People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve.
—Tom Robbins
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
Everything on earth [is] beautiful, everything, except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.
—Anton Chekhov
It is really a hard life. Men will not be nice to you if you are not good-looking, and women will not be nice to you if you are.
—Agatha Christie in The Man in the Brown Suit
Love is a great beautifier.
—Louisa May Alcott
There is so much beauty in just existing. In being alive.
—Hannah Harrington in Saving June
It’s sad when you think about it, but also kind of beautiful.
—Gabrielle Zevin in All These Things I’ve Done
A prisoner lived in solitary confinement for ten years. He saw and spoke to no one, and his meals were served through an opening in the wall. One day, an ant came into his cell. The man contemplated it in fascination as it crawled around the room. He held it in the palm of his hand the better to observe it, gave it a grain or two.… It suddenly struck him that it had taken him ten long years of solitary confinement to open his eyes to the loveliness of an ant.
—Anthony de Mello
Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.
—Anne Frank
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.
—Reinhold Niebuhr
A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
The world is full of hundreds of beautiful things we can never possibly have time to discover, and there is no time to be unkind or envious or ungenerous, and no sense in enslaving the mind to the trivialities of the moment. For you can be equal to the greatness of life only by marching with it; not by seeking love but by giving it, nor seeking to be understood but learning to understand. And when it is all over, there will be an agony of remorse because one spared the effort and did not make more of that little span of opportunity; and knowing reality at last, who knows but that one will look back with unassuageable regret upon one's pitiful little faith.
—Vivienne de Watteville
To love rightly is to love what is orderly and beautiful in an educated and disciplined way.
—Plato
What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.
—John Keats
How beautiful the leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.
—John Burroughs