Quotes by British Authors - Page 629

It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.
Walter Pater
As food nourishes the body, beauty nourishes the spirit.
Ginger Gilmour
Again, no disrespect intended, but she looked to me like a divorce that hadn't found a courtroom yet.
James Anderson
Like a carpenter with two broken legs at the bottom of a beautiful staircase. Maybe I can't climb the stairs, ma'am, but at least let me admire the workmanship.
James Anderson
There is something about my face in the mirrors that catch it. Even at a distance it will never be right again, not even to a casual glance. Beauty: it's the upkeep that costs, that's what Balzac said, not the initial investment.
Joanna Walsh
And I thought, I am in love. For the first time I am in love. And loved. Someone loves me. And I love them. And within me things clicked and whirled like the insides of some gigantic clock, cog against wheel, spring against spiral, tick against tock, and I knew that nothing would ever be the same again. I had shown someone what I really was. I had shown someone my truth, my secret. Out there, beyond the walls of the Castle, there was a boy who had seen inside my chrysalis. And I would never be safe again.
Philip Ridley
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
You despise the real bourgeois classes for all their snobbishness and their snobbish voices and ways. You do, don't you? Yet all you put in their place is a horrid little refusal to have nasty thoughts or do nasty things or be nasty in any way. Do you know that every great thing in the story of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?
John Fowles
Beautiful girls are not a decoration, arm candy, an object. They are, whether they know it or not, the very essence of our humanity.
Chloe Thurlow
Beautiful girls – the true beauties – are rarely vain, arrogant, poseurs. It is the girl who makes disproportionate efforts with makeup, clothes, heels and hair who suffers these conceits. They are girls who have made themselves appear beautiful without ever reaching the exalted status of being beautiful girls.
Chloe Thurlow
What constitutes a beautiful girl? It is not merely an anatomical or aesthetic quality. Beautiful girls have an inner beauty, an inner light that defeats the darkness. It is a way of walking, smiling, of being. They have a certain smell, sweet as baby breath. They radiate good will, kindness, selflessness.
Chloe Thurlow
She then thought the land enchanted into everlasting brightness and happiness; she fancied, then, that into a region so lovely no bale or woe could enter, but would be charmed away and disappear before the sight of the glorious guardian mountains. Now she knew the truth, that earth has no barrier which avails against agony.
Elizabeth Gaskell
The world is corrupt, and the way for me to make it better is not by writing letters, but joining my efforts with those of others to produce a work of beauty.
H.S. Ede
There's no beauty without some sadness or damage, or at least the potential of damage. If something's unbreakable, you can't love it because it doesn't need your love. It's the thing that don't last that really move us.
Rory Dunlop
Nightingales sang about her wherever she went.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The sons of Dior and Nimloth were Elured and Elurin; and a daughter also was born to them, and she was named Elwing, which is Star-spray, for she was born on a night of stars, whose light glittered in the spray of the waterfall of Lanthir Lamath beside her father's house.
J.R.R. Tolkien
As the light upon the leaves of trees, as the voice of clear waters, as the stars above the mists of the world, such was her glory and her loveliness; and in her face was a shining light.
J.R.R. Tolkien
She had never felt so light of heart and it seemed to her as though her body were a shell that lay at her feet and she pure spirit. Here was Beauty.
m. somerset maugham
You could not see and know her, and remain unmoved by those sensations of affection which belong to so near and tender a relationship.
Fanny Burney
....it seems to me that a pleasurable Contemplation of Beauty has certainly an immeasurably greater value than mere Consciousness of Pleasure.
G.E. Moore
Hopper’s paintings are full of women like her; women who appear to be in the grips of a loneliness that has to do with gender and unattainable standards of appearance, and that gets increasingly toxic and strangulating with age.
Olivia Laing
Pitfalls he must find on that journey, blind paths perhaps, but through it all the philosophy of belief in the essential goodness, the actual significance of things created, the state of being, 'in love with life.
Frances Chesterton
You can't see beauty with miserable eyes.
H.G.Wells
All that can best be expressed in words should be expressed in verse, but verse is a slow thing to create; nay, it is not really created: it is a secretion of the mind, it is a pearl that gathers round some irritant and slowly expresses the very essence of beauty and of desire that has lain long, potential and unexpressed, in the mind of the man who secretes it. God knows that this Unknown Country has been hit off in verse a hundred times...Milton does it so well in the Fourth Book of Paradise Lost that I defy any man of a sane understanding to read the whole of that book before going to bed and not to wake up next morning as though he had been on a journey.
Hilaire Belloc
On BeautyNo, we could not itemize the listof sins they can't forgive us.The beautiful don't lack the wound.It is always beginning to snow.Of sins they can't forgive usspeech is beautifully useless.It is always beginning to snow.The beautiful know this.Speech is beautifully useless.They are the damned.The beautiful know this.They stand around unnatural as statuary.They are the damnedand so their sadness is perfect,delicate as an egg placed in your palm.Hard, it is decorated with their faceand so their sadness is perfect.The beautiful don't lack the wound.Hard, it is decorated with their face.No, we could not itemize the list. Cape Cod, May 1974
Zadie Smith
Tell your daughters how you love your body.Tell them how they must love theirs.Tell them to be proud of every bit of themselves—from their tiger stripes to the soft flesh of their thighs,whether there is a little of them or a lot,whether freckles cover their face or not,whether their curves are plentiful or slim,whether their hair is thick, curly, straight, long or short.Tell them how they inheritedtheir ancestors, souls in their smiles,that their eyes carry countriesthat breathed life into history,that the swing of their hipsdoes not determine their destiny.Tell them never to listen when bodies are critiqued.Tell them every woman’s body is beautifulbecause every woman’s soul is unique.
Nikita Gill
Beauty and desire to possess have driven men mad for centuries.
Hannah Rothschild
Beauty isn't skin-deep. It's bone-deep. Heart-deep. Soul-deep. Only put to sleep. When we prick our finger on fear. Beauty can't be bought or made. It can only be awoken through laughter, and living, and love. Through being you and being true.
Siobhan Curham
He was a giant who had caught a butterfly and knew he'd only kill it if he kept it but was so reluctant to let it go for its beauty made him something he wouldn't be without it: happy.
Carrie Hope Fletcher
There is no physical description of Christ in the Gospels, and so we are unable to know whether he was physically attractive or not. Of course, the specifications for what constitutes physical beauty are culturally conditioned and so change from place to place and from time to time. Christ's beauty then does not stem from physical attractiveness. It's rather the 'harsh' beauty of a God Who has given Himself so completely in love that it takes Him to the most ignominous death, on the Cross. Bruno Forte writes: 'Christ, the crucified God, is the place where beauty happens: in His self-emptying, eternity is present in time, the All Who is God is present in the fragment of Christ's human form (cf. Phil 2:6ff.). It is the cross that reveals the beauty that saves'. Christ is beautiful because He is Love incarnate, and, in a world disfigured by sin, that love is necessarily manifest in His suffering for others. This means that in our broken, marred condition, the shape of deepest beauty is cruciform.
Chris Ryan MGL
She had to quickly pop back to the fifteenth century to find a word for how beautiful he was. The boy was makeless.
Helen Oyeyemi
For the first time she knew and loved the Spirit of good and beauty, an affinity to which affords the greatest bliss that our nature can receive.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... those who seek the lost Lord will find traces of His being and beauty in all that men have made, from music and poetry and sculpture to the gingerbread men in the pâtisseries, from the final calculation of the pure mathematician to the first delighted chalk drawing of a small child.
Caryll Houselander
Think'st thou heaven is such a glorious thing?I tell thee, 'tis not so fair as thouOr any man that breathes on earth.
Christopher Marlowe
We have an obligation to make things beautiful, to not leave the world uglier than we found it.
Neil Gaiman
...With the failure of the imagination to present form the mind discovers that it has the capacity to conceive of the infinite, and thus has the power to transcend everything that sense can measure and thus present. The sublime feeling in this case arises from the play between the finite nature of the senses and the infinite capacity of reason.
Nicholas Gane
Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word "glory" a meaning for me.
C.S. Lewis
The trick and the beauty of language is that it seems to order the whole universe, misleading us into believing that we live in sight of a rational space, a possible harmony.
John Burnside
We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it
C.S. Lewis
Beauty is itself so unattainable that it escapes altogether; and the true artist, like the true Mystic, can never rest
Aleister Crowley
Six years previously, Miss Brodie had led her new class into the garden for a history lesson underneath the big elm. On the way through the school corridors they passed the headmistress's study. The door was wide open, the room was empty.'Little girls,' said Miss Brodie, 'come and observe this.'They clustered round the open door while she pointed to a large poster pinned with drawing-pins on the opposite wall within the room. It depicted a man's big face. Underneath were the words 'Safety First'.'This is Stanley Baldwin who got in as Prime Minister and got out again ere long,' said Miss Brodie. 'Miss Mackay retains him on the wall because she believes in the slogan "Safety First". But Safety does not come first. Goodness, Truth and Beauty come first. Follow me.
Muriel Spark
She made beauty all round her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When she picked up a toad - she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes - the toad became beautiful.
C.S. Lewis
Each generation has its own dream of beauty. I have lived long enough to watch it change. Just then, he was what all sculptors were reaching after, and only the great achieved.
Mary Renault
Then there are the fully intentional pleasures, which, although in some way tied up with sensory or perceptual experience, are modes of exploration of the world. Aesthetic pleasures are like this. Aesthetic pleasures are contemplative - they involve studying an object OUTSIDE of the self, to which one is GIVING something (namely, attention and all that flows from it), and not TAKING, as in the pleasure that comes from drugs and drinks. Hence such pleasures are not addictive - there is no pathway to reward that can be short-circuited here, and a serotonin injection is not a cheap way of obtaining the experience of PARISFAL or THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.
Roger Scruton
No one who is good can ever be ugly.
Roald Dahl
In the new quiet I heard the sea as if my ears were laid against the ocean floor. I could hear everything. The rumbling earthquake of a ship and spider crabs moving between weeds.
Deborah Levy
No one noticed them step off the train, no one saw them arrive in Desolation Road . . . . Then something very much like a sustained explosion of light filled the hotel and there, at the epicenter of the glare, was the most beautiful woman anyone had ever seen. Every man in the room had to swallow hard. Every woman fought an inexpressible need to sigh. A dozen hearts cracked down the middle and all the love flew out like larks and circled round the incredible being. It was as if God Himself had walked into the room. Then the God-light went out and there was a blinking, eye-rubbing darkness. When vision was restored, everyone saw before them a small, very ordinary man and a young girl of about eight who was quite the plainest, drabbest creature anyone had ever seen. For it was the nature of Ruthie Blue Mountain, a girl of stunning ordinariness, to absorb like sunlight the beauty of everything around her and store it until she chose to release it, all at once, like a flashbulb of intense beauty. Then she would return again to dowdy anonymity, leaving behind her an afterimage in the heart of unutterable loss.
Ian McDonald
Its quietness was the quietness of strength. And the eyes were those of one who had walked through many a dark valley without flinching.
Madeleine Brent
There is, in the act of destruction, a beauty which we try to deny, and a joy which we cannot. Children build to knock down, and though we may grow around it, that need runs in is, deeper than our blood.
Mark Lawrence
Behold,' said the Voice, 'earthly beauty. It is nothing but seeming, for to the uninstructed eye the world appears fruitful and sweet, yet in it is nothing but a pile of skulls, showing where others were lost as they went before.
Maria McCann
Do not all charms fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
John Keats 1795-1821
It seems comfortable to sink down on a sofa in a corner, to look, to listen. Then it happens that two figures standing with their backs against the window appear against the branches of a spreading tree. With a shock of emotion one feels 'There are figures without features robed in beauty'. In the pause that follows while the ripples spread, the girl to whom one should be talking says to herself, 'He is old'. But she is wrong. It is not age; it is that a drop has fallen; another drop. Time has given the arrangement another shake. Out we creep from the arch of the currant leaves, out into a wider world. The true order of things – this is our perpetual illusion – is now apparent. Thus in a moment, in a drawing-room, our life adjusts itself to the majestic march of day across the sky.
Virginia Woolf
It is foolish to wish for beauty.  Sensible people never either desire it for themselves or care about it in others.  If the mind be but well cultivated, and the heart well disposed, no one ever cares for the exterior.  So said the teachers of our childhood; and so say we to the children of the present day.  All very judicious and proper, no doubt; but are such assertions supported by actual experience?We are naturally disposed to love what gives us pleasure, and what more pleasing than a beautiful face—when we know no harm of the possessor at least?  A little girl loves her bird—Why?  Because it lives and feels; because it is helpless and harmless?  A toad, likewise, lives and feels, and is equally helpless and harmless; but though she would not hurt a toad, she cannot love it like the bird, with its graceful form, soft feathers, and bright, speaking eyes.  If a woman is fair and amiable, she is praised for both qualities, but especially the former, by the bulk of mankind: if, on the other hand, she is disagreeable in person and character, her plainness is commonly inveighed against as her greatest crime, because, to common observers, it gives the greatest offence; while, if she is plain and good, provided she is a person of retired manners and secluded life, no one ever knows of her goodness, except her immediate connections.  Others, on the contrary, are disposed to form unfavourable opinions of her mind, and disposition, if it be but to excuse themselves for their instinctive dislike of one so unfavoured by nature; and visa versâ with her whose angel form conceals a vicious heart, or sheds a false, deceitful charm over defects and foibles that would not be tolerated in another. 
Anne Brontë
He didn’t ask himself if she was beautiful, because the physical effect of her presence made the question insignificant.
Sebastian Faulks
Seek and see beauty in the watery world.
Fennel Hudson
Reveal the timeless beauty of Nature’s special places.
Fennel Hudson
The USA is a beautiful country...when you take the corrupt corporations and their government minions out of the equation.
Steven Magee
My general feeling is that date make-up should be an honest advertisement for a potential relationship. Frankly, it’s easier for you that way. There’s no point labouring over lots of perfectly applied make-up if you are, in reality, a low-maintenance kind of girl who can’t possibly keep it up beyond the honeymoon period. Equally, it seems unwise to imply you’re someone who rolls out of bed and out to a Sunday farmer’s market all natural skin, flushed cheeks and a smidge of lip balm when your real life is spent in full coverage foundation and smoky eyes. Like any part of dating, it is always safer to be yourself because who can maintain a lie for long?
Sali Hughes
A smile is what makes a face beautiful.
Anthony T.Hincks
Beauty is seeing,the world through colored glass,of seeing everything in its glory,it's all it ever asks.
Anthony T.Hincks