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....Then he felt quite ashamed, and hid his head under his wing; for he did not know what to do, he was so happy, and yet not at all proud. He had been persecuted and despised for his ugliness, and now he heard them say he was the most beautiful of all the birds. Even the elder-tree bent down its bows into the water before him, and the sun shone warm and bright. He would never became vain or conceited, and would always remembered how it felt to be despised and teased, and he was very sorry for all the creatures who are so treated merely because they are different from those around them. Then he rustled his feathers, curved his slender neck, and cried joyfully, from the depths of his heart, “I never dreamed of such happiness as this, while I was an ugly duckling.”
-Hans Christian Andersen, The Ugly Duckling, 1844
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Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God.
-Jean Anouilh
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The loveliest face in all the world will not please you if you see it suddenly eye to eye, at a distance of half an inch from your own.
-Max Beerbohm, "Zuleika Dobson"
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Character contributes to beauty. It fortifies a woman as her youth fades. A mode of conduct, a standard of courage, discipline, fortitude and integrity can do a great deal to make a woman beautiful.
-Jacqueline Bisset
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"Beauty puts a face on God. When we gaze at nature, at a loved one, at a work of art, our soul immediately recognizes and is drawn to the face of God."
-Margaret Brownley, Grieving God's Way
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It is better to be first with an ugly woman than the hundredth with a beauty.
-Pearl Buck, The Good Earth, Chapter 1., 1931
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Beauty without intelligence is an illusion that is close to disenchantment. It is like a fairy that fascinates us, as long as we look at her through the enchanting prism of her beauty. However, it disappears as soon as the light of reason penetrates beyond the place where the eyes can see.
-Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, Concerning Women's Intelligence and Beauty, 1876
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Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offers us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
-Albert Camus, Notebooks
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Beauty is all about us, but how many are blind! They look at the wonder of this earth and seem to see nothing. People move hectically but give little thought to where they are going. They seek excitement...as if they were lost and desperate.
-Pau (Pablo) Casals
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Beauty is an omnipresence of death and loveliness, a smiling sadness that we discern in nature and all things, a mystic communion that the poet feels.
-Charlie Chaplin
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I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.
-e. e. (Edward Estlin) cummings
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The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
-Havelock Ellis, Impressions and Comments, 1914
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"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"Tell them dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for being:
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never sought to ask, I never knew:
But, in my simple ignorance suppose
The selfsame power that brought me there brought you."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rhodora, The
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Looking for and enjoying beauty is a way to nourish the soul. the universe is in the habit of making beauty. There are flowers and songs, snowflakes and smiles, acts of great courage, laughter between friends, a job well done, the smell of fresh-baked bread. Beauty is everywhere.
-Matthew Fox
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Even beauty may present a prism wearying to the eye.
-Karl Joseph, Prince de Ligne
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Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.
-James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916
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Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' -- that is all
Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know."
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/urn.html "...there is no definitive text for this poem. No manuscript in Keats's handwriting survives."
-John Keats, Ode On A Grecian Urn, 1820
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The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart.
-Helen Keller
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"But what Kezia liked more than anything, what she liked frightfully, was the lamp. It stood in the middle of the dining-room table, an exquisite little amber lamp with a white globe. It was filled all ready for lighting, though, of course, you couldn't light it. But there was something inside that looked like oil and moved when you shook it.
The father and mother dolls, who sprawled very stiff as though they had fainted in the drawing-room, and their two little children asleep upstairs, were really too big for the doll's house. They didn't look as though they belonged. But the lamp was perfect. It seemed to smile at Kezia, to say, 'I live here.' The lamp was real."
-Katherine Mansfield, The Doll's House
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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, Ashenden, in Cakes and Ale, ch. 11 (1930)
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Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic.
-Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 86 "The Tail", 1851
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"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."
N.B.: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." See also: Napoleon Bonaparte.
-Plato, Symposium
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In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art - the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard’s canvases - beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.
-Anne Rice
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Some beautiful things are more impressive when left imperfect than when too highly finished.
-François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims [1665], Maxim 627
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And beauty is a form of genius -- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.
-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (ch. 2)
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"The definition of a beautiful woman is one who loves me."
-Sloan Wilson
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Unity and simplicity are the two true sources of beauty.
-Johann Joachim Winckelmann
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The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
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Beauty is being in harmony with what you are.
-Peter Nivio Zarlenga, The Orator, "Flight", 1977
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Books about Beauty
