Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 60
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o’ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stranger than a flower? William Shakespeare, Sonnet 65
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 130
Beauty is everywhere a welcome guest. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies. John Donne 1572-1631
Exuberance is beauty. William Blake
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. Francis Bacon, Essays: ‘Of Beauty’, 1625
Don’t take down ‘knickers’. Carry on Girls 1973 starring Sid James & Joan Sims & Barbara Windsor & Kenneth Connor & Bernard Bresslaw & June Whitfield & Peter Butterworth & Wendy Richard & Jack Douglas & Patsy Rowlands & Joan Hickson & David Lodge et al, director Gerald Thomas, mayor to minute-taker of Council meeting
Are we all right for Fircombe? ibid. bird boarding train
I’m supposed to be covering the mayor’s opening this afternoon. ibid. photographer
And Miss World 1974 is – Miss Switzerland. The World of Miss World, Sky Arts 2012, Eric Morley at rehearsals
Miss World Says: I Quit. ibid. Daily Express headline November 27th 1974
‘The girls benefit’. ibid. Eric Morley
But in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him. II Samuel 14:25.
Beautified is the life of the world for those who disbelieve; they make a jest of the believers. But those who keep their duty to Allah will be above them on the Day of Resurrection. Allah giveth without stint to whom He will. Koran 2:212
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone. Dorothy Parker
Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old. Franz Kafka
I don’t mind being burdened with being glamorous and sexual. Beauty and femininity are ageless and can't be contrived, and glamour, although the manufacturers won't like this, cannot be manufactured. Not real glamour; it’s based on femininity. Marilyn Monroe
Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring. Marilyn Monroe
The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
47,594. She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes. Lord Byron
Italia! oh Italia! thou who hast
The fatal gift of beauty. Lord Byron
The voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls. Friedrich Nietzsche
The slow arrow of beauty. The most noble kind of beauty is that which does not carry us away suddenly, whose attacks are not violent or intoxicating (this kind easily awakens disgust), but rather the kind of beauty which infiltrates slowly, which we carry along with us almost unnoticed, and meet up with again in dreams; finally, after it has for a long time lain modestly in our heart, it takes complete possession of us, filling our eyes with tears, our hearts with longing. What do we long for when we see beauty? To be beautiful. We think much happiness must be connected with it. But that is an error. Friedrich Nietzsche
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
I have an important message to deliver to all the cute people all over the world. If you’re out there and you’re cute, maybe you're beautiful. I just want to tell you somethin’ — there’s more of us UGLY MOTHERFUCKERS than you are, hey-y, so watch out. Frank Zappa
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
Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world! Vladimir Nabokov
She was beautiful, but not like those girls in the magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn't beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. She is beautiful. F Scott Fitzgerald
Beauty belongs to the sphere of the simple, the ordinary, whilst ugliness is something extraordinary, and there is no question but that every ardent imagination prefers in lubricity, the extraordinary to the commonplace. Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. Percy Bysshe Shelley
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Beauty doesn’t have to be about anything. What’s a vase about? What’s a sunset or a flower about? What, for that matter, is Mozart’s Twenty-third Piano Concerto about? Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
Beauty is a fragile gift. Ovid
O, thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars. Christopher Marlowe
Beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty: so that good means that which simply pleases the appetite; while the beautiful is something pleasant to apprehend. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Her gentle limbs did she undress,
And lay down in her loveliness. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christa
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. Bertrand Russell, The Study of Mathematics, 1902
Beauty’s of a fading nature –
Has a season and is gone! Robert Burns, Will Ye Go and Marry Katie? 1764