Quotes about beauty

One would think that the mere shortness of life would be a reminder that to destroy beauty is to destroy one’s own self too.

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.'''

On the other side of anger at those who either peddled false visions of security or incited irrational fears of death, Lucretius offered a feeling of liberation and the power to stare down what had once seemed so menacing. What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world.

"This grey’s sort of depressing.”

What on earth has that got to do with anything?“It’s a question of aesthetics, Em. We should always strive to fill our lives with beauty.”

I don’t see anything beautiful in something that was designed to kill people.

“There’s beauty in everything, Em. You just have to learn to look for it.”If you’re going to preach at me, I think I’ll just curl up and go back to sleep.

Even ugly people know beauty when they don't see it.

a true beauty, real and lasting, [is] achieved by a healthy diet, without eating meat or drinking alcoholic beverages, by practicing gymnastics and taking walks in the open air, not a fictitious beauty such as that of adornment, without which, she is no longer herself.

Art is not only made from things that "spark joy." Art is also made out of what is ugly or repulsive to us. Part of the artist's job is to help tidy up the place, to make order out of chaos, to turn trash into treasure, to show us beauty where we can't see it.

You speak like an aesthete sometimes, Sonmi.

Perhaps those deprived of beauty perceive it most instinctively.

For all those years when Loonie and I surfed together, having caught the bug that first morning at the Point, we never spoke about the business of beauty. We were mates but there were places our conversation simply couldn't go. There was never any doubt about the primary thrill of surfing, the huge body-rush we got flying down the line with the wind in our ears. We didn't know what endorphins were but we quickly understood how narcotic the feeling was, and how addictive it became; from day one I was stoned from just watching. We talked about skill and courage and luck - we shared all that, and in time we surfed to fool with death - but for me there was still the outlaw feeling of doing something graceful, as if dancing on water was the best and bravest thing a man could do.

He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

The more we narrow the definition of beauty, the more beauty we shut out of our lives.

'In the end, defeat, and the cold, must come. First to the system, then the galaxy, then the universe, and the rest will be silence. Not to admit that is a foolish vanity.' She paused. 'Yet one grows flowers because they are lovely - not because one wishes them to live for ever.'