Beauty Standards Quotes

I think you should leave [the scar]. [...] It's not as bad as you think. It will look better once it is healed. And besides, you already have a classical beauty. This gives you a romantic beauty as well. ~ April Adams

Thus the little mermaid learned her world's greatest paradox: that their currency was beauty, and their coin was body parts. ~ Esther Dalseno

Simply being born female in our society is to grow up being told your worth as a person is tied to how slim and attractive you are. Even for those of us lucky enough to have evolved parents, the message is still driven home by the world at large. ~ Padma Lakshmi

The insidious reasons for a brown girl's self-loathing won't be surprising to any woman of color. I cannot rightly compare my own struggles to those of another minority, as each ethnicity comes with its own baggage and the South Asian experience is just one variation on the experience of dark-skinned people everywhere. As parents and grandparents often do in Asian countries, my extended family urged me to avoid the sun, not out of fear that heatstroke would sicken me or that UV rays would lead to cancer, but more, I think, out of fear that my skin would darken to the shade of an Untouchable, a person from the lowest caste in Indian society, someone who toils in the fields. The judgments implicit in these exhortations - and what they mean about your worth - might not dawn on you while you're playing cricket in the sand. What's at stake might not dawn on you while, as a girl, you clutch fast to yourself your blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll named Helen. But all along, the message that lighter skin is equivalent to a more attractive, worthier self is getting beamed deep into your subconscious. Western ideals of beauty do not stop at ocean shores. They pervade the world and mingle with those of your own country to create mutant, unachievable standards. ~ Padma Lakshmi

When you watch Olympic athletes in competition, does your self-esteem plummet? Of course not. On the contrary, you feel wonder and admiration; you're inspired that such exceptional individuals exist. So why can't we feels the same way about beauty? ~ Ted Chiang

It doesn't matter if you're a size 2 or 22, you can be healthy as long as you're taking care of your body, working out, and telling yourself 'I love you' instead of taking in the negativity of beauty standards. ~ Ashley Graham

Of course, all of the software I write runs on Linux; that's the beauty of standards, and of cross-platform code. I don't have to run your OS, and you don't have to run mine, and we can use the same applications anyway! ~ Jamie Zawinski

Every woman has a record of her body - a closet full of jeans and bras of various sizes, albums full of photographs revealing periods of weight gain and loss. ~ Padma Lakshmi

Let her know that there are many individuals and many cultures that do not find the narrow mainstream definition of beauty attractive. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Invisible

She scanned through the magazine
for girls who looked like her
with deeper hues,
flat nose, and thick hair.

The day she turned fifteen
she scrubbed herself with bleach
while screaming for God,
whispering over and over again
"the darker the skin,
the deeper the struggle"
releasing a sigh
that made her soul shake. ~ Ijeoma Umebinyuo

Mermaids weren't mammalian. They couldn't be. Too many sightings focused on their 'slender backs' and 'narrow waists'--features that seemed reasonable to modern readers with modern beauty standards, but which made no sense for an Italian fisherman during the plague years, or a Puerto Rican swimmer in the 1920s. If the mermaid had been an idealized projection of a human woman onto a marine mammal, she would have looked different every time, fat during some eras, thin during others, not consistently slim to the point of freezing in oceanic waters. The people who described mermaids were describing a real creature, something that wasn't mammalian, but looked mammalian enough to make a tempting lure. And why would anything lure sailors, if not as a form of sustenance? ~ Mira Grant

Beauty isn't visible; I don't know why people think it is. Perhaps because at times there are physical manifestations suggesting beauty exists in a person, but don't be fooled. Beauty isn't the packaging, it's the treasure wrapped up inside. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Everyone wants to look beautiful. No one wants to be beautiful! ~ Avijeet Das

[A Letter to the Culture that Raised Me] I'm not here to be on display. And my body is not for public consumption. I will not be reduced to an object, or a pair of legs to sell shoes. I'm a soul, a mind, a servant of God. My worth is defined by the beauty of my soul, my heart, my moral character. So I won't worship your beauty standards, and I don't submit to your fashion sense. My submission is to something higher. ~ Yasmin Mogahed

Guy suddenly wanted to scald his face, gain fifty pounds, shear his hair. He was sick of his beauty, his "eternal" beauty. People thought he was purer, more intelligent, kinder, nobler than he was because they ascribed all these virtues to him. What if he were stripped of his looks, if he stabbed the grotesque painting in the attic? If they saw him for what he really was – empty-headed, vicieux (how did you translate that? "Riddled with vices?"), narcisse? Used to being indulged and pursued, terrified he'd outlive his fatal appeal and yet longing to be free of it? ~ Edmund White

Women hide their imperfections instead of accepting them as an added charm. ~ Coco Chanel

Good night, chubby baby
I can't rock you no more
I'm sorry, chubby baby
But my arms are getting sore
Sleep tight, chubby baby
And please don't get me wrong
You're a perfect sized baby
So never accept fakey beauty standards or develop unhealthy body issues...
... from this dumb song ~ Brian K. Vaughan

Girls have always been told that their value is tied to their appearance; their accomplishments are always magnified if they're pretty and diminished if they're not. Even worse, some girls get the message that they can get through life relying on just their looks, and then they never develop their minds. [ ... ]
Being pretty is fundamentally a passive quality; even what you work at it, you're working at being passive. ~ Ted Chiang

For a girl, the fear of not being pretty is the fear of not being a valuable object, which is the fear of not being loved. It is a conflation that is instilled so early on and runs so deep that, even when you know it's a fear perpetrated by patriarchy, goaded by fashion magazines, and used to manipulate you into buying stuff, you still can't stop the way it affects you. Being a woke feminist doesn't mean you've overcome it, it just means you've learned to live with your perpetual self-loathing and your anger around it, too. ~ Ani DiFranco

Excuse me while I throw this down, I'm old and cranky and tired of hearing the idiocy repeated by people who ought to know better.
Real women do not have curves. Real women do not look like just one thing.

Real women have curves, and not. They are tall, and not. They are brown-skinned, and olive-skinned, and not. They have small breasts, and big ones, and no breasts whatsoever.

Real women start their lives as baby girls. And as baby boys. And as babies of indeterminate biological sex whose bodies terrify their doctors and families into making all kinds of very sudden decisions.

Real women have big hands and small hands and long elegant fingers and short stubby fingers and manicures and broken nails with dirt under them.

Real women have armpit hair and leg hair and pubic hair and facial hair and chest hair and sexy moustaches and full, luxuriant beards. Real women have none of these things, spontaneously or as the result of intentional change. Real women are bald as eggs, by chance and by choice and by chemo. Real women have hair so long they can sit on it. Real women wear wigs and weaves and extensions and kufi and do-rags and hairnets and hijab and headscarves and hats and yarmulkes and textured rubber swim caps with the plastic flowers on the sides.

Real women wear high heels and skirts. Or not.

Real women are feminine and smell good and they are masculine and smell good and they are androgynous and smel ~ Hanne Blank

By today's beauty standards, of course, Marilyn Monroe was an oil tanker. ~ Dave Barry

The feminist call was for women to embrace ways of seeing beauty and adorning ourselves that are healthy, life-affirming, and not overly time-time consuming. ~ Bell Hooks

Feeling comfortable in my body isn't entirely about beauty standards. It is not entirely about ideals. It's about how I feel in my skin and bones, from one day to the next. ~ Roxane Gay

He called you beautiful, for a black girl and you kissed him. It would not be the last time someone would pay you a provisional compliment, nor the last time you accept it. Back then, you had not yet realized, that those who view your beauty conditionally, undoubtedly felt the same towards your humanity. ~ Rafeif Ismail

Again the starter and the engine, and after a minute or two the rattle and pop of gravel as the DeSoto eased backward out of the barn. It gleamed darkly and demurely, like a ripe plum. Its chrome was polished, hubcaps and grille, and the side walls of the tires were snowy white. There was a preposterous beauty in all that shine that made her laugh. Jack put his arm out of the window, waiving his hat like a visiting dignitary, backed into the street, and floated away, gentling the gleaming dirigible through the shadows of arching elm trees, light dropping on it through their leaves like confetti as it made its ceremonious passage. ~ Marilynne Robinson

Beauty intoxicates the eye, as wine does the body; both are morally fatal if indulged. ~ John Godfrey Saxe

Pippa's hair was down and fell over her shoulders. Beneath her jersey dress, her body was easy to imagine, and I reached forward, sliding a hand around her waist to pull her just a little closer. I wanted to kiss her. I knew that in part it was the wine, and the beer, and the heady sense of freedom in a small town where I knew no one, but I also knew that in no part was that feeling about Becky. Pippa bounced against me, singing terribly into the mic - perfect for the song, really. Her earrings cascaded down from her ears, nearly touching her shoulders. Her bracelets clanged on her wrist. Her lipstick stained her lips a seductive fire-red, and it made her happy smile seem boundless. ~ Christina Lauren

And there is a beauty that brevity alone provides. ~ Cassandra Clare

'The Sleeping Beauty' is the greatest, most challenging and most vulnerable of classical ballets. Everything can go wrong with it, and all too often, everything does. ~ Robert Gottlieb

I felt the sharp sting of emptiness and solitude that you feel so acutely and with such internal sorrow and wonder whenever music is performed well. ~ Pat Conroy

Desire for beauty will endure and undermine the desire for truth. ~ Richard O. Prum

Dwight Langley, the painter, is the pure exponent of the evil the play is attacking; he is, in effect, the spokesman for Platonism, who explicitly preaches that beauty is unreachable in this world and perfection unattainable. Since he insists that ideals are impossible on earth, he cannot, logically enough, believe in the reality of any ideal, even when it actually confronts him. Thus, although he knows every facet of Kay Gonda's face, he (alone among the characters) does not recognize her when she appears in his life. This philosophically induced blindness, which motivates his betrayal of her, is a particularly brilliant concretization of the play's theme, and makes a dramatic Act I curtain. ~ Ayn Rand

The thinner a newspaper or magazine is - due to reduced revenue from advertising dollars - the less editorial content because of the standard ad-to-editorial ratio, and the less money there is to support investigative journalism. ~ Lynda Resnick

The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face. ~ John Fowles

When I design a collection I strive to make a woman feel as special as the delicate creation she is wearing; take her to an enchanted time and place where women are princesses and magnificent goddesses. In today's modern world we need to pause and indulge in beauty. ~ Claire Pettibone

Eugenic rhetoric thus remained dependent on the body exterior as a powerful "material metaphor" for mysterious genetic processes. The desirable stock of the "fit" was imagined in terms of whiteness, beauty, and physical fitness; embodied in the winners of the AES's "Better Babies" and "Fitter Families" competitions; invoked in books like Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race (1916), which described the progenitors of good American stock as "splendid conquistadores" of Nordic heritage with "absolutely fair skin" and "great stature"; and visualized in eugenic displays.37 ~ Angela M. Smith

Wear your treasure and you will be Treasured ~ Treasure Stitches

beginners when it came to inner landscapes of beauty that would anchor and nourish them on the inside, beyond work, in the intimate spaces that in the end define us all. ~ Krista Tippett

Knowing there is a world that will outlive you, there are people whose well-being depends on how you live your life, affects the way you live your life, whether or not you directly experience those effects. You want to be the kind of person who has the larger view, who takes other people's interests into account, who's dedicated to the principles that you can justify, like justice, knowledge, truth, beauty and morality. ~ Steven Pinker

In the center of the sofa were two oblong companion pillows, shouldered so closely together that they looked like the Decalogue tablets. They were white, or had been white, and painfully stitched upon them with blue thread were companion mottoes, companion pictures. In the left pillow lies a girl, her long blue hair asprawl about her face, her eyes innocently shut, asleep. The motto: I SLEPT AND DREAMED THAT LIFE WAS BEAUTY. But the story continued, and on the next pillow her innocence is all torn away: there she stands, gripping a round broom; her hair now is pinned up severely and behind her sits a disheartening barrel churn. I WOKE AND FOUND THAT LIFE WAS DUTY. The pillows sat, stuffed and stiff as disapproving bishops; they could, he thought, serve as twin tombstones for whole gray generations. ~ Fred Chappell

In the literal sense, there has been no relevant evolution since the trek from Africa. But there has been substantial progress towards higher standards of rights, justice and freedom - along with all too many illustrations of how remote is the goal of a decent society. ~ Noam Chomsky

The really magical things are the ones that happen right in front of you. A lot of the time you keep looking for beauty, but it is already there. And if you look with a bit more intention, you see it. ~ Vik Muniz

Nature and art: The material and the workmanship. There is no beauty unaided, no excellence that does not sink to the barbarous, unless saved by art: It redeems the bad and perfects the good. Because nature commonly forsakes us at her best, take refuge in art. The best in nature is raw without art, and the excellent is lacking if it lacks culture. Without cultivation everyone is a clown and needs polish, fine attributes notwithstanding. ~ Baltasar Gracian

What's beauty if it's not, in the end, true? Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty. ~ John Updike

It is right to love beauty and to desire it; but God desires us to love and seek first the highest beauty, that which is imperishable. No outward adorning can compare in value or loveliness with that "meek and quiet spirit." ~ Ellen G. White

If you will study the history of Christ's ministry from Baptism to Ascension, you will discover that it is mostly made up of little words, little deeds, little prayers, little sympathies, adding themselves together in unwearied succession. The Gospel is full of divine attempts to help and heal, in the body, mind and heart, individual men. The completed beauty of Christ's life is only the added beauty of little inconspicuous acts of beauty -- talking with the woman at the well; going far up into the North country to talk with the Syrophenician woman; showing the young ruler the stealthy ambition laid away in his heart, that kept him out of the kingdom of Heaven; shedding a tear at the grave of Lazarus; teaching a little knot of followers how to pray; preaching the Gospel one Sunday afternoon to two disciples going out to Emmaus; kindling a fire and broiling fish, that His disciples might have a breakfast waiting for them when they came ashore after a night of fishing, cold, tired, discouraged. All of these things, you see, let us in so easily into the real quality and tone of God's interests, so specific, so narrowed down, so enlisted in what is small, so engrossed in what is minute. ~ Charles Henry Parkhurst

The color and shape of flowers are a precise record of what bees find attractive ~ Frederick Turner

Saying this, he turned his head toward the window as if he were trying to solve the problems of human existence by concentrating on the beauty of the universe. ~ Kahlil Gibran

Comics are so full of amazing work. And I can't look at a drawing of a woman without thinking of, for instance, Wallace Wood and his amazing way of capturing beauty. ~ Frank Miller

I've traveled. All over. I've never seen anything like you. How could anything be put together like you? Do you know how beautiful you are? Have you looked at yourself?'
'I'm looking now. ~ Toni Morrison

blind love finds ideal beauty everywhere. ~ Anton Chekhov

Releasing masks and veils allows the other to see you in your authenticity. Guards are dropped, and we can be seen for who we really are: the uniqueness of our personality, the beauty of our soul, our pure spirit. ~ John Friend

I cannot tell by what logic we call a toad, a bear, or an elephant ugly, they being created in those outward shapes and figures which best express those actions of their inward forms. And having passed that general visitation of God, who saw that all that he had made was good, that is, conformable to his will, which abhors deformity, and is the rule of order and beauty; there is no deformity but in monstrosity, wherein, notwithstanding there is a kind of beauty. ~ Thomas Browne

Such beauty, he thought, was too perfect to have come about by mere chance. That day in the center of the Pacific was, to him, a gift crafted deliberately, compassionately, for him and Phil. Joyful and grateful in the midst of slow dying, the two men bathed in that day until sunset brought is, and their time in the doldrums, to an end. ~ Laura Hillenbrand