W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

I am inspired by so much. I am inspired by women, of course - beautiful women. I am also inspired by not so beautiful things in the world.

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.

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.

If true, rarely beautiful. If beautiful, rarely true.

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

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

Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful?

Everything is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour if seen as experience.

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

Every form correctly seen is beautiful

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.

TV in all its ugliness can be a beautiful thing.

Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

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

Find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and dark which that thing provides.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!

He who cannot see the beautiful side is a bad painter, a bad friend, a bad lover; he cannot lift his mind and his heart so high as goodness.

For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

He had been through a good deal in the course of the Great Quest — he had seen beautiful things and horrible things — but up until now he had not known that one and the same creature can be both, that beauty can be terrifying.

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