Beauty is a characteristic of a person, place, object or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning or satisfaction. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology and culture. The subjective experience of beauty often involves the interpretation of some entity as being in harmony with nature, which may lead to feelings of attraction and emotional well-being.

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• BEAUTY: An aesthetic radiance that delights the soul; a quality much admired in women, landscapes and tropical fish, but curiously out of favor in art throughout the modern era.
  • Rick Bayan, in The Cynic's Dictionary

• Beauty. The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

• 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, Notebooks

• We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet

• Beauty without expression tires.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life

• Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life

• Il n'y a de vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir à rien; tout ce qui est utile est laid.
  • There is nothing truly beautiful but that which can never be of any use whatsoever; everything useful is ugly.
  • Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835; Paris: Charpentier, 1866)

• Care about the beings you care about in gorgeous and surprising ways. Color outside the lines. Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty. This is your last chance.
  • Anne Herbert in "Handy tips on how to behave at the death of the world" in Whole Earth Review (Spring 1995)

• She who is born a beauty is born betrothed.
  • Italian proverb

• Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it.
  • W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

• Beauty is ever to the lonely mind
  A shadow fleeting; she is never plain.
  She is a visitor who leaves behind
  The gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.
  • Robert Nathan, "Beauty Is Ever to the Lonely Mind"

• Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies, for instance.
  • John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice

• Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.
  • Stendhal, On Love

• Ask a toad what is beauty....; he will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat head, a yellow belly and a brown back.
  • Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary

• God help you if you are an ugly girl because too pretty is also your doom: everyone harbours a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room.
  • Ani DiFranco, "32 Flavors"

• Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the infinite.
  • George Bancroft, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 22.

• The gospel allies itself with all that is beautiful in the universe, as truly as with all that is noble and pure.
  • Samuel Wolcott, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 22.

• Eyes raised toward heaven are always beautiful, whatever they be.
  • Joseph Joubert, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 22.

• He hath a daily beauty in his life.
  • William Shakespeare, Othello, Act 5, Scene 1.

• I pray the prayer of Plato old, — "God make thee beautiful within."
  • J. G. Whittier, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 22.

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• If you search for beauty you will never lose sight of it. ~ Alfred Kin

• The night sky is a beautiful thing no matter where you are..... Look at it and tell me that you do not just forget about every woe you have ever had. Gaze at the starry night and you forget about everything, get lost in the lights, and focus on the night sky. For it is truly beautiful, because in it you get lost and can think of simply nothing else. If you ever think something is beautiful do not compare it to a supermodel or a manmade piece of art, but compare it to the firmament, God's art. If you can find yourself getting lost and forgetting everything as when you look at the night sky then you have indeed found something truly beautiful. ~ Bob Hiteshew

• I am sure that you heard it said that appearance does not matter so much and that it only matters what is on the inside. This is, of course, utter nonsense, because if it were true then people who were good on the inside, would never have to comb their hair or take a bath and then the whole world would smell worse than it already does. ~ Lemony Snicket

• 'Beauty more than bitterness, makes the heart break' ~ Sara Teasdale

• Beauty rely's on ones ability to find the right source to achieve it! ~ (Hairflix.com)

• Beauty is only skin deep. ~ Proverb. Possible origin

• It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. ~ Leo Tolstoy

• Sight is a big part of our existence, but it shouldn't make us blind to other things. ~ Moira Doolan on beauty and aesthetics.

• Beauty is merciless. You do not look at it, it looks at you and does not forgive. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

• The gift which you possess ... is not an art, but, as I was just saying, an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you... For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed... Socrates in Plato's Ion.

• But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty--the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities of human life--thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine? ~ Plato's Symposium

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

• Beauty is skin deep but ugly goes all the way to the bones.

• 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. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

• 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

• There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness. – Countess of Blessington

• A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness. ~ John Keats

• Anybody who preserves the ability to recognize beauty will never get old. ~ Franz Kafka

• Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. ~ Proverb

• Beauty is in the heart of the beholder. ~ Al Bernstein

• Beauty is in the imagination of the beholder. ~ David Newell

• Beauty is the evidence of why we are here. ~ Adrian D. Canfield

• Beauty will save the world. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Enthusiasm is the most beautiful word in the world. ~ Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914)

• Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it. ~ Confucius

• Glance at the sun.
  See the moon and the stars.
  Gaze at the beauty of the earth's greenings.
  Now,
  Think. ~ Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179)

• He who marries a beauty, marries trouble. ~ Anonymous

• She had gained a reputation for beauty, and (which is often another thing) was beautiful. ~ Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

• I have a message to deliver to the cute people of the world... if you're cute, or maybe you're beautiful... there's more of us UGLY MOTHERFUCKERS out there than you are!! So watch out. ~ Frank Zappa

• If a model pay food with a greenback this dollar is an important part of a balanced diet too. ~ Unknown Author

• Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

• 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 reality (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

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

• There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. ~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton

• Through light and joy is the world opened up, revealed for what it is: ineffable beauty, unending creation. ~ Henry Miller

• To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms -- this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness. ~ Albert Einstein

• Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail. ~ Navajo song

• When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other. ~ Chinese proverb

• If truth is beauty how come nobody has their hair done in a library? ~ Lily Tomlin

• When you get to the point where you cheat for the sake of beauty, you're an artist. ~ Max Jacob

• Beauty will be convulsive or not at all. ~ André Breton "Nadja"

• Beauty always comes with dark thoughts. ~ Nightwish ~ "Wish I Had An Angel"

• "Smash, smash the old laws" habitual beauty becomes narcotic eventually; it can be rediscovered, but only dialectically, by contrast, by the creation of new, brutally shocking beauty, beauty that seems barbarism at first. And the creation of such new beauty is the first step for anyone who would a god, and not a slave of dead gods. It is in the war between great seeking and great boredom that new beauty is born. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

• And lo, the Beast looked upon the face of Beauty. Beauty stayed Its hand and from that moment on, He was as one dead.

• Beauty is a curse on the world. It keeps us from seeing who the real monsters are. ~ The Carver, Nip/Tuck

• All life is beautiful. All humans are beautiful. Only behavior makes one ugly. ~ Jeffrey C. Keene II

• I know very well that beauty is empty. But I want it anyway. ~ Anonymous

• Beauty is pain ~ Steven Minshall
• "Beauty is in the eye of the BEERHOLDER"- WC Fields or Rodney Dangerfield ?

• The reason for the unreason with which you treat reason, so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of your beauty. ~ Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

• A girl of sixteen deserves no credit for her looks. Beauty at sixty is her souls doing. ~ Anonymous

• Nothing is more powerful than beauty in a wicked world. ~ Amos Lee

• Beauty is it's own excuse for being. ~ Margaret Skinner's matchbox

• Beauty is found within. ~ "Belle" in Beauty and The Beast

• It's beauty that captures your attention; personality which captures your heart.