William Gaddis Quotes

Beauty is as relative as light and dark. Thus, there exists no beautiful woman, none at all, because you are never certain that a still far more beautiful woman will not appear and completely shame the supposed beauty of the first.

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

Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

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

Maybe no one can know how it is for anyone else.

You have to believe it and you hate it. I don't have to and I think it's beautiful.

Anything is beautiful if you say it is.

Your whole life is nothing but a dream. You live in a fantasy where everything you know about yourself is only true for you. Your truth is not the truth for anyone else.

Only the beautiful can acknowledge all that is beautiful, and only the ugly can acknowledge all that is ugly as being beautiful. Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.

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.

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.

Certain things, if not seen as lovely or detestable, are not being correctly seen at all.

Ugliness is a point of view; an ulcer is wonderful to a pathologist.

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.

Faith is in the eye of the beholder.

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.

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

Beauty is altogether in the eye of the beholder.

Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.

Nothing's beautiful from every point of view.

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;

People like things that make sense to them; your perspective is your reality.

What is my truth can not be your truth.