Quotes to inspire and reflect

Beauty is truth’s smile / when she beholds her own face / in a perfect mirror.

To keep beauty in its place is to make all things beautiful.

All beauties are to be honored, but only one embraced.

Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadow ceases to be enjoyed as light.

’ Lis not a lip or eye we beauty call, / But the joint force and full result of all.

Truth is the strong eompost in which beauty may sometimes germinate.

Beauty in all things—no, we cannot hope for that; but some place set apart for it.

Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it.

And his heart was stirred, it felt a father’s kindness: such an emotion as the possessor of beauty can inspire in one who has offered himself up in spirit to create beauty.

beauty gets the best of it / in this world.

Beauty hath no true glass, except it be / In the sweet privacy of loving eyes.

I do not want no pretty woman. First thing you know, you fall in love with her—then you got to kill somebody about her. She’ll make you so jealous, you'll bust!

The young prince in velvet gathered in lovely domesticity around the queen amid the hush of rich draperies may presently grow up to be Pedro the Cruel or Charles the Mad, but the moment of beauty was there.

She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.

We fly to Beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

Oh, what a vileness human beauty is, / corroding, corrupting everything it touches!

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.

The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary.

Beauty without expression tires.

Any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm.

There is in true beauty, as in courage, somewhat which narrow souls cannot dare to admire.

Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.

Personal beauty requires that one should be tall; little people may have charm and elegance, but beauty—no.

Anything in any way beautiful derives its beauty from itself, and asks nothing beyond itself. Praise is no part of it, for nothing is made worse or better by praise.

Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.

The existence of the soldier, next to capital punishment, is the most grievous vestige of barbarism which survives among men.

American bankers believe in the personal touch; the teller conveys a sense that he happens to be there accidentally and he is overjoyed at the lucky chance of the encounter.

In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.

The background reveals the true being and state of being of the man or thing. If I do not possess the background, I make the man transparent, the thing transparent.

He was himself a homeless bachelor with a past, much in debt, and nothing gave more pleasure than to envy his friends their wives and comforts and to speak of them intimately and disparagingly.

Bachelor’s fare: bread and cheese and kisses.

There lay the little miracle among the pillows: so well formed, so encompassed, as it were, with the harmony of sweet proportions, with little hands that even then, though so much tinier, were beautiful as now; with wide-open eyes blue as the sky and brighter than the sunshine—and almost in that very second he felt himself captured and held fast.

Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it.

Every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.

As hand-to-hand combat has gradually disappeared from our civilization, even in wartime, and competition has become more and more sophisticated and abstract, Americans have turned to the automobile to satisfy their love of direct aggression.

John did not remember very clearly the first time she had gone, to have Roy; folks said that he had cried and carried on the whole time his mother was away; he remembered only enough to be afraid every time her belly began to swell, knowing that each time the swelling began it would not end until she was taken from him, to come back with a stranger.

Beneath this slab / John Brown is stowed. / He watched the ads, / And not the road.

In reviewing my life, in tracing its course, I fill my cell with the pleasure of being what for want of a trifle I failed to be, recapturing, so that I may hurl myself into them as into dark pits, those moments when I strayed through the trap-ridden compartments of a subterranean sky.

When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one’s

Man, proud man, / Drest in a little brief authority, / Most ignorant of what he’s most assured.

Jurisdiction is not given for the sake of the judge, but for that of the litigant.

Lawful and settled authority is very seldom resisted when it is well employed.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.

If your heart is quite set upon a crown, make and put on one of roses, for it will make the prettier appearance.

The audience is not the least important actor in the play and if it will not do its allotted share the play falls to pieces.

It’s the admirer and the watcher who provoke us to all the insanities we commit.

If one talks to more than four people, it is an audience; and one cannot really think or exchange thoughts with an audience.

The audience is a very curious animal. It is shrewd rather than intelligent. Its mental capacity is less than that of its most intellectual members.