Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man – the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.
Friedrich Nietzsche – Beauty, Aesthetics
Glances of true beauty can be seen in the faces of those who live in true meekness.
Henry David Thoreau – Beauty, Meekness
I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don’t care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity.
Emile Zola – Beauty, Perfection
I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful.
Oscar Wilde – Beauty, Useful
It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.
Oscar Wilde – Beauty, Good, Ugly
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.
John Ruskin – Beauty
We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.
Maya Angelou – Beauty, Life
Beauty depends on size as well as symmetry. No very small animal can be beautiful, for looking at it takes so small a portion of time that the impression of it will be confused. Nor can any very large one, for a whole view of it cannot be had at once, and so there will be no unity and completeness.
Aristotle – Beauty
The ideas which have lighted my way and, time after time, have given me new courage to face life cheerfully have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth.
Albert Einstein – Kindness, Beauty
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
Francis Bacon – Beauty
A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson – Beauty
The beautiful things of the earth become more dear as they elude pursuit.
Thomas Hardy – Beauty, Pursuit
In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.
Milan Kundera – Beautiful Landscape
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
Milan Kundera – Life, beauty
When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
