The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

—Albert Einstein

The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.

—George Sand

You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen. But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul’s own doing.

—Marie Stopes

By plucking her petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower.

—Rabindranath Tagore

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.

—Chinese Proverb

I hope you have lost your good looks, for while they last any fool can adore you, and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul. No, give me a ruined complexion and a lost figure and sixteen chins on a farmyard of Crow’s feet and an obvious wig. Then you shall see me coming out strong.

—George Bernard Shaw, to Mrs Patrick Campbell

When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

 —R. Buckminster Fuller

When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold, because they believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history, it becomes more beautiful.

—Barbara Bloom

The absence of a flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

—Havelock Ellis

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.

—Miss Piggy