Virginia Postrel Quotes

I don't believe in one ideal beauty.

Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.

Beauty can come in strange forms.

There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.

I think the idea of the social construction of beauty - this idea that beauty is simply whatever culture or society says it is - is on the run. Of course, beauty does arise in a cultural context. No one ever denies that. But there's also a natural response people have to it.

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

Beauty is subjective: Bette Davis wasn't beautiful, but she was more than beautiful.

Beauty is a combination of qualities. I don't think one can deny that certain people or things feel aesthetically pleasing. But without an equally pleasing being behind that form, there is no beauty there.

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.

People often say that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder,' and I say that the most liberating thing about beauty is realizing that you are the beholder. This empowers us to find beauty in places where others have not dared to look, including inside ourselves.

I think, when I was younger, I believed in - and yearned for - conventional beauty. I thought there was a spectrum from ugly to beautiful, and that you could objectively plot everyone you saw along it.

Beauty is subjective and should not be limited to only what we see on the outside.

Beauty is subjective, so people's opinions don't really matter.

The foundation of beauty is the body.

Beauty, whether moral or natural, is felt, more properly than perceived.

The beauty of a woman is not in the clothes she wears, the figure that she carries or the way she combs her hair.

Spin is 'something is beautiful because we say it's beautiful.'

A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.

External beauty is a bizarre thing to me.

Different members of different cultures will think that some things are beautiful.

Sexiness is all in the eye of the beholder. I think it should be. Absolutely. My sex appeal, whatever it might be, isn't obvious... at least to me.

Part of what I have to represent is an alternative to this perverted fashion industry concept of what beauty is.

What can you do? You're never going to be - I'm sure there are people out there who think Cindy Crawford isn't pretty.

Beauty should not be culturally relevant; it should be universal.

Beauty doesn't have to be in accord with prefabricated concepts of 'pretty.'