Beauty

Beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.

But of the heaven which is above the heavens, what earthly poet ever did or ever will sing worthily?

Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly.

Beauty is the splendor of truth.

Beauty is certainly a soft, smooth, slippery thing, and therefore of a nature which easily slips in and permeates our souls.

Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.

True greatness is free, kind, familiar, and popular; it lets itself be touched and handled, it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters; the better one knows it, the more one admires it.

One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve.

The flower has no weekday self, dressed as it always is in Sunday clothes.

This was really a compliment to be pleased with— a nice little handsome pat of butter made up by a neat-handed . . . dairy-maid instead of the grease fit only for cartwheels which one is dosed with by the pound.

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in light out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.

Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.

In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.

Beauty is only a promise of happiness.

Beauty can pierce one like a pain.

The ideal has many names, and beauty is but one of them.

Beauty is everywhere a welcome guest.

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles, from the desperate to the sheepish.

Bait, n . A preparation that renders the hook more palatable. The best kind is beauty.

Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference.

There is nothing that makes its way more directly to the soul than beauty.

A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty; and inasmuch as babyhood spans but three short years, no baby is competent to be a joy “forever.”

while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.