Beautiful quotes
11.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"I ate apple pie and ice cream—it was getting better as I got deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer. There were the most beautiful bevies of girls everywhere I looked in Des Moines that afternoon—they were coming home from high school—but I had no time for thoughts like that…So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines."
"Burlesque is beautiful: It's art, it's fun, it's done with a lot of comedy - an awful lot of big wink-wink and nudge-nudge."
"Politics...You see, it depends on what kind of politics. What we did during my father's generation was a duty. And it was beautiful because its goal was the conquest of freedom."
"Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions."
"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault."
"Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty."
"Fashion rests upon folly. Art rests upon law. Fashion is ephemeral. Art is eternal. Indeed what is a fashion really? A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months! It is quite clear that were it beautiful and rational we would not alter anything that combined those two rare qualities. And wherever dress has been so, it has remained unchanged in law and principle for many hundred years."
"He is some brainless, beautiful creature, who should always be here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in the summer when we want something to chill our intelligence."
"She has form," he said to himself, as he walked away through the grove - "that cannot be denied to her; but has she got feeling? I am afraid not. In fact, she is like most artists; she is all style, without any sincerity. She would not sacrifice herself for others. She thinks merely of music, and everybody knows that arts are selfish. Still, it must be admitted that she has some beautiful notes in her voice. What a pity it is that they do not mean anything, or do any practical good."
"In England it is enough for a man to try and produce any serious, beautiful work to lose all his rights as a citizen."
"There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America. It was not until I had seen the water-works at Chicago that I realised the wonders of machinery; the rise and fall of the steel rods, the symmetrical motion of the great wheels is the most beautiful rhythmic thing I have ever seen."
"I would that you were either less beautiful, or less corrupt. Such perfect beauty does not suit such imperfect morals. [Lat., Aut formosa fores minus, aut minus improba vellem. Non facit ad mores tam bona forma malos.]"
"Technologies of easy travel "give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,-in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?"
"Spring is a beautiful piece of work; and not to be in the country to see it done is the not realizing what glorious masters we are, and how cheerfully, minutely, and unflaggingly the fair fingers of the season broider the world for us."
"The Italians say that a beautiful woman by her smiles draws tears from our purse."
"Youth is beautiful; its friendship is precious; the intercourse with it is a purifying release from the worn and stained harness of older life."
"I was carrying a beautiful alcoholic conflagration around with me. The thing fed on its own heat and flamed the fiercer. There was no time, in all my waking time, that I didn't want a drink. I began to anticipate the completion of my daily thousand words by taking a drink when only five hundred words were written. It was not long until I prefaced the beginning of the thousand words with a drink."
"A human life the treasure of the world cannot buy; nor can it redeem one which is misspent; nor can it make full and complete and beautiful a life which is dwarfed and warped and ugly."
"What's beautiful is all that counts, pal. That's ALL that counts."
"Maybe it's superficial to exude a sense of confidence in one's clothes. But it's also integral. We have an appearance. Not all of us are beautiful. But we can appear fine looking. So we should. Feeling good about an outfit is the point at which that outfit finally becomes good."
