Reflections on beauty, thoughts, opinions, ideas, meditations, short philosophical and aesthetic texts by famous authors on the concepts of beauty.
Qualities or characteristics that are aesthetically appealing to the senses or the mind are referred to as beauty, which is a subjective concept. Beauty certainly goes beyond the surface; it includes a person’s inner traits, which can also be seen as attractive. These attributes include personality, values, and character. Because the concept of beauty is a subjective idea, it differs from person to person, which is why beauty itself cannot be objectively quantified. However, there are some cultural or social definitions accepted as the standard model of beauty.
Carl William Brown
Beauty depends on size as well as symmetry. No very small animal can be beautiful, for looking at it takes so small a portion of time that the impression of it will be confused. Nor can any very large one, for a whole view of it cannot be had at once, and so there will be no unity and completeness.
Aristotle
All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory – of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.
Charles Baudelaire
Women who are either indisputably beautiful, or indisputably ugly, are best flattered upon the score of their understandings; but those who are in a state of mediocrity are best flattered upon their beauty, or at least their graces: for every woman who is not absolutely ugly, thinks herself handsome.
Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield
At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise… that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.
Albert Camus
There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles…but there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief — a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you.
George Eliot
In the beautiful, man sets himself up as the standard of perfection; in select cases he worships himself in it. Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty –he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world – alas! Only a very human, an all too human, beauty.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not fine yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labor to make all one glow or beauty and never cease chiseling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendor of virtue, until you see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine
Plotinus
Like plowing, housework makes the ground ready for the germination of family life. The kids will not invite a teacher home if beer cans litter the living room. The family isn’t likely to have breakfast together if somebody didn’t remember to buy eggs, milk, or muffins. Housework maintains an orderly setting in which family life can flourish.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
We know only that we are living in these bodies and have a vague idea, because we have heard it, and because our faith tells us so, that we possess souls. As to what good qualities there may be in our souls, or who dwells within them, or how precious they are, those are things which seldom consider and so we trouble little about carefully preserving the soul’s beauty.
St. Teresa of Avila
Salvation is from our side a choice, from the divine side it is a seizing upon, an apprehending, a conquest by the Most High God. Our “accepting” and “willing” are reactions rather than actions. The right of determination must always remain with God.
A. W. Tozer
In a certain sense, beauty is important because it can impact a person’s social interactions, self-confidence, and self-esteem. However, it shouldn’t be the sole tool for determining someone’s intrinsic worth. Naturally, taking care of one’s physical appearance, such as maintaining good hygiene, following a healthy diet, exercising regularly, and dressing appropriately, can enhance one’s aesthetic appeal. One can and should also work on one’s inner qualities, such as developing a positive attitude, being kind and compassionate, and cultivating one’s talents and abilities. And, as the saying goes, “everything goes.”
Carl William Brown
Since goodness is the origin of beauty, otherwise it would not be beautiful, we must affirm that beauty is generated by goodness, and the essence of beauty consists in participating in goodness. Everything that participates in goodness, in proportion to its participation, becomes beautiful, while what lacks it becomes ugly.
Platone
Anne-Marie […] spent her childhood in a chair. They taught her to be bored, to stand upright, to sew. She had certain abilities: they thought it respectable not to cultivate them; she had the splendor of youth: they took care to hide it from her. These modest and proud bourgeois considered beauty above their means or below their social status: something to be indulged in by marquises and whores […] Fifty years later, leafing through a family album, Anne-Marie realized she had once been beautiful.
J.-P. Sartre
The total psychological blindness to beauty in all its forms, which is rapidly spreading everywhere today, constitutes a mental illness that should not be underestimated, if only because it goes hand in hand with insensitivity towards everything that is morally reprehensible.
Konrad Lorenz
If all our women were to become as beautiful as the Medici Venus, we would be enchanted for a while; but soon we would begin to desire something different, and once that was achieved, we would want to see certain characteristics accentuated that would modify the prevailing standards.
Charles Darwin
Beauty is something that cannot be explained by the struggle for existence, and indeed there are forms of beauty that can be destructive to the animal itself, like overdeveloped antlers in a deer. Darwin realized that he could not explain beauty, in the life of plants and animals, with natural selection, and was forced to introduce the great secondary principle of sexual selection.
Lin Yu-t’ang
Beauty deceives many and attracts all. The feelings, emotions, and stimuli it evokes in our perceptions certainly cannot be considered arbitrary and conventional, much less irrational.
Carl William Brown
The noblest kind of beauty is that which does not suddenly sweep us away, which does not unleash stormy and intoxicating assaults (such beauty easily arouses nausea), but which insinuates itself slowly, which almost inadvertently carries us away and which one day we find before us in a dream, but which in the end, after having long and modestly lain in our heart, takes complete possession of us and fills our eyes with tears and our hearts with longing.
Friedrich Nietzsche
GDP doesn’t take into account the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their leisure time. It doesn’t include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our family values, the intelligence of our debate. It measures everything, in short, except what makes life truly worth living.
Robert Kennedy
The most beautiful people you can meet are those who have experienced defeat, suffering, struggle, and loss, and who have found their way out of the depths of the abyss. These people have an appreciation, sensitivity, and understanding of life that fills them with compassion, kindness, and deep loving care. Beautiful people don’t become beautiful by accident.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Move toward being, toward the center, toward the true essence. Always seek the roots! Don’t be fooled by the leaves. But you are fooled by the leaves. If a woman is beautiful on the surface, you fall in love with her; you have fallen in love with the appearance. The woman may not be beautiful on the inside; she may be downright ugly, and you are trapped.
Osho
Even biology has its own aesthetics; who knows what purpose it serves, perhaps it’s because even nothingness likes beauty, that stupid result of the physical laws of the symmetrical agglomeration of matter.
Carl William Brown
There is nothing more divine than beauty, which, not belonging to the body and having no beginning or existence except in the spirit and reason, can be revealed and apprehended by this most divine part of us, when it contemplates itself, the only object worthy of it.
Anthony Ashley Cooper Shaftesbury
There are billions of women on earth, right? Some are passable. Most are pretty good, but every now and then nature plays a trick, creating a special, incredible woman. I mean, you look and you can’t believe it. Everything is a perfect undulating movement, like quicksilver, like a snake; you see an ankle, an elbow, a breast, a knee, and everything blends into a gigantic, provocative whole.
Charles Bukowski
Trust is good, mistrust is better; especially if you’re dealing with the guise of beauty and wealth, for beneath such guise usually lurks the demon of power, generally suggestive and attractive, but ultimately always illusory, hypocritical, decadent, and disappointing.
Carl William Brown
Aesthetics is ultimately a wolf in sheep’s clothing: it is true that it makes modern art autonomous, but in doing so it alienates it from society, making it autonomous to the point of reducing it to an aesthetic game devoid of any practical or theoretical utility.
For Jay M. Bernstein: “In securing an autonomous domain of aesthetic judgment, a domain with its own norms, language, and practices, Kant was simultaneously securing the independence of the domains of cognition and moral value from the interference of aesthetics.”
Kant separates beauty from the ideas of morality and truth, laying the foundations for the concept of art for art’s sake. Art can therefore no longer concern itself with truth and ends up in the ghetto of beauty, where it cannot disturb or interfere in matters that matter.
It is thanks to the ideological program of aesthetics that we still hear today that art should limit itself to pleasure; it is thanks to philosophers like Kant that even some artists today are still convinced of this. It is an idealistic vision that reinforces a supernaturalistic idea of art, making it contemplative, disinterested, and purely spiritual, separate from needs, desires, and practical activities.
Andros
Men are struck by the sight of a beautiful woman, turning around in the street. But this happens to women too. In fact, women are much more capable of appreciating the aesthetic aspect of female beauty; they grasp its terrible power of attraction. They are proud when they feel beautiful, and are gripped by a pang of jealousy when they see another woman more beautiful and more elegant.
Francesco Alberoni
Man does not like to remain in the solitude of the ego: therefore he loves; therefore he must seek the object of his love outside himself. He can find it only in beauty, but since he himself is the most beautiful creature fashioned by God, it is necessary that he find within himself the model of that beauty he seeks outside. Everyone can discover within himself the first rays of this beauty, and depending on whether the outside corresponds to it or distances itself from it, he forms ideas of beauty or ugliness about everything. And yet, although man seeks to fill the great emptiness he has created by going outside himself, he cannot be satisfied by any kind of object. His heart is too vast; there must be something that resembles it and is very close to it. Therefore, the beauty that can satisfy man consists not only in conformity, but also in similarity. This narrows and limits it in the difference of sex.
Anonymous
They killed a girl, they killed beauty and charm, they killed joy and cheerfulness, they killed life, passion and truth, but then again, nature cannot choose its own course and must still obey its universal stupidity.
Carl William Brown
Beauty will save the world. When we are captivated by beauty, we rise above our daily worries and experience a kind of transcendence that fills us with joy and hope.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
I have found the definition of Beauty – of my Beauty. It is something ardent and sad, something a little vague, leaving room for conjecture. I will apply my ideas, if you like, to a sensible object, to the most interesting object in society, for example, to a woman’s face. A seductive and beautiful head, a female head, I mean, is a head that makes one dream simultaneously – but in a confused way – of voluptuousness and sadness; that presupposes an idea of melancholy, of weakness, even of satiety – but also a contrary idea, namely, an ardor, a desire to live, associated with an ebbing bitterness, as if it came from privation or despair. Mystery and regret are equally characteristics of Beauty.
Charles Baudelaire
God or someone keeps creating women and sending them out, and one’s ass is too big, another’s breasts are too small, one’s crazy and another’s crazy, one’s obsessed with religion and another reads tea leaves, one can’t control her farts, another has a big nose, and another has skinny legs. But every now and then a woman arrives, in full bloom, a woman bursting from her dress, a creature all sex, a curse, the end of everything.
Charles Bukowski
Already in the nineteenth century, there were those who contested aesthetics, such as Bernard Rosanquet, who railed against the attempts of aesthetics to guide or assist the artist, and to interfere in his work, for him it would be like: “Committing the impertinence of invading the artist’s domain with an apparatus belli of principles and critical precepts.” Max Dessoir would speak of callicracy, the government of beauty: “According to callicracy, art would have a task of delightful simplicity, that is, to make the beautiful in general or the pleasant in itself more effective and accessible through repetition. Naive souls are accustomed to considering art in this way. […] How the scope and meaning of art would be narrowed, if we wanted to reduce it to a higher form of pleasantness!”
Andros
Beautify oneself. This is the verb that women especially like. They beautify themselves so well, with pomades, nail polishes, lipsticks, and all sorts of bistres, that they manage to become disgustingly beautiful. For them, beauty is fashion; and fashion seems all the more beautiful to them the more grotesque and similar it is to the customs of prostitutes.
Domenico Giuliotti e Giovanni Papini
A woman to whom Providence has endowed both physical and spiritual beauty is a truth at once accessible and hidden, which we can comprehend only with love, and touch only with virtue; and when we attempt to describe such a woman, she vanishes like a faint vapor.
Kahlil Gibran
The extreme selection to create the Olympus of entertainment divinities deprives ordinary society of beauty, which must therefore enjoy it by proxy, and as punishment in real life, when one looks around, one unfortunately sees only mediocrity.
Carl William Brown
What dazzles in beauty passes quickly, fleeting and inconstant, while what constitutes it endures. Time does not harm the truly beautiful; rather, it makes its beauty stand out; it does not decay, but rather brings it to the light.
Filostrato
A person’s beauty lies in their mind, their spirit, and their attitude toward the world. Outward beauty may captivate, but it’s inner beauty that leaves a lasting impression.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I do not pretend that joy cannot accompany beauty; but I say that joy is one of the most vulgar ornaments, while melancholy is, so to speak, the noble companion of beauty, to the point that I cannot conceive of a kind of beauty that does not contain sorrow.
Charles Baudelaire
Beauty works true miracles. Every moral flaw in a beautiful woman, far from generating repulsion, becomes, instead, the most attractive; vice itself exudes grace; but if beauty disappears, a woman will have to be twenty times more intelligent than a man to attract, I won’t say love, but at least esteem.
Nikolaj Gogol
In certain women, who are neither as beautiful nor as charming as others, there is an invincible charm that attracts men and amazes and disgusts other women, who cannot realize it, because it only affects men. The reason is that one woman is more of a woman than another, just as between two bottles of wine of the same size, one contains more aroma and essence of wine than the other, so in one woman there is much more femininity than in another.
Alphonse Karr
In such a world order, men who look sad and women who look cheerful appear suspect. However, beggars are preferred to frivolous women. Because frivolous women are dishonest and deficient, taking advantage of the physical defect of beauty.
Karl Kraus
To become beautiful, a woman must not want to pass for pretty: that is, in ninety-nine cases in which she could please, she must disdain and abstain from pleasure, in order to one day reap the rapture of him whose soul’s door is large enough to welcome the great.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There are women of dazzling but uneven beauty, who often overshadow others more authentically beautiful; but since taste, which is prone to prejudice, is the judge of beauty, and the beauty of the most beautiful people is not always equal, it can happen, even if only for a moment, that the less beautiful ones overshadow the others: the differences in light and day will more or less discern the truth that lies in the features or colors, will reveal what is beautiful in the less beautiful, and will eclipse whatever is true and beautiful in the other.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Nature has destined young girls for what, in theatrical terms, is called a “coup de théâtre”: in fact, for a few years nature has endowed them with lush beauty, charm and fullness of form, at the expense of the rest of their lives, so that, that is, they are capable of taking possession during those years of a man’s imagination to such an extent that he will be induced to honestly take one of them for life, in some form or another, a step which mere rational reflection would seem to have offered no sure guarantee of enticing the man to take.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Beauty is divided into a thousand different ways. Woman is the most suitable subject to support it and, if she possesses intelligence, she enlivens and manifests it in a wonderful way. If a woman wants to please and possesses the qualities of beauty, or at least a part of them, she will succeed; and even if men paid no attention and she did not try, she would still succeed in making herself loved. In men’s hearts there is a waiting room where she would take up residence.
Anonymous
First of all, we must abandon the idea that there is a single, compact definition of “beautiful” and that therefore we can know what is beautiful through fixed canons: the concept of beauty depends first of all on the various civilizations; secondly, in every civilization, but especially in ours, it is the fruit of a series of stratifications, so that beauty could be defined in a cluster, a constellation, that is, by taking and connecting the main variants, the various answers that have been given.
The concept of beauty is linked, in many civilizations, to that of good. Indeed, our very word, “beautiful,” derives from the Latin “bellus,” a diminutive of the root “duenulus bonulus,” meaning “good in a small way,” or “averagely good.” We also know that in Greece the term “kalós” is “beautiful,” but is often found in hendiadys, meaning connected to the term “good.” Furthermore, in modern Greek, “kalós” no longer means “beautiful,” but “good.” One could continue: for example, the Japanese “yashi” implies “beautiful” and “good.” But in every culture, more or less, beauty is attributed a value, and therefore something worthy of being pursued.
Remo Bodei
Let’s introduce another important concept, that of “aesthetic canon.” Intelligible beauty presupposes that there are, in some way, objective standards of beauty, and therefore, as you already emphasized, that it is recognizable by all based on measurements or calculations. This concept remained dominant for a long time, in theory if not in practice, until the beginning of the modern age, when it was replaced by a more vague idea of beauty. What, specifically, were the consequences of this attitude?
First, it must be said that the previously described model of beauty tied to measure also implies that beauty is calculable and that, being calculable and objective, by following certain rules one can produce beauty in architecture, painting, and so on. However, even the ancients, although this conception was dominant, did not consider it the only one, because there are—and here we are dealing with a composite definition of beauty – forms of beauty tied, for example, to simplicity, as Plotinus maintains: the color of gold or a star are beautiful without harmony, that is, without relation to anything else. Or there are medieval conceptions of beauty, which Heidegger will take up in our century, which have to do with the idea of “splendor.” Moreover, the German “schön,” meaning “beautiful,” from the verb “scheinen,” implies “shining,” “splendor.” Therefore, beauty is tied to this “claritas,” this “luminosity.”
Thus, this dominant conception, centered on the idea of proportion, measure, calculability, and objectivity, began to enter into crisis in the late Renaissance, a crisis that became fully evident in the Baroque period. As recently as 1509, for example, Luca Pacioli, in his book De divina proportione, and then the entire Florentine Neoplatonic, or rather, Neo-Plothinian, school – Marsilio Ficino and others, who influenced painters such as Botticelli, Raphael, and Michelangelo – were tied to this idea of divine proportion and measure. But already with Mannerism, and then with the Baroque, we realize that beauty does not coincide with order and regularity, that there is something more, which, in the language immediately drawn from Petrarch, is called “I don’t know what” – Petrarch, in turn, borrowed it from Augustine, from another context: “nescio quid.”
There’s a “something,” a “je ne sais quoi,” that helps establish what beauty is, something that is neither calculable nor measurable, something added to it, introduced by the artist’s genius. Thus, all previous canons somehow fall by the wayside, because there’s no longer a shared criterion to appeal to. One must have what will be called “taste.”
Remo Bodei
On the same argument you can also read:
Best quotes and aphorisms on beauty
