William Shenstone Quotes

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.

But when I was twelve years old I caught my first strong glimpse of one of the fundamental forces of existence, whose votary I was destined to be for life - namely, Beauty.

What delights us in visible beauty is the invisible.

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 in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.

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 the mystery of life. It is not in the eye, it is in the mind.

Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.

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

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

...The human perception of this energy first begins with a heightened sensitivity to beauty.

Tis the perception of the beautiful, A fine extension of the faculties, Platonic, universal, wonderful, Drawn from the stars, and filtered through the skies, Without which life would be extremely dull

Beauty is a luster which love bestows to guile the eye. Therefore it may be said that only when the brain is without love will the eye look and see no beauty.

Taste is, in general, considered as that faculty of the human mind by which we perceive and enjoy whatever is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature or art.

Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye.

Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible, are comely, as they take their place in the pictures of memory.

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art.

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?

Paintings and fightings are best seen at a distance.

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. - Of Human Bondage

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.

A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.

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