Beauty

Taste . . . is the only morality. . . . Tell me what you like, and I’ll tell you what you are.

One evening, I sat Beauty in my lap.—And I found her bitter.—And I cursed her.

Beauty is nothing

An artist has no need to express his thought directly in his work for the latter to reflect its quality; it has even been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of Him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.

But the beauty is not the madness

How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals.

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.

We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace .

Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

Of life's two chief prizes, beauty and truth, I found the first in a loving heart and the second in a labourer’s hand.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

To appreciate the beauty of a snowflake, it is necessary to stand out in the cold.

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.

Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.

There are many good inventions on earth, some useful, some pleasing: for their sake, the earth is to be loved. And there is such a variety of well-invented things that the earth is like the breasts of a woman: useful as well as pleasing.

This woman is beautiful and clever: but how much cleverer she would have become if she were not beautiful!

As yet hath his knowledge not learned to smile, and to be without jealously ; as yet hath his gushing passion not become calm in beauty.

Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all.

hitherto we have been permitted to seek beauty only in the morally good - a fact which sufficiently accounts for our having found so little of it and having had to seek about for imaginary beauties without backbone! - As surely as the wicked enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty: and many of them have not yet been discovered.

It may be that until now there has been no more potent means for beautifying man himself than piety: it can turn man into so much art, surface, play of colors, graciousness that his sight no longer makes one suffer.---

I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.