Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.
Beauty can pierce one like pain.
All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.[Все разнообразие, вся прелесть, вся красота жизни слагается из тени и света.]
You’re lovely, but you’re empty. One couldn’t die for you.[translation by Richard Howard]You are beautiful, but you are empty. One could not die for you.[translation by Katherine Woods][Le langaVous êtes belles mais vous êtes vides – leur dit-il encore -. On ne peut pas mourir pour vous.]
When a woman isn’t beautiful, people always say, ‘You have lovely eyes, you have lovely hair.’[Когда женщина некрасива, то ей говорят: «у вас прекрасные глаза, у вас прекрасные волосы»…]
To love beauty is to see light.
To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.
To constitute taste, it is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.
There certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them.
The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich.
