150 Beauty Quotes

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How would you answer this question: “Who do you think is beautiful?” Do images of famous sex symbols come to mind? Or, do you automatically think of family members or friends?

Now, how would you answer this one: “What do you think is beautiful?” That’s an even more difficult question. According to the collection of quotes below, beauty can be found in something so simple as a common blade of grass to something so complex and profound as the mysteries of the universe, and everything in between! That’s beautiful in itself, don’t you think? ; )

“Beauty” is a concept that so completely captures our unique longings that no two among us have ever agreed on what it means—and probably never will. (Any Grace Jones or Deee-Lite fans here?)

150 QUOTES ABOUT WHO OR WHAT IS BEAUTIFUL

1. Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of introduction.
- Aristotle

2. Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.
- Saint Augustine

3. 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.
- Marcus Aurelius

4. There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
- Francis Bacon, Sr.

5. Beauty comes in all sizes, not just size 5.
- Roseanne Barr

6. There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
- Charles Baudelaire

7. People see you as an object, not as a person; and, they project a set of expectations onto you. People who don’t have it think beauty is a blessing; but, actually, it sets you apart.
- Candace Bergen

8. Mere enthusiasm is the all in all …
Passion and expression are beauty itself.
- William Blake

9. If you’re respectful by habit,
constantly honoring the worthy,
four things increase:
long life, beauty,
happiness, strength.
- Buddha

10. How beautiful the leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.
- John Burroughs

11. Some people, no matter how old they get, never lose their beauty—they merely move it from their faces into their hearts.
- Martin Buxbaum

12. The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful is, “Why do I think it’s not beautiful?” And, very shortly, you discover that there is no reason.
- John Cage

13. Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
- Albert Camus

14. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
- Rachel Carson

15. It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know of wonder and humility.
- Rachel Carson

16. One summer night, out on a flat headland, all but surrounded by the waters of the bay, the horizons were remote and distant rims on the edge of space. Millions of stars blazed in darkness, and on the far shore a few lights burned in cottages. Otherwise there was no reminder of human life. My companion and I were alone with the stars: the misty river of the Milky Way flowing across the sky, the patterns of the constellations standing out bright and clear, a blazing planet low on the horizon. It occurred to me that if this were a sight that could be seen only once in a century, this little headland would be thronged with spectators. But it can be see many scores of nights in any year, and so the lights burned in the cottages and the inhabitants probably gave not a thought to the beauty overhead; and because they could see it almost any night, perhaps they never will.
- Rachel Carson

17. It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honor nature’s gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever.
- Jimmy Carter

18. The beautiful remains so in ugly surroundings.
- Chazal

19. There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.
- G. K. Chesterton

20. The problem with beauty is that it’s like being born rich and getting poorer.
- Joan Collins

21. Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.
- Confucius

22. I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may—light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.
- John Constable

23. The art of procreation and the members employed therein are so repulsive, that, if it were not for the beauty of the faces and the adornments of the actors and the pent-up impulse, nature would lose the human species.
- Leonardo da Vinci

24. That which is striking and beautiful is not always good, but that which is good is always beautiful.
- Ninon de L’Enclos

25. The lover says: “How beautiful you are, now that you love me!”
- Marlene Dietrich

26. Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and, from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.
- Charles Dickens

27. Beauty is not caused. It is.
- Emily Dickinson

28. Beauty … when you look into a woman’s eyes and see what is in her heart.
- Nate Dircks

29. The ideals which have lighted my way and, time after time, have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been kindness, beauty, and truth.
- Albert Einstein

30. A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
- Albert Einstein

31. 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.
- Albert Einstein

32. Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.
- Albert Einstein

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

34. The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
- Albert Einstein

35. Plainness has its peculiar temptations quite as much as beauty.
- George Eliot

36. Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
- Ralph Ellison

37. Love of beauty is Taste. The creation of beauty is Art.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

38. We find a delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

39. Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

40. To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

41. If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

42. Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

43. We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

44. As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

45. Flowers … are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

46. Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

47. Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.
- Anne Frank

48. Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.
- Kinky Friedman

49. When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
- Richard Buckminster Fuller

50. There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
- John Kenneth Galbraith

51. Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.
- Kahlil Gibran

52. When you reach the heart of life you shall find beauty in all things, even in the eyes that are blind to beauty.
- Kahlil Gibran

53. We live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting.
- Kahlil Gibran

54. Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.
- Kahlil Gibran

55. A man’s true wealth is the good he does in the world. Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror.
- Kahlil Gibran

56. Keep your faith in all beautiful things; in the sun when it is hidden, in the Spring when it is gone.
- Roy R. Gilson

57. Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.
- Jean-Luc Godard

58. The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.
- Goethe

59. A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
- Goethe

60. The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
- Nadine Gordimer

61. The ever-present phenomenon ceases to exist for our senses. It was a city dweller, or a prisoner, or a blind man suddenly given his sight, who first noted natural beauty.
- Remy de Gourmont

62. Beauty and folly are generally companions.
- Baltasar Gracian

63. A person is only beautiful when their own beauty is reflecting on to others.
- Tara Grady

64. I know the world is filled with troubles and many injustices. But reality is as beautiful as it is ugly. I think it is just as important to sing about beautiful mornings as it is to talk about slums. I just couldn’t write anything without hope in it.
- Oscar Hammerstein

65. Time is a great healer, but a poor beautician.
- Lucille S. Harper

66. Just for today, I will be unafraid. Especially I will not be afraid to enjoy what is beautiful, and to believe that as I give to the world, so the world will give to me.
- Kenneth L. Holmes

67. Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

68. Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.
- David Hume

69. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
- Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

70. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
- Franz Kafka

71. Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the
Verities and Realities of your Existence.
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty;
For Yesterday is but a Dream,
And To-morrow is only a Vision;
But To-day well lived makes
Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness,
And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well therefore to this Day!
Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!
- Kalidasa

72. A thing of beauty is a joy forever; its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.
- John Keats

73. Beauty isn’t worth thinking about; what’s important is your mind. You don’t want a fifty-dollar haircut on a fifty-cent head.
- Garrison Keillor

74. The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched; they must be felt with the heart.
- Helen Keller

75. I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want—an adorable pancreas?
- Jean Kerr

76. A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.
- Karl Kraus

77. People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.
- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

78. I don’t like standard beauty—there is no beauty without strangeness.
- Karl Lagerfeld

79. Joy is the best makeup.
- Anne Lamott

80. Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness. What ails us is that our sense of beauty is so bruised and blunted, we miss all the best.
- D. H. Lawrence

81. The most beautiful make-up of a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy.
- Yves Saint Laurent

82. The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one’s soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility, you are not attractive—you are leaking.
- Fran Lebowitz

83. Beauty comes as much from the mind as from the eye.
- Grey Livingston

84. Beauty—in projection and perceiving—is 99.9% attitude.
- Grey Livingston

85. Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.
- Sophia Loren

86. Sex appeal is fifty percent what you’ve got and fifty percent what people think you’ve got.
- Sophia Loren

87. Beauty and sadness always go together.
Nature thought beauty too rich to go forth
Upon the earth without a meet alloy.
- George MacDonald

88. It’s okay to be a fat man. It’s prestige and power and all of that. But, fat women are seen as just lazy and stupid and having no self-control.
- Camryn Manheim

89. Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.
- W. Somerset Maugham

90. The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
- Henry Miller

91. There’s nothing particularly physical that I find attractive in a man. It’s men with a passion for something that I find attractive.
- Rhona Mitra

92. In every man’s heart, there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.
- Christopher Morley

93. Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.
- John Muir

94. We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.
- Jawaharlal Nehru

95. Women’s modesty generally increases with their beauty.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

96. Science will never be able to reduce the value of a sunset to arithmetic. Nor can it reduce friendship to formula. Laughter and love, pain and loneliness, the challenge of beauty and truth: these will always surpass the scientific mastery of nature.
- Louis Orr

97. I said to myself, “I’ll paint what I see—what the flower is to me; but, I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it. I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.”
- Georgia O’Keefe

98. For every beauty there is an eye somewhere to see it. For every truth there is an ear somewhere to hear it. For every love there is a heart somewhere to receive it.
- Ivan Panin

99. Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.
- Dorothy Parker

100. Beauty? … To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.
- Pablo Picasso

101. Remember how in that communion only, 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.
- Plato

102. I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.
- Edgar Allan Poe

103. Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
- Edgar Allan Poe

104. The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one’s own—even more, one’s own—for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.
- Katherine Anne Porter

105. If I could catch a rainbow I would do it just for you and share with you its beauty on the days you’re feeling blue.
- Sandra Lewis Pringle

106. Man makes holy what he believes, as he makes beautiful what he loves.
- Ernest Renan

107. The pain passes, but the beauty remains.
- Pierre Auguste Renoir

108. Do I love you because you’re beautiful,
Or are you beautiful because I love you?
- Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II

109. A woman whose smile is open and whose expression is glad has a kind of beauty no matter what she wears.
- Anne Roiphe

110. The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

111. There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.
- Helena Rubinstein

112. Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.
- John Ruskin

113. Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.
- John Ruskin

114. Our hearts are drunk with a beauty our eyes could never see.
- George W. Russell

115. Taking joy in living is a woman’s best cosmetic.
- Rosalind Russell

116. The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.
- George Sand

117. She’s beautiful, and therefore to be woo’d
She is a woman, therefore to be won
- William Shakespeare

118. To me, fair friend, you never can be old
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still.
- William Shakespeare

119. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
- William Shakespeare

120. Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
- George Bernard Shaw

121. I hope you have lost your good looks, for while they last any fool can adore you, and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul. No, give me a ruined complexion and a lost figure and sixteen chins on a farmyard of Crow’s feet and an obvious wig. Then you shall see me coming out strong.
- George Bernard Shaw

122. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley

123. To wash one’s hair, make one’s toilet, and put on scented robes; even if not a soul sees one, these preparations still produce an inner pleasure.
- Sei Shonagon

124. What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for Beauty, and never see the Dawn!
- Logan Pearsall Smith

125. What a paradox! Beauty is not goodness; beauty lies in ones thoughts.
- M. K. Soni

126. Beauty is the promise of happiness.
- Stendhal

127. A beauty is a woman you notice; a charmer is one who notices you.
- Adlai E. Stevenson

128. It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.
- Robert Louis Stevenson

129. You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen. But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul’s own doing.
- Marie Stopes

130. By plucking her petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower.
- Rabindranath Tagore

131. Beauty is truth’s smile when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror.
- Rabindranath Tagore

132. Beauty, more than bitterness, makes the heart break.
- Sara Teasdale

133. Life is beauty; admire it.
- Mother Theresa

134. The perception of beauty is a moral test.
- Henry David Thoreau

135. You cannot perceive beauty but with a serene mind.
- Henry David Thoreau

136. It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
- Leo Tolstoy

137. To those who followed Columbus and Cortez, the New World truly seemed incredible because of the natural endowments. The land often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the ocean. Giovanni di Verrazano in 1524 smelled the cedars of the East Coast a hundred leagues out. The men of Henry Hudson’s Half Moon were temporarily disarmed by the fragrance of the New Jersey shore, while ships running farther up the coast occasionally swam through large beds of floating flowers. Wherever they came inland they found a rich riot of color and sound, of game and luxuriant vegetation. Had they been other than they were, they might have written a new mythology here. As it was, they took inventory.
- Frederick Turner

138. We often neglect to find the beauty in things we see every day.
- Michelle C. Ustaszeski

139. Only through difficulty can you rest at the peak, look out over the horizon that surrounds you, and rejoice beyond today’s imagination at how beautiful life really is and how lucky we truly are.
- Michelle C. Ustaszeski

140. It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.
- Voltaire

141. Truth exists for the wise, beauty for the feeling heart.
- Friedrich von Schiller

142. In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.
- Alice Walker

143. Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.
- Simone Weil

144. Beauty is a fruit which we look at without trying to seize it.
- Simone Weil

145. No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.
- Oscar Wilde

146. It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.
- Oscar Wilde

147. Beauty is a form of genius—is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.
- Oscar Wilde

148. A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.
- Walt Whitman

149. The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
- Virginia Woolf

150. Beauty in the flesh will continue to rule the world.
- Florenz Ziegfeld

CONCLUSION

It seems whatever pleases our senses or sensibilities can be—and is—beautiful.

No wonder the ancients saw the following 3 virtues as one and the same: Truth! Love! Beauty! Beauty is as beauty does! So we can all be beautiful if we want! : )

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