Brief Beauty Quotes

Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into pure continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short-lived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music. ~ Yukio Mishima

I've been reading about moths," she said, to fill the silence.
"What have you read?"
Maggie shrugged. "They navigate by the light of the moon. They fling themselves into flames and electric lights because they think they're headed toward the moon's light."
"I guess they die in ecstasy then," Liam said. ~ Jodi Lynn Anderson

I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.' ~ Jerry Saltz

Beauty crowds me till I die. ~ Emily Dickinson

I'm overflowing with stories, delighted and quite mad with the beauty and tragedy of them. ~ Katharine Susannah Prichard

We can, each of us, be likened to houses made entirely of colorfully stained-glass. They sparkle and shine when the sun is on them, however when the darkness sets in, their greatest beauty is revealed only by a Light from within. ~ Raymond D. Longoria Jr.

Not longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man. ~ Hans Urs Von Balthasar

Only the childlike consciousness is capable of understanding all that is beautiful in life, all that is great in existence. And the whole existence is full of greatness, full of glories. This is the only existence there is; its beauty, its truth, is the only beauty and the only truth. But they are available only to the innocent people. Blessed are the innocent, for theirs is the kingdom of God. ~ Rajneesh

The body should be bedecked naturally and without affectation, with simplicity, with neglect rather than nicety, not with costly and dazzling apparel, but with ordinary clothes, so that nothing be lacking to honesty and necessity, yet nothing be added to increase its beauty. ~ Ambrose

You have something much more enduring than beauty," she said severely. "And what is that?" "Grace," she said simply. "Grace, and talent." I ~ S. Jae-Jones

Frazier is so ugly that he should donate his face to the U.S. Bureau of Wild Life. ~ Muhammad Ali

Nobody could have put her in the shade, blown out her light that evening; she was too evidently shining. ~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

Yes, he remembered it perfectly. He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain young, and the portrait grow old; that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood. Surely his wish had not been fulfilled? Such things were impossible. It ~ Oscar Wilde

Things external to her may have their own weight and dimension: but within inside us she gives them such measures as she wills: death is terrifying to Cicero, desirable to Cato, indifferent to Socrates. Health, consciousness, authority, knowledge, beauty and their opposites doff their garments as they enter the soul and receive new vestments, coloured with qualities of her own choosing: brown or green; light or dark; bitter or sweet, deep or shallow, as it pleases each of the individual souls, who have not agreed together on the truth of their practices, rules or ideas. Each soul is Queen in her own state. So let us no longer seek excuses from the external qualities of anything, the responsibility lies within ourselves. Our good or our bad depends on us alone. So let us make our offertories and our vows to ourselves not to Fortune: she has no power over our behaviour, on the contrary our souls drag Fortune in their train and mould her to their own idea. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Hitherto the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience. But my women are simple, honest creatures who are concerned with nothing beyond their physical occupations ... it is as if you were looking through a keyhole. ~ Edgar Degas

Everything you do,
do with great love.
Make it a song of your soul,
and beauty of your heart. ~ Debasish Mridha

A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator. ~ Alain De Botton

Education depends on the quality of the teacher, not the site or beauty of the buildings-- nor, I might add, does it depend on the winning record of the football team, and I like football. ~ Anonymous

What we look at determines what we see, and what we see, really see, becomes part of an inner museum of pictures and references, a mental collection that for most of us is not so much curated as acquired in a haphazard way. There is an opportunity with children to show them art and illustration that will furnish their minds with beauty and mystery, symmetry and wonder. The simplest mechanism for this is the selection of picture books that we share with them. ~ Meghan Cox Gurdon

But this was that view of human destiny which she had most passionately hated and rejected: the view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve. Her life and her values could not bring her to that, she thought; she had never found beauty in longing for the impossible and had never found the possible to be beyond her reach. ~ Ayn Rand

The bewildering beauty of Paris ... ~ Allen Ginsberg

I want the Arabic Granada, that which is art, which is all that seems to me beauty and emotion ~ Isaac Albeniz

I love my beauty. It's not my fault. ~ Valentino Garavani

Dean Swift proposed to tax beauty, and to leave every lady to rate her own charms; he said the tax would be cheerfully paid and very productive. ~ Arthur Frederick Saunders

She was her father's daughter but she'd inherited her mother's black anger. It burned through her sometimes like a chemical fire, brief and devastating and utterly unstoppable. ~ Amber Sparks

Innocence is the twin of beauty. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Solace is not meant to be an answer, but an invitation, through the door of pain and difficulty, to the depth of suffering and simultaneous beauty in the world that the strategic mind by itself cannot grasp nor make sense of. ~ David Whyte

Gardening is a luxury occupation: an ornament, not a necessity, of life ... Fortunate gardener, who may preoccupy himself solely with beauty in these difficult and ugly days! He is one of the few people left in this distressful world to carry on the tradition of elegance and charm. A useless member of society, considered in terms of economics, he must not be denied his rightful place. He deserves to share it, however humbly, with the painter and poet. ~ Vita Sackville-West

You're hardly likely to find a Chav mating with a lady of charm, beauty and sophistication, are you? The subsidised breeding farms they live in are unlikely to attract a lady who has cultivated proper deportment, and it's doubtful she'll be swayed by his shell suit, Burberry cap and Vauxhall Corsa ~ Karl Wiggins

I think true beauty is everywhere. Be it. See it. Notice it. Love it. Be grateful for it. Marvel at it. It's everywhere. It's all around us all the time. ~ Bellamy Young

It's funny, isn't it," Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula's ear, "how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too. ~ Kate Atkinson

Miles away, factory smokestacks rimmed with flame sent up cast billowing clouds of smoke that gave watercolor look to the sky – orange yellow – a pink cast like dawn – beauty to the gray-layered winter sky like cotton batting laced with flame bleak and radiant simultaneously; and Felix in a rush of gratitude though his heartbeat was still erratic and his hands were sticky with blood could have weepy seeing such beauty in all he'd been a witness to most of his life, thinking Oh Jesus he was going to miss these opaque surfaces of a world he knew so well, it was like his skill turned inside out, all he loved out there, he was missing them even now when he was still here, still alive. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

How difficult it is to see
The things we love
With all this shadow round us,
This brief time we're here. ~ Ruth Padel

Occasionally we glimpse the South Rim, four or five thousand feet above. From the rims the canyon seems oceanic; at the surface of the river the feeling is intimate. To someone up there with binoculars we seem utterly remote down here. It is this know dimension if distance and time and the perplexing question posed by the canyon itself- What is consequential? (in one's life, in the life of human beings, in the life of a planet)- that reverberate constantly, and make the human inclination to judge (another person, another kind of thought) seem so eerie ... Two kinds of time pass here: sitting at the edge of a sun-warmed pool watching blue dragonflies and black tadpoles. And the rapids: down the glassy-smooth tongue into a yawing trench, climb a ten-foot wall of standing water and fall into boiling, ferocious hydraulics ... ~ Barry Lopez

The light too brief to finish any work
the woman seeks to amplify the dark ~ Leatha Kendrick

Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye. ~ William Shakespeare

till it appears that men are much more philosophic on the subject of beauty than they are generally supposed; till they do fall in love with well-informed minds instead of handsome faces, a girl, with such loveliness as Harriet, has a certainty of being admired and sought after, of having the power of chusing from among many, consequently a claim to be nice. ~ Jane Austen

I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it. Things aren't that way. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Grace and beauty originates from within. It is the spirit's light that glows out and make every-thing beautiful, no mater what those things are, they all have their beauty gracefully when they come from a place within. ~ Angie Karan

Being lonely because of Allah is another kind of a beauty ~ Felix Siauw

The beauty that withstands all. Stubborn in the harshest of atmospheres. ~ Hafsah Faizal

."Missed you today, beauty," he says, reigning kisses on my neck. He pulls back and kisses me gently on the mouth.
"Did you miss me?" Ryan asks, grinning.
"No," Reid answers playfully. "You two are trouble together, I swear," he says, shaking his head at us. ~ Chantal Fernando

I want to love and be loved ... I don't want a world without love or grief or beauty. I'd rather die. ~ Daniel Mainwaring

Piety is indifferent whether she enters at the eye or at the ear. There is none of the senses at which she does not knock one day or other. The Puritans forgot this, and thrust Beauty out of the meeting-house and slammed the door in her face. ~ James Russell Lowell