W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

All is as beautiful as we think it.

No facts, however indubitably detected, no effort of reason, however magnificently maintained, can prove that Bach's music is beautiful.

Art has got nothing to do with taste.

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

Indeed, there is no such thing as an altogether ugly woman — or altogether beautiful.

For he who would proceed aright... should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms... out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another, and that beauty in every form is one and the same.

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

The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?

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

By means of beauty all beautiful things become beautiful.

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

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.

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.

Physical beauty is such a strange thing.

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.

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?

Beauty is altogether in the eye of the beholder.

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

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.

Do not confuse beauty with beautiful. Beautiful is a human judgment. Beauty is All. The difference is everything.

If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?

What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.