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1 " Beauty! Wasn't that what mattered? Beauty was hardly a popular ideal at that jumpy moment in history. The masses had been desensitized to it, the intelligentsia regarded it with suspicion. To most of her peers, 'beauty' smacked of the rarefied, the indulgent, the superfluous, the effete. How could persons of good conscience pursue the beautiful when there was so much suffering and injustice in the world? Ellen Cherry's answer was that if one didn't cultivate beauty, soon he or she wouldn't be able to recognize ugliness. The prevalence of social ugliness made commitment to physical beauty all the more essential. And the very presence in life of double-wide mobile homes, Magic Marker graffiti, and orange shag carpeting had the effect of making ills such as poverty, crime, repression, pollution, and child abuse seem tolerable. In a sense, beauty was the ultimate protest, and, in that it generally lasted longer than an orgasm, the ultimate refuge. The Venus de Milo screamed 'No!' at evil, whereas the Spandex stretch pant, the macrame plant holder were compliant with it. Ugly bedrooms bred ugly habits. Of course, it wasn't required of beauty that it perform a social function. That was what was valuable about it. "
― Tom Robbins , Skinny Legs and All
2 " So odd. Most women of his acquaintance relied on physical beauty and charm to mask their less-pleasant traits. This girl did the opposite, hiding everything interesting about herself behind a prim, plain facade.What other surprises was she concealing? "
― Tessa Dare , A Week to Be Wicked (Spindle Cove, #2)
3 " Maybe that's why I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do. I see a pretty mouth or a moody pair of eyes and imagine all sorts of deep affinities, private kinships. "
― Donna Tartt , The Secret History
4 " Having extreme physical beauty presented a problem similar to being rich: it was difficult to know if people loved you for the person you were inside. "
5 " There is no physical description of Christ in the Gospels, and so we are unable to know whether he was physically attractive or not. Of course, the specifications for what constitutes physical beauty are culturally conditioned and so change from place to place and from time to time. Christ's beauty then does not stem from physical attractiveness. It's rather the 'harsh' beauty of a God Who has given Himself so completely in love that it takes Him to the most ignominous death, on the Cross. Bruno Forte writes: 'Christ, the crucified God, is the place where beauty happens: in His self-emptying, eternity is present in time, the All Who is God is present in the fragment of Christ's human form (cf. Phil 2:6ff.). It is the cross that reveals the beauty that saves'. Christ is beautiful because He is Love incarnate, and, in a world disfigured by sin, that love is necessarily manifest in His suffering for others. This means that in our broken, marred condition, the shape of deepest beauty is cruciform. "
― , In The Light Of The Cross: Reflections On The Australian Journey Of The World Youth Day Cross And Icon
6 " Maybe that's why I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do. I see a pretty mouth or a moody pair of eyes and imagine all sorts of deep affinities, private kinships. Never mind that half a dozen jerks are clustered round the same person, just because they've been duped by the same pair of eyes. "
7 " Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it. "
― Florence King
8 " If the only thing that you have to offer in a relationship or marriage is your physical appearance, then you are definitely walking on a very thin line. It takes more than physical beauty to sustain a healthy relationship or marriage. "
9 " We must remember that possession of physical beauty can easily weaken the moral faculty. "
― Frank Tallis , A Death in Vienna (Liebermann Papers, #1)
10 " When they are authentically engaged, their positive impressions create memorable moments and leave a lasting impact. Physical beauty becomes irrelevant because their exuberance and engagement bring out the beauty in you. "
― Susan C. Young , The Art of Being: 8 Ways to Optimize Your Presence & Essence for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #1)
11 " But in his years among the drow, Drizzt Do'Urden had learned to look beyond physical beauty and physical attraction. Drizzt did not separate the physical from the emotional. He was a superb fighter because he fought with his heart and would no sooner battle merely for the sake of battle than he would mate for the sake of the physical act. "
― , Starless Night (Forgotten Realms: Legacy of the Drow, #2; Legend of Drizzt, #8)
12 " A woman can be very beautiful and an ideal model and she will photograph incredibly well, but she'll appear in film and it won't work. What works is some fusion of physical beauty with some mental field or whatever you call it. I don't know. "
13 " For me, physical beauty is never the reason for attraction to anyone. "
