Umberto Eco Quotes

Such as ne'er saw swans May think crows beautiful.

Beauty is that little something that fills the whole world, and is contained neither in a single straight nose, a long eyelash, nor a blue mountain. Some see it in a leg of mutton, others in a compound fracture; and to expect others to accept one's own definition of it is as absurd as to expect all humanity to use the same toilet-brush.

We know beauty when we see it, and our reactions are remarkably consistent. Beauty is not just a social construct, and not every girl is beautiful just the way she is.

Spin is 'something is beautiful because we say it's beautiful.'

Different members of different cultures will think that some things are beautiful.

You cannot say that one woman is 'more beautiful' than another, though people always do. It's so ridiculous to say that.

I think, when I was younger, I believed in - and yearned for - conventional beauty. I thought there was a spectrum from ugly to beautiful, and that you could objectively plot everyone you saw along it.

There are no bad books any more than there are ugly women.

One man’s “ugly” is another man’s “beautiful.

Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape Who dost in every country change thy shape!

All my own small perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded.

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.

The power of association is stronger than the power of beauty; therefore, the power of association is the power of beauty.

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

Beauty is whatever anyone thinks is beautiful.

I love classic beauty. It’s an idea of beauty with no standard.

Beauty is an opinion not a fact.

Now I've heard the phrase 'there's no such thing as an ugly baby' but that is an ugly baby!

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

It is because every one tinder Heaven recognizes beauty as beauty that the idea of ugliness exists.

Beauty is where you find it.

I initially thought you were ugly, but then you walked closer to me and I realized you were pretty.

I know a girl who just looks at her face in the medicine cabinet mirror and never looks below her shoulders, and she's four or five hundred pounds but she doesn't see all that, she just sees a beautiful face and therefore she thinks she's a beauty. And therefore, I think she's a beauty, too, because I usually accept people on the basis of their self-images, because their self-images have more to do with the way they think than their objective-images do.

In a world of extreme beauty, anyone normal is ugly.

All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory - of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.