"A beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of fine arts."
Read quote
3 likes
Beautiful quotes
Beautiful
11.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Beautiful
Browse quotes that often appear alongside beautiful — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Beautiful quotes (page 135 of 568)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Never lose an opportunity to see anything that is beautiful. It is God's handwriting a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, every fair sky, every fair flower."
Read quote
3 likes
"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation from the work of art of human character, — a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attributes."
Read quote
3 likes
"How beautiful to have the church always open, so that every tired wayfaring man may come in and be soothed by all that art can suggest of a better world when he is weary with this."
Read quote
3 likes
"If I see one dilemma with Western man, it's that he can't accept how beautiful he is. He can't accept that he is pure light, that he's pure love, that he's pure consciousness, that he's divine."
Read quote
3 likes
"The laws of the colors are unutterably beautiful, just because they are not accidental."
Read quote
3 likes
"Joyce's writing in Dubliners contains some of the most unshowily beautiful sentences in the English language. I learned from him that if you write a good, clean line of English, you can get under a reader's skin. The reader won't even know why, but there you are. Didion, Berger, the many others I mentioned above, and many, many poets I haven't mentioned. Writers of this calibre are the moving targets the rest of us are always chasing."
Read quote
3 likes
"Princess,” he whispered against her ear. “My beautiful, beautiful princess. I want to spoil you. Pamper you. Indulge you."
Read quote
3 likes
"When I first collected these authorities, I was desirous that every quotation should be useful to some other end than the illustration of a word; I therefore extracted from philosophers principles of science; from historians remarkable facts; from chymists complete processes; from divines striking exhortations; and from poets beautiful descriptions."
Read quote
3 likes
"I'm sorry, if you've been married for five minutes, you've sacrificed something, you've looked over at your partner and have gone, "Oh my God this is the biggest mistake I've ever made in my life." And then the next moment it's "This is the most beautiful and extraordinary human being, and I'm going to stick with it because I love them more than anyone else." That monologue to me is the universal thing, especially for women because I feel like that's the big thing with women."
Read quote
3 likes
"She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was however; there she was."
Read quote
3 likes
"... the random talk of people who have no chance of immortality and thus can speak their minds out has a setting, often, of lights, streets, houses, human beings, beautiful or grotesque, which will weave itself into the moment for ever."
Read quote
3 likes
"...the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron."
Read quote
3 likes
"Yet, she said to herself, form the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this--love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary."
Read quote
3 likes
"If this were the time or the place to uphold a paradox, I am half inclined to state that Norfolk is one of the most beautiful of counties."
Read quote
3 likes
"For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they can only say 'good to eat' when they mean 'beautiful' and the other way about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves."
Read quote
3 likes
"But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter!"
Read quote
3 likes
"And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely."
Read quote
3 likes
"Legends don't have to make sense. They just have to be beautiful. Or at least interesting."
Read quote
3 likes
"In her own special category, she was quite beautiful. This was the category of all the women, in his entire life, who had ever thought he was worth smiling at."
Read quote
3 likes