"“You are not traditionally beautiful; and you know it. We women do. But what most people mean by beauty is really a kind of aesthetic acceptability, not so much character as a lack of it, a set of features and lineaments that hide their history, that suggest history itself does not exist. But the template by which we recognize the features and forms in the human body that cause the heart to halt, threatening to spill us over into the silence of death—that is drawn on another part of the soul entirely...But all sing, chant, hymn the history of the body, if only because we all know how people regard bodies that deviate from the lauded and totally abnormal norm named beauty. Most of us would rather not recognize such desires in ourselves and thus avoid all contemplation of what the possession of such features means about the lives, the bodies, the histories of others, preferring instead to go on merely accepting the acceptable. But that is not who I am.”"

"The giant female bodybuilder proves unthinking people wrong who believe feminine beauty can never be harmonious with well developed musculature."

"I think that the most important thing a woman can have - next to talent, of course — is her hairdresser."

"I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may—light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful."

"Beauty is the lover's gift."

"There is in true beauty, as in courage, somewhat which narrow souls cannot dare to admire."

"Her gentle limbs did she undress, And lay down in her loveliness."

"She is not fair to outward view As many maidens be; Her loveliness I never knew Until she smiled on me: Oh! then I saw her eye was bright, A well of love, a spring of light."

"Everything changes, but beauty remains."

"There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the spring."

"I pour into the world the eternal streams Wan prophets tent beside, and dream their dreams."

"Exceeding fair she was not; and yet fair In that she never studied to be fairer Than Nature made her; beauty cost her nothing, Her virtues were so rare."

"It is a prerogative of beauty to always be respected."

"Beauty has this power, that in an instant, a moment, it brings with it the desire of whoever sees and knows it, and when it reveals or promises some way of reaching and enjoying it, with powerful fervor it sets fire to the soul of whoever contemplates it, just like the means whereby dry prepared gunpowder is easily lit by any spark that touches it."

"No todas hermosuras enamoran, que algunas alegran la vista, y no rinden la voluntad."

"The reason for the unreason with which you treat reason, so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of your beauty."

"Is it the right of this, our generation, in its selfish materialism, to destroy these things because we are blinded by the dollar sign? Beauty—and all the values the derive from beauty-are not measured and evaluated in terms of the dollar."

"I am not afraid of being thought a sentimentalist when I stand here tonight and tell you that I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man's spiritual growth."

"There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of birds, in the ebb and flow of the tides; in the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in these repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter."

"Beauty is pain and there's beauty in everything."

"[B]eauty 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."

"A lovely being, scarcely formed or moulded, A rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded."

"Her glossy hair was cluster'd o'er a brow Bright with intelligence, and fair and smooth; Her eyebrow's shape was like the aerial bow, Her cheek all purple with the beam of youth, Mounting, at times, to a transparent glow, As if her veins ran lightning."

"Thou who hast The fatal gift of beauty."

"She walks in beauty like the night Of cloudless chimes and starry skies; And all that's best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes: Thus mellowed to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies."

"The light of love, the purity of grace, The mind, the Music breathing from her face, The heart whose softness harmonized the whole, And, oh! the eye was in itself a Soul!"

"Who doth not feel, until his failing sight Faints into dimness with its own delight, His changing cheek, his sinking heart confess, The might—the majesty of Loveliness?"

"A lovely girl is above all rank. Men, however high, must feel her higher, however low."

"Nothing gives life a finer touch of grace, than the presence in the family circle of a lovely girl of seventeen."

"Beauty's of a fading nature— Has a season and is gone!"

"Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried. Is not this a demonstration of that change of surface continual and yet hardly perceptible at any point which forms one of the great constituents of beauty?"

"And behold there was a very stately palace before him, the name of which was Beautiful."

"Rank is a great beautifier."

"Beauty, thou art twice blessed! thou blessest the gazer and the possessor; often at once the effect and the cause of goodness! A sweet disposition—a lovely soul—an affectionate nature—will speak in the eyes—the lips—the brows—and become the cause of beauty. On the other hand, they who have a gift that commands love, a key that opens all hearts, are ordinarily inclined to look with happy eyes upon the world—to be cheerful and serene—to hope and to confide. There is more wisdom than the vulgar dream of in our admiration of a fair face."

"L'air spirituel est dans les hommes ce que la régularité des traits est dans les femmes: c'est le genre de beauté où les plus vains puissent aspirer."

"O world, as God has made it! All is beauty."

"The beautiful seems right By force of beauty, and the feeble wrong Because of weakness."

"The essence of all beauty, I call love, The attribute, the evidence, and end, The consummation to the inward sense Of beauty apprehended from without, I still call love."

"I had hardly ever seen a handsome youth; never in my life spoken to one. I had a theoretical reverence and homage for beauty, elegance, gallantry, fascination; but had I met those qualities incarnate in masculine shape, I should have known instinctively that they neither had nor could have sympathy with anything in me, and should have shunned them as one would fire, lightning, or anything else that is bright but antipathetic."

"Verily by Beauty it is that we come at , yet not by Reason at Beauty."

"Beauty, the eternal Spouse of the Wisdom of God and Angel of his Presence thru' all creation, fashioning her love-realm in the mind of man, attempteth every mortal child with influences of her divine supremacy."

"Beauty will be convulsive or not at all."

"There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness."

"Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of the earth's greenings. Now, Think."

"Beauty. The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband."

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

"Ye Gods! but she is wondrous fair! For me her constant flame appears; The garland she hath culled, I wear On brows bald since my thirty years. Ye veils that deck my loved one rare, Fall, for the crowning triumph's nigh. Ye Gods! but she is wondrous fair! And I, so plain a man am I!"