“We do not like final knowledge, because knowledge, Phaedo, has no dignity or severity: it knows, understands, forgives, without attitude; it is sympathetic to the abyss, it is the abyss. Therefore we deny it and instead seek beauty, simplicity, greatness and severity, of objectivity and form. But form and objectivity, Phaedo, lead the noble one to intoxication and desire, to horrible emotional transgressions rejected by his beautiful severity, lead to the abyss. Us poets, I say, it leads there, for we are unable to elevate ourselves, instead we can only transgress.”
“There are very few sights more off-putting than a woman s hands with corrugated layers of nail polish.”
“The more I saw her, the more she enchanted me. She was exquisitely beautiful. Her slenderness was a charm. I was lost in contemplation. What was passing in my mind I should have some difficulty in explaining. I was full of indulgence for her life, full of admiration for her beauty. The proof of disinterestedness that she gave in not accepting a rich and fashionable young man, ready to waste all his money upon her, excused her in my eyes for all her faults in the past. There was a kind of candour in this woman. You could see she was still in the virginity of vice. Her firm walk, her supple figure, her rosy, open nostrils, her large eyes, slightly tinged with blue, indicated one of those ardent natures which shed around them a sort of voluptuous perfume, like Eastern vials, which, close them as tightly as you will, still let some of their perfume escape. Finally, whether it was simple nature or a breath of fever, there passed from time to time in the eyes of this woman a glimmer of desire, giving promise of a very heaven for one whom she should love. But those who had loved Marguerite were not to be counted, nor those whom she had loved.”
“Willa Jean did not feel she was beautiful because she was a healthy child. She felt beautiful like a grown-up lady on TV.”
“All life is vain. But even to have lived in vain is beautiful.”
“Kirigin cleared his throat. It s of no matter to me. I just wondered if I should have that cordial she likes waiting. Is Commander Nazalensky well? Pretty as a picture and brimming with spite. She is lovely, isn t she? said Kirigin dreamily....”
“Love is the magnet for your spirit Sex is the breath of your love The beauty is Switch-Power of both All that surround your thoughts And run your life.”
“To have beauty is to have only that, but to have goodness is to be beautiful too As translated by Suzy Q. Groden in Sappho: Poems (1966)”
“When you start loving yourself wholeheartedly, you learn to see your own internal happiness, strength and beauty.”
“I knew that lust was a dangerous thing, but I wanted these men to lust for me because, even though I didn t know the precise shape and weight of lust, I knew that lust was power - and I wanted power even then.”
“From my mother, I learned that beauty was armor. From my teenage friends, I learned that femininity was junk. They were both right.”
“Someone once told me that flaws are what give people real beauty”
“The greatest thing you can do for your well-being is what you can commit to every single day.”
“I started carrying an old tour book for the Florida Keys in my bag with me at all times. I d had it since I was a kid, and after my daddy died, I read it to escape back to memories of him taking me there. As I read it to my guys, we d leave whatever hospital we were in, and go somewhere beautiful, away from trouble and worry. They d all come home to Arkansas, a place that had birthed them but wouldn t claim them. So we left. . . . We went someplace else, where they were safe and warm. Where there was nothing to be hidden and nothing wrong with admiring the way the sun shone down on the beauty of men. As it it existed for that very reason -- to be admired and loved.”
“We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.”
“{...], reality is painful, so people invent justifications and use them to supplant measurement of reality. We could use the old cliché of an ostrich hiding its head in the sand, but only if there s a television down there, dramatizing the sadness. It is an inversion of art: instead of singing the beautiful, we find praises for the ugly and disguise it as beauty, because we have lost belief in beauty. As good nihilists, we note that this loss of beauty is vested more in belief than in beauty. We have made beauty contingent upon so many moral justifications that it is socially taboo to note beauty without somehow tying it to the plight of the disadvantaged.”
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread.”