Havelock Ellis Quotes

Love is an optical illusion that makes you believe the object of your affection is the most beautiful person in the world.

Suppose someone were to say: 'Imagine this butterfly exactly as it is, but ugly instead of beautiful'?!

A beautiful woman can make herself look ugly in the eyes of a man if she is very insecure.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, get it out with Optrex.

Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.

If you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty.

Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country

The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators.

The ideal woman which is in every man's mind is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist, her hand. The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement. Remember, all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

I shall not find a painting more beautiful because the artist has painted a hawthorn in the foreground, though I know of nothing more beautiful than the hawthorn, for I wish to remain sincere and because I know that the beauty of a painting does not depend on the things represented in it. I shall not collect images of hawthorn. I do not venerate hawthorn, I go to see and smell it.

Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently, when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep.

I have no problem with whatever the next big look is. Just don't try and tell me that only one look is beautiful.

To experience a thing as beautiful means: to experience it necessarily wrongly.

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.

If you say my eyes are beautiful, it's because they are looking at you.

Beauty is everywhere and it comes in all different forms. Many times I don't find a size zero girl amazing, I find her really shockingly thin or small, and I think that beauty comes in all different forms. Beauty is about how you feel. There are plenty of people who are amazing to look at who are super beautiful, and then there are plenty of people who are easy to look at who are not beautiful at all, they open their mouth or they have an attitude or they are cruel, and they look hideous suddenly.

Where is truth, forsooth, and who knoweth it? Is Beauty beautiful, or is it only our eyes that make it so? Does Venus squint? Has she got a splay-foot, red hair, and a crooked back? Anoint my eyes, good Fairy Puck, so that I may ever consider the Beloved Object a paragon! Above all, keep on anointing my mistress's dainty peepers with the very strongest ointment, so that my noddle may ever appear lovely to her, and that she may continue to crown my honest ears with fresh roses!

I believe that the very process of looking can make a thing beautiful.

It's been a growth process for each of us to understand why we find certain things beautiful. And if we do find something beautiful, we'll chase it, because you want to understand yourself and what your psyche is creating.

There is no man on earth who can give a final judgment on what the most beautiful shape may be. Only God knows.

If a given combination of trees, mountains, water, and houses, say a landscape, is beautiful, it is not so by itself, but because of me, of my favor, of the idea or feeling I attach to it.

Beauty is whatever anyone thinks is beautiful.

If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it the beauty forsakesall the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time.

There is no passion so much transports the sincerity of judgment as doth anger

Liking is not always the child of beauty; but whatsoever is liked, to the liker is beautiful.