Diane Ackerman Quotes

I think it's very pretty. Can it be pretty if no one thinks it's pretty? I think it's pretty. If you're the only one? That's pretty pretty. And what about the boys? Don't you want them to think you're pretty? I wouldn't want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty.

The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?

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

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

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.

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.

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.

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.

I'm not that obsessed with making representations of ugliness. Everything I've seen is beautiful.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

It is not beauty that endears, it's love that makes us see beauty.

For something to be beautiful it doesn’t have to be pretty.

Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.

By means of beauty all beautiful things become beautiful.

In her own special category, she was quite beautiful. This was the category of all the women, in his entire life, who had ever thought he was worth smiling at.

It is the search for beauty...That is what it is. We find ourselves on this earth--gods and men--and we know that it is beautiful. That is one of the few things we understand--beauty; because it is there, in the world, and we can see it all about us. We want beauty. It requires our love. It just does.

All is as beautiful as we think it.

The flower you single out is a rejection of all other flowers; nevertheless, only on these terms is it beautiful.

What is beautiful for you may not be beautiful to someone else. Or whatever is beautiful here may not be beautiful there and what is sometimes beautiful today is not necessarily beautiful tomorrow. Perhaps this is the story of fashion and what makes it move forward, the fact that there is no decision whatsoever with what’s wrong.

Everything that is made beautiful and fair and lovely is made for the eye of one who sees.

I'm a romantic. The impressionists have always been my favorites. I like prettiness - beauty, or what I perceive as beauty.

Physical beauty is such a strange thing.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.