I cried over beautiful things, knowing no beautiful thing lasts.
All beauty is sad. [...] For it fades.
To me, beauty and sadness are very closely linked. Truly beautiful things make me sad because I know they are going to fade. When I see a beautiful 20-year-old boy or girl-and they are breathtaking-I am filled with a kind of sadness. But maybe they are beautiful because we know they are not permanent and they are in a kind of transition.
The essence of what makes life beautiful is the fact that it can go away.
There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.
Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good; a shining gloss that fadeth suddenly; a flower that dies when it begins to bud; a doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower, lost, faded, broken, dead within an hour.
Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.
Joy and sorrow, beauty and deformity, equally pass away.
A frail gift is beauty, which grows less as time draws on, and is devoured by its own years.
... there are few things that can reconcile us fully to our parting with a world of which the longest life can see so little and whose beauties have so extraordinary a variety.
Beauty is precious, you see, and the more beautiful something is, the more precious it is; and the more precious it is the more it hurts us that it will fade away; and the more we are hurt by beauty, the more we love the world.
My dear, beautiful and imaginative things can be destroyed. Beauty and imagination cannot.
I submit that Zooey's face was close to being a wholly beautiful face. As such, it was of course vulnerable to the same variety of glibly undaunted and usually specious evaluations that any legitimate art object is. I think it just remains to be said that any one of a hundred everyday menaces — a car accident, a head cold, a lie before breakfast — could have disfigured or coarsened his bounteous good looks in a day or a second.
Beauty is but a flower Which wrinkles will devour; Brightness falls from the air; Queens have died young and fair; Dust hath closed Helen's eye.
Every fair from fair sometime declines
The world isn't purposeful. It isn't ruled by reason. The world wants to play. Fashion queens have always aroused more interest than future generations and their fate.
Everyone is fragile. Everything beautiful is fragile
Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses.
Beauty is momentary in the mind -- The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing.
A man should not risk his life for beauty alone, Kiall, for that fades. You might as well risk it for a rose. Think on it.
Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
Beauty often fades, but seldom so swiftly as the joy it gives us.
The fairest things have fleetest end, Their scent survives their close: But the rose's scent is bitterness To him that loved the rose.
Oh, how this spring of love resembleth, The uncertain glory of an April day, Which now shows all beauty of the Sun, And by and by a cloud takes all away
What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.
