Horace Quotes

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is ugliness.

Beauty, my dear Sir, is not so much a quality of the object beheld, as an effect in him who beholds it. If our sight were longer or shorter, or if our constitution were different, what now appears beautiful to us would seem misshapen, and what we now think misshapen we should regard as beautiful. The most beautiful hand seen through the microscope will appear horrible. Some things are beautiful at a distance, but ugly near;

To tell you the truth, I am rather perplexed by the concept of 'art'. What one person considers to be 'art' is often not 'art' to another. 'Beautiful' and 'ugly' are old-fashioned concepts that are seldom applied these days; perhaps justifiably, who knows? Something repulsive, which gives you a moral hangover, and hurts your ears or eyes, may well be art. Only 'kitsch' is not art - we're all agreed about that. Indeed, but what is 'kitsch'? If only I knew!

To keep beauty in its place is to make all things beautiful.

Justice, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

I don't know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs.

Venus de Milo. To a child she is ugly. When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness, even though, by physiologic standards, incomplete, she is beautiful.

No facts, however indubitably detected, no effort of reason, however magnificently maintained, can prove that Bach's music is beautiful.

Nothing's beautiful from every point of view.

Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

It's weird to me to see how different everyone's opinion of beauty is.

Beauty is only about relationships. Nothing is beautiful on its own.

The beauty about history is that it's open to perception.

Moderation sees itself as beautiful; it is unaware that in the eye of the immoderate it appears black and sober and consequently ugly-looking.

For me, life offers so many complexly appealing moments that two beautiful objects may be equally beautiful for different reasons and at different times. How can one choose?

Indeed, there is no such thing as an altogether ugly woman — or altogether beautiful.

Look at light and admire its beauty. Close your eyes, and then look again: what you saw is no longer there; and what you will see later is not yet.

It is easier to be mistaken about the true than the beautiful.

I think making things beautiful is important. But often what's first considered ugly is beautiful, too.

While truth is ultimately convergent, beauty is ultimately divergent. No one can and no one should tell anyone else what that person should consider beautiful.

There is nothing that is more beautiful than everything else in the world.

It is only framed in space that beauty blooms; only in space are events, and objects and people unique and significant and therefore beautiful.

All is as beautiful as we think it.