty might have changed my whole life. Beauty can do that, can’t it?

...the moon that hung over the garden like some great priceless pearl, flawed and blemished with grey shadowy ridges as only a very great beauty can risk being. (IV, p.159)