Henry Miller Quotes

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

It's hard to blow an ugly bubble.

Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.

I hate ugliness. You know I'm allergic to ugliness.

A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.

He was afflicted by the thought that where Beauty was, nothing ever ran quite straight, which no doubt, was why so many people looked on it as immoral.

To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers.

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.

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

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;

I think that one of the things that drives me in telling stories, and art in general, is finding the beautiful in a big mass of ugly.

I see flaws as a kind of beauty.

Even the duster in my house has to be beautiful; no old piece of cloth will ever be used in its place.

I think for something to be beautiful, it has to have some darkness in it; otherwise, it's just pretty. And pretty does not interest me at all.

The ugly can achieve an absoluteness beyond the reach of beauty.

There is a sort of charm in ugliness, if the person has some redeeming qualities and is only ugly enough.

New things are always ugly.

His friends said, "Why do you have that ugly thing hanging there?" and Bull said, "I like it because it's ugly." All his life was in that line.

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

Nothing keeps me in such awe as perfect beauty; now, there is something consoling and encouraging in ugliness.

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

Absolute and entire ugliness is rare.

Engineering, like poetry, is an attempt to approach perfection. And engineers, like poets, are seldom completely satisfied with their creations. They notice, even if no one else does, the world that is not quite le mot juste, or the hairline crack that blemishes the structure.