Leo Rosten Quotes

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.

If you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty.

The creator and arbiter of beauty is the heart; to the male rattlesnake the female rattlesnake is the loveliest thing in nature.

I hate that aesthetic game of the eye and the mind, played by these connoisseurs, these mandarins who "appreciate" beauty. What is beauty, anyway? There's no such thing. I never "appreciate," any more than I "like." I love it or I hate.

Beauty is no material thing. Beauty cannot be copied. Beauty is the sensation of pleasure on the mind of the seer. No thing is beautiful. But all things await the sensitive and imaginative mind that may be aroused to pleasurable emotion at sight of them. This is beauty.

Beauty is objectified pleasure.

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

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

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.

Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it. The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.

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

For me, life offers so many complexly appealing moments that two beautiful objects may be equally beautiful for different reasons and at different times. How can one choose?

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.

I don't know if it's art, but I know I like it.

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

To experience a thing as beautiful means: to experience it necessarily wrongly.

I knew it was beautiful, but knowing something is beautiful and caring about it are two very different things, and I didn't care.

Andrei, did you like the opera?" "Not particularly." "Andrei, do you see what you're missing?" "I don't think I do, Kira. It's all rather silly. And useless." "Can't you enjoy things that are useless, merely because they are beautiful?" "No. But I enjoyed it." "The music?" "No. The way you listened to it.

I believe that the very process of looking can make a thing beautiful.

If a given combination of trees, mountains, water, and houses, say a landscape, is beautiful, it is not so by itself, but because of me, of my favor, of the idea or feeling I attach to it.

Beauty is whatever anyone thinks is beautiful.

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

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?

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