Beautiful Quotes

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First Shakespeare sonnets seem meaningless; first Bach fugues, a bore; first differential equations, sheer torture. But training changes the nature of our spiritual experiences. In due course, contact with an obscurely beautiful poem, an elaborate piece of counterpoint or of mathematical reasoning, causes us to feel direct intuitions of beauty and significance. It is the same in the moral world.

I've never seen the poor people being so familiar with their head of state as they were with her. It was a beautiful lesson for me.

As regards to its use on the coinage we have actual experience by which to go. In all my life I have never heard any human being speak reverently of this motto on the coins or show any sign of having appealed to any high emotion in him. But I have literally hundreds of times heard it used as an occasion of, and incitement to, the sneering ridicule which it is above all things undesirable that so beautiful and exalted a phrase should excite.

Theodore Roosevelt

There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.

Rainer Maria Rilke

A beautiful woman pleases the eye, a good woman pleases the heart: one is a jewel, the other a treasure.

Napoleon I of France

This is the ending. Now not day only shall be beloved, but night too shall be beautiful and blessed and all its fear pass away.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Suffering becomes beautiful when any one bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility, but through greatness of mind.

He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.

I wanted to be a nun. I saw nuns as superstars. When I was growing up I went to a Catholic school, and the nuns, to me, were these superhuman, beautiful, fantastic people.

And they were canopied by the blue sky,
So cloudless, clear, and purely beautiful
That God alone was to be seen in heaven.

Money, which represents the prose in life, and which is hardly mentioned in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sports are positively essential. It is healthy to engage in sports, they are beautiful and liberal, liberal in the sense that nothing serves quite as well to integrate social classes, etc., than street or public games.

Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees... to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilization.

To his son, Randolph Churchill, during a trip to Canada, on 11 August 1929

Winston Churchill

It is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight, that enhances every object.

To a true artist only that face is beautiful which, quite apart from its exterior, shines with the truth within the soul.

I hope she'll be a fool — that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty.

Stephen Hawking

My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. All I am I owe to my mother. I attribute all my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education I received from her.

George Washington

Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.

Vincent van Gogh

A beautiful homily, a genuine sermon, must begin with the first proclamation, with the proclamation of salvation. There is nothing more solid, deep and sure than this proclamation.

Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they're preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them. Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astounding. Man needs such a life and if it hasn't yet appeared, he should begin to anticipate it, wait for it, dream about it, prepare for it. To achieve this, he has to see and know more than did his grandfather and father.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

At bidding of a Will, to which we bend
(and must), but only dimly apprehend,
great processes march on, as Time unrolls
from dark beginnings to uncertain goals;
and as on page o'er-written without clue,
with script and limning packed of various hue,
an endless multitude of forms appear,
some grim, some frail, some beautiful, some queer,
each alien, except as kin from one
remote Origo, gnat, man, stone, and sun.

J. R. R. Tolkien