Quotes about Beauty

This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.

A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,--and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a west as distant and as fair as that into which the Sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

Beauty is where it is perceived. When I see the sun shinning on the woods across the pond, I think this side the richer which sees it.

It is the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us. The question is not what you look at but what you see.

on the morning of many a first spring day...the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead. There needs no stronger proof of immortality.

We get only transient and partial glimpses of the beauty of the world. Standing at the right angle, we are dazzled by the colors of the rainbow in colorless ice. From the right point of view, every storm and every drop in it is a rainbow.

Nature is mythical and mystical always, and works with the license and extravagance of genius.

Nor is it every apple I desire,      Nor that which pleases every palate best; 'T is not the lasting Deuxan I require,      Nor yet the red-cheeked Greening I request, Nor that which first beshrewed the name of wife, Nor that whose beauty caused the golden strife: No, no! bring me an apple from the tree of life.

Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper.

The poem of the world is uninterrupted, but few are the ears that hear it.