Quotes about Beauty

What runs so contrary to received wisdom is that it really is the male who is the aesthete while the woman is drawn to abstractions. Wealth. Power. What a man seeks is beauty, plain and simple. No other way to put it. The rustle of her clothes, her scent. The sweep of her hair across his naked stomach. Categories all but meaningless to a woman. Lost in her calculations.

All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.

Beauty makes promises that beauty cant keep. I've seen it too many times. Twice in this house.

All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain.

Across the yard, brilliant against the façade of pines beyond, a cardinal shot like a drop of blood.

A temple was never perfectly a temple, till it was ruined and mixed up with the winds and the sky and the herbs.

Whatever life may be, and whatever horror men have made of it, the world is a lovely place, a magic place, something to marvel over. The world is an amazing place.

She was like a forest, like the dark interlacing of the oakwood, humming inaudibly with myriad unfolding buds. Meanwhile the birds of desire were asleep in the vast interlaced intricacy of her body.

It seethes and seethes, a river of darkness, putting forth lilies and snakes

I really do not want to be forced into all this criticism and analysis of life. I really do want to see things in their entirety, with their beauty left to them, and their wholeness, their natural holiness.Don't you feel it, don't you feel you can't be tortured into any more knowledge?

He crouched down, and carefully put his finger through the thorns into the round door of the nest. It's almost as if you were feeling inside the live body of the bird, he said... After that, Miriam came to see it everyday. It seemed so close to her. Again, going down the hedge side with the girl, he noticed the celandines, scalloped slashes of gold, on the side of the ditch. I like them, he said, when their petals go flat back with the sunshine. They seem to be pressing themselves at the sun.

Her still face, with the mouth closed tight from suffering and disillusion and self-denial, and her nose the smallest bit on one side, and her blue eyes so young, quick, and warm, made his heart contract with love.