Virginia Woolf Quotes

Beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty: so that "good" means that which simply pleases the appetite; while the "beautiful" is something pleasant to apprehend.

The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow.

Art trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.

I had seen faces in photographs I might have found beautiful had I known even vaguely in what beauty was supposed to consist. And my father's face, on his death-bolster, had seemed to hint at some form of aesthetics relevant to man. But the faces of the living, all grimace and flush, can they be described as objects?

What beauty is, I know not, though it adheres to many things.

Of all the senses, sight must be the most delightful.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

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.

The singular point of beautiful objects, and people, is that they are experienced not as parts, or ratios between cheekbones and chin, but as wholes. The experience of beauty is a perception, but it is one that mixes up various other sensations and makes them converge in a particular way.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

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

The eye must be easy, before it can be pleased.

My wife jokes that any time I want to take a picture of her, it has nothing to do with her - it's just because the light is really nice. She's usually right. I definitely am somebody who notices the way the light skips off the floor.

We call beauty that which supplies us with a particular pleasure.

Our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses.

Is beauty beautiful, or is it only our eyes that make it so?

Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.

There are other things besides beauty with which to captivate the hearts of men. The Italians have a saying: "Fair is not fair, but that which pleaseth.

We find things beautiful because we recognize them and contrariwise we find things beautiful because their novelty surprises us.

My idea being that for the sublime and the beautiful and the interesting, you do not have to look far away. You have to know how to see.

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

Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting.

The beauty that is there is also available for me, too. But I see a deeper beauty that isn't so readily available to others.... I don't see how studying a flower ever detracts from its beauty. It only adds

As the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful; and the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath like space and time, make all matter gay.

It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth.