Quotes & Sayings About A Beautiful Picture

It's nothing but a matter of seeing, thinking, and interest. That's what makes a good photograph. And then rejecting anything that would be bad for the picture. The wrong light, the wrong background, time and so on. Just don't do it, not matter how beautiful the subject is. — Andreas Feininger

In due course I would learn how to cover up for this event, but on that awful day I knew of nothing to say but: 'Well, I guess they aren't going to do that either, heh, heh. FINALLY Hoku and Kiko stopped staring suspiciously through the glass long enough to go over the six bars, gracefully arcing in and out of the water against the glass, making the beautiful picture they were supposed to. I waved frantically at Chris to stop right there, to quit while we were ahead. I thanked the politely clapping audience and suggested they come back in a month and see what Hoku and Kiko could really do (I didn't have the courage to order them to KEEP clapping, and louder, please, so that Hoku and Kiko would do the applause jump). Then I yanked out the mike plug, raced down the ladder into the trainers' little sitting room underneath the stage, and took up smoking again. — Karen Pryor

The study of the human character opens at once a beautiful and a deformed picture of the soul. — Mercy Otis Warren

The spontaneous is the most beautiful thing that can appear in a picture, but nothing in art appears less spontaneously than that. — Jeff Wall

What are you doing?" Her voice stammered.
"Taking Your picture."
"Why?" She began to reach for the camera, but he took a step back.
"Because you're beautiful — Bernadette Marie

It was only when we brought Will back home, once the annex was adapted and ready, that I could see a point in making it beautiful again. I needed to give my son something to look at. I needed to tell him, silently, that things might change, grow, or fail, but that life did go on. That we were all part of some great cycle, some pattern that it was only God's purpose to understand. I couldn't say that to him, of course - Will and I have never been able to say much to each other - but I wanted to show him. A silent promise, if you like, that there was a bigger picture, a brighter future. — Jojo Moyes

Japanese things - laquers, netsuke, prints - conjure a picture of a place where sensations are always new, where art pours out of daily life, where everything exists in a dream of endless beautiful flow. — Edmund De Waal

I created this picture of this character who would play the guitar effortlessly, who had no limitations, performing beautiful music, and he moved around with great acrobatic skills, just capturing the audience and being a great entertainer. — Steve Vai

Wildflowers burst from the ground in vivid blues and whites and violets, creating a picture more pleasing than anything her hands could design. She didn't understand how it was possible, but Evan had been right. The abundance of snow had produced an abundance of wildflowers. More than she's ever seen before. Somehow, those cold, lifeless winter months had prepared the land for something breathtaking. Something beautiful. Something brimming with life. — Katie Ganshert

My bad head cannot adjust itself to the way things are ... If I want to depict spring, it has to be in wintertime; if I want to describe a beautiful landscape, I must be enclosed within walls; and I have said a hundred times that if I were put in the Bastille, there I would paint a picture of liberty. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The last book I picked up had a picture of the Stranger on the front cover. Although his eyes were not nearly as beautiful in my dream state, they still took my breath away. I opened it up curiously and there was one word written in a large, bolded font: FATE. — Markelle Grabo

Beautiful," she said. I turned the page, and she smiled. It was a picture of the day when we built the human pyramid in my backyard, and I was at the top. The caption read: One day, all these Mexicans built a pyramid to the Sun. "You were my pyramid," she whispered. "All of you. — Benjamin Alire Saenz

A picture neither saddening nor gladdening I fear; neither beautiful nor ugly. — Jean Cocteau

That sure is a beautiful picture," she said. "Looks just like heaven or something." "Or something," said the painter. — Kurt Vonnegut

We painted a beautiful picture, but we just didn't finish it. Finishing is the difference between a beautiful picture and a masterpiece. — Don Meyer

The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of art for art's sake than a man on a sinking ship thinks of painting a beautiful picture in the cabin; he thinks of getting ashore - and then there will be time enough for art. — Upton Sinclair

And on some nights in bed, in that moment before sleep erased the day, I would picture the way the sky in Lapland looked the morning I left, how the train had sped south beneath a sky that was brighter than it had been in weeks. It had pulsed with reds and oranges, as though hiding a beating heart. — Vendela Vida

Those who largely rely on their hands and the beautiful or shocking traces of the imagination that they leave on the canvas ... CONCRETE ... one builds a picture. — Pierre Alechinsky

I've been in beautiful landscapes where one is tempted to whip out a camera and take a picture. I've learned to resist that. — David Byrne

In other languages,
you are beautiful- mort, muerto- I wish
I spoke moon, I wish the bottom of the ocean
were sitting in that chair playing cards
and noticing how famous you are
on my cell phone- picture of your eyes
guarding your nose and the fire
you set by walking, picture of dawn
getting up early to enthrall your skin- what I hate
about stars is they're not those candles
that make a joke of cake, that you blow on
and they die and come back, and you
you're not those candles either, how often I realize
I'm not breathing, to be like you
or just afraid to move at all, a lung
or finger, is it time already
for inventory, a mountain, I have three
of those, a bag of hair, box of ashes, if you
were a cigarette I'd be cancer, if you
were a leaf, you were a leaf, every leaf, as far
as this tree can say. — Bob Hicok

The Tibetan monks make mandalas out of dyed sand laid out into big, beautiful designs.
And when they're done, after days or weeks of work, they wipe it all away. They let it all go,
no pain, no regrets. That is happiness. That is bliss. The euphoria of Nirvana. We live for
that. Just for the experience. We paint a picture and we erase it. — Thisuri Wanniarachchi

I am more affected by the attractions of virtue than by the deformities of vice; I turn gently away from the wicked and I fly to meet the good. If there is in a literary work, in a character, in a picture, in a statue, a beautiful spot, that is where my eyes rest; I see only that, I remember only that, all the rest is well-nigh forgotten. What becomes of me when the whole work is beautiful! — Denis Diderot

Music is, for me, like a beautiful mosaic which God has put together. He takes all the pieces in his hand, throws them into the world, and we have to recreate the picture from the pieces. — Jean Sibelius

I missed out on a big part of your life, Gabi. You look absolutely beautiful in this picture. I have to tell you something before I lose my nerve." He turned. "I've loved-"
The .22 glistened underneath the florescent lighting. — Wendy Ely

She was very beautiful and he felt he loved her. She was not beautiful as a state or a picture is beautiful; she was beautiful as a meadow across which the wind blows. It was life that pulsed in her and that had formed her into what she was. — Erich Maria Remarque

The Bible is a love story. Time and time again it illustrates how much God loves the world in spite of its sinful disobedience...The last book of the Bible, the Revelation of St John the Divine, creates a beautiful and yet terrifying picture of those last days when God will reveal Himself in judgment and in grace to all creation. — Jerry Falwell

I'm sure people tell you this constantly, but if you looked up 'incredibly beautiful' in the dictionary, there would be a picture of you." She cracked up a bit and said, "People never tell me that." "I bet they do." She cracked up a bit more. "They don't." "Then you hang out with the wrong people." "You might be right about that." "Because you're incredibly beautiful. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I think laying out a beautiful picture in a beautiful way is a bloody bore. I think you've got to blow it right across the page and down the side, crop it, cut it in half, combine it with something else ... do something with it. You've got to make something out of it. — Diana Vreeland

Everything in New York is a photograph. All the things that are supposed to be dirty or rough or unrefined are the most beautiful things. Garbage cans at the ends of alleyways look like they've been up all night talking with each other. Doorways with peeling paint look like the wise lines around an old feller's eyes. I stop and stare but can't stay because men always think I'm selling something. Or worse, giving something away. I wish I could be invisible. Or at least I wish I didn't look like someone they want to look at. They stop being part of the picture, they get up from their chess game and come out of the frame at me, blocking my view. — Ann-Marie MacDonald

There is a picture of me in their heads, a picture of someone I don't know yet. She is not the chubby girl with the braces and bad perm. She is not the girl hiding in the bathroom at recess. She is someone new, a blank slate they have named beautiful. That is what I am now: beautiful, with this new body and face and hair and clothes. Beautiful, with this erasing of history. — Amy Reed

Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in street look not just indeferent but ugly ... perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is real sickness
the ache of the uprooted plant the breathing method — Stephen King

I'd see him do things that didn't fit with his face or hands, things like painting a picture at OT with real paints on a blank paper with no lines or numbers anywhere on it to tell him where to paint, or like writing letters to somebody in a beautiful flowing hand. How could a man who looked like him paint pictures or write letters to people, or be upset and worried like I saw him once when he got a letter back? — Ken Kesey

Adoption is a beautiful picture of redemption. It is the Gospel in my living room. — Katie J. Davis

There is nothing to suggest a trangression of the universal laws of egotism and malice. It is ridiculous to imagine that at the edge of the cosmos, other well-intentioned and wise beings await to guide us toward some sort of harmony. In order to imagine how they might treat us were we to come into contact with them, it might be best to recall how we treat "inferior intelligences" such as rabbits and frogs. In the best cases they serve as food for us, sometimes also, often in fact, we kill them for the sheer pleasure of killing. Thus, [Author: Lovecraft] warned, would be the true picture of our future relationship to those other intelligent beings. Perhaps some of the more beautiful human species would be honored and would end up on a dissection table - that's all. — Michel Houellebecq

One story sums up their magical quality. On June 30th 1968, at the height of Apple optimism, Paul McCartney and Derek Taylor were driving back to London from Saltaire, Yorkshire, where they had been recording the Black Dyke Mills Band on a song of Paul's called 'Thingummybob'. They were in Bedfordshire. Let's pick a village on the map and pay it a visit, said Beatle Paul. He found a village called Harrold, which they found quite hilarious, and turned off the A5. Harrold turned out to be a picture-perfect village, with a picture-perfect pub at its heart. The pub was closed, but when the villagers saw there was a Beatle at the door they opened it up. Soon the whole village was in the pub, listening to Paul McCartney on the pub piano playing the as-yet-unreleased 'Hey Jude'. Every Harrold resident danced and sang along, and the revelry went on until 3 a.m. It was beautiful, perfect, spontaneous and full of love. Harrold. You couldn't make it up. — Bob Stanley

That picture changed everything. I was not the same after I saw it and I couldn't go back to the man I'd been before seeing it either. Not after we met that night on the street. My whole world altered because of a photograph. A photograph of my beautiful American girl. — Raine Miller

If you're dreaming of being a great soloist, walking on stage, receiving ovations night after night, having money thrown at you, girls chasing after you and your beautiful picture - that's wonderful. But what exactly does that have to do with the practice of music ? — Wu Han

When we hold a photo negative up to the light all objects are reversed. Black is white, white is black. Moreover, the character lines of any face in the picture are not clear. Once placed into the developing solution, what photographers call "the latent image" is revealed in the print-darkness is turned to light; and, lo, we have a beautiful picture. — Catherine Marshall

I never set out to make a movie that was everything to everybody; if that were the case, we could all just take a picture of a tree and agree that the tree is beautiful and move on with our lives. I wouldn't even need to show up. — Shane Carruth

Its front porch had a beautiful view of the water and invisible screening to keep the jellybugs and stinkmoths at bay. I wove mats for the floors and painted sincere, klutzy seascapes for the walls. Piece by piece I assembled chef-quality cooking equipment, learned how to use it, and achieved a state of domestic competence that would have astounded my long-suffering ex-wife, Joanna. — Julian May

The past twelve weeks had been a blur, and now she was about to meet her baby via ultrasound, go home with a picture of an alien baby that people would pretend was beautiful, and here she sat after drinking a liter of fluid, her panties moist from a bladder that gave up control right around the time her shoes stopped fitting. A light breeze could make her pee at this point. A sneeze would unleash a tsunami. — Julia Kent

I think that the photographer must completely control his picture and bring to it all his personality, and in this area most photographs never transcend being just snapshots. When a great photographer does infuse the snapshot with his personality and vision, it can be transformed into something truly moving and beautiful. — Duane Michals

Can you say those words and not like it? Don't it bring to you a magnificent picture of the pristine world, - great seas and other skies, - a world of accentuated crises, that sloughed off age after age, and rose fresher from each plunge? Don't you see, or long to see, that mysterious magic tree out of whose pores oozed this fine solidified sunshine? What leaf did it have? What blossom? What great wind shivered its branches? Was it a giant on a lonely coast, or thick low growth blistered in ravines and dells? That's the witchery of amber, - that it has no cause, - that all the world grew to produce it, maybe, - died and gave no other sign, - that its tree, which must have been beautiful, dropped all its fruits, and how bursting with juice must they have been - — Harriet Prescott Spofford

She was smart and terribly determined, this girl-her will was pure steel, through and through-but she was as human as anyone else. She was lonely, too. Lonely in a way that perhaps only single girls fresh from small Midwestern towns know. Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly ... perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness- the ache of the uprooted plant. — Stephen King

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde THE PREFACE The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things — Oscar Wilde

Are you glad I came?" "Delighted, dear Carmilla," I answered. "And you asked for the picture you think like me, to hang in your room," she murmured with a sigh, as she drew her arm closer about my waist, and let her pretty head sink upon my shoulder. "How romantic you are, Carmilla," I said. "Whenever you tell me your story, it will be made up chiefly of some one great romance." She kissed me silently. "I am sure, Carmilla, you have been in love; that there is, at this moment, an affair of the heart going on." "I have been in love with no one, and never shall," she whispered, "unless it should be with you." How beautiful she looked in the moonlight! Shy and strange was the look with which she quickly hid her face in my neck and hair, with tumultuous sighs, that seemed almost to sob, and pressed in mine a hand that trembled. Her — J. Sheridan Le Fanu

If I was going to be a woman, I would want to be as beautiful as possible. And they said to me, 'Uh, that's as beautiful as we can get you.' And I went home and started crying to my wife, and I said, 'I have to make this picture.' And she said, 'Why?' And I said, 'Because I think I'm an interesting woman when I look at myself on screen, and I know that if I met myself at a party, I would never talk to that character because she doesn't fulfill, physically, the demands that we're brought up to think that women have to have in order for us to ask them out.' She says, 'What are you saying?' and I said, 'There's too many interesting women I have not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed.' It was not what it felt like to be a woman. It was what it felt like to be someone that people didn't respect, for the wrong reasons. I know it's a comedy. But comedy's a serious business. — Dustin Hoffman

He thought that maybe when you're making your way forward into your life, it just looks higgledy-piggledy, the way, if you were a fly walking across one of Beautiful Girl's drawings all you'd be able to see was green, then blue, then yellow. Only if you got in the air before the swat came down would you see the colors belonged to a big drawing, with the green for this part of the picture, the blue and yellow for others, every color being just where if was meant to be. Could that be what life was? — Rachel Simon

A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it? — Ernst Haas

There isn't one thing in particular; rather, a lot of different things give me inspiration. I tend to come up with tunes when I do things that are not part of my daily routine, like traveling. But even during my everyday life, I come up with tunes when I'm emotionally moved. By looking at a beautiful picture, scenery, tasting something delicious, scents that bring back memories, happy and sad things ... Anything that moves my emotion gives me inspiration. — Yoko Shimomura

both the Egyptian [and] American pyramids, the outside of the structures was covered with a thick coating of smooth, shining cement." "The Aztecs, like the Egyptians, had progressed through all the three different modes of writing - the picture-writing, the symbolical, and the phonetic. They recorded all their laws, their tribute-rolls specifying the various imposts, their mythology, astronomical calendars, and rituals, their political annals and their chronology. They wrote on cotton-cloth, on skins prepared like parchment, on a composition of silk and gum, and on a species of paper, soft and beautiful, made from the aloe. Their books were about — Dennis Brooks

his survival was threatened day by day. Minute by minute. It was impossible to picture a spoiled, beautiful man like Christopher Phelan contending with danger and hardship. Hunger. Loneliness. Beatrix stared at her friend pensively, their gazes meeting in the looking glass. "What is your favorite song, Pru?" "I don't have one, actually. Tell him yours." "Should we discuss this with Audrey?" Beatrix asked, referring to Phelan's sister-in-law. "Certainly not. Audrey has a problem with honesty. She wouldn't send the letter if she knew I hadn't written it." Beatrix made a sound that could have either been a laugh or a groan. — Lisa Kleypas

These days, the selfie and its main outlet, Instagram, generally come in for much adult loathing. But consider this: The selfie is a tiny pulse of girl pride - a shout-out to the self. ... The selfie suggests something in picture form - I think I look [beautiful] [happy] [funny] [sexy]. Do you? - that a girl could never get away with saying. It puts the gaze of the camera squarely in a girl's hands, and along with it, the power to influence the photo's interpretation. — Rachel Simmons

Can you picture Ghandi or Buddha storming into the polling place of a local election, shouting, overturning tables, sending the participants fleeing? Now throw a small carnival into the mix, which they also need rout. Impossible. Whoever did this would have to be really committed to clear the building. Fierce and intentional.
This is a breathtaking quality - especially when compared to our present age where doubt masquerades as humility, passivity cloaks as rest, and emasculated indecision poses as laid-back enlightenment. — John Eldredge

I could picture how Caprice was before we lost her. Dark hair, beautiful smile, intelligent hazel eyes, quick wit.
Now gone.
Just gone.
Like a chessboard where suddenly one of the knights disappeared. A blank spot on the board of life that could never truly be replaced because no two things were alike, no two beings alike. — Cheyenne McCray

I'll buy a bottle for anyone who can tell me what makes a picture beautiful! — Edgar Degas

We know that children with autism like order, that they are often very visual and that they can be quite literal. They deserve beautiful resources and symbols that make sense. If a picture does not explain visually, it is pointless and the child will stop looking to the pictures for information. — Adele Devine

If a painter, then, paints a picture of an ideally beautiful man, complete to the last detail, is he any the worse painter because he cannot show that such a man could really exist? — Plato

I do not possess the ability to draw or paint.
I can't sing or dance.
I can't knit or sew.
But I am an artist.
I have the ability to put onto paper, words that tell an intriguing story.
I am a writer.
A writer is someone who, with just words, can paint a beautiful picture.
A writer can open up a world of imagination you didn't realize was possible.
When you open up a book and become so consumed in the story, you feel like you're a part of it ... you're standing next to that character and feeling the same way that character feels,
That's the art of a writer.
I am an artist.
My inspiration is the world around me.
My paintbrush is my words.
My easel is my computer.
My canvas is the mind of my reader. — Bri Justine

I think I look for a muse in women. Someone I can just picture in my mind. Someone who respects herself and others. It isn't so much the things she says, it's mainly what she does. That's what make her all the more beautiful. — JC Chasez

I imagine that the goddess of Love has come down from Olympus to visit a mortal. So as not to die of cold in this modern world of ours, she wraps her sublime body in great heavy furs and warms her feet on the prostrate body of her lover. I imagine the favorite of this beautiful despot, who is whipped when his mistress grows tired of kissing him, and whose love only grows more intense the more he is trampled underfoot. I shall call the picture Venus in Furs — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

A photographer who made a picture from a splendid moment, an accidental pose of someone or a beautiful scenery, is the finder of a treasure. — Robert Doisneau

They showed this one beautiful picture of me recently and they had all the things that I had done. I thought it was a great compliment for everybody to think I've had plastic surgery. — Cybill Shepherd

A virtuous mind in a fair body is indeed a fine picture in a food light, and therefore it is no wonder that it makes the beautiful sex all over charms. — Joseph Addison

Kept dreaming of this spot she had on her neck, this tiny country. I wanted to visit, to paint a picture of what I found there, a wall with a road map of her skin. — Cath Crowley

Why sit on your butt watching 'Jersey Shore' when you can learn to paint a beautiful picture? — Leven Rambin

When I was out in Georgia doing photographs, I found myself trying to undo my own sense of composition. I'd think, 'Why do I want to take it like this? Is it because I want to take a beautiful picture?' It's quite hard to try and undo it. — Sam Taylor-Johnson

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. — Henry David Thoreau

From Lee's extensive quotes of Edwards on page 152 we can gather that the reason some reject good thoughts that might order their minds aright is because of a disposition of the heart, or a "taste" for evil. The habit of a person's mind is in accordance with his spiritual appetite, a good man's mind will always suggest and supply good and holy thoughts to connect ideas and information to create a beautiful picture in one's mind of God's orderly universe (Himself at the helm) but the evil man's mind is habitually disorganizing the things of this world or rather dis-integrating them from the knowledge of God, and so Edwards might say that his mind is not a cosmos but a chaos, or a conductor-less cacophony rather than a grand symphony. — Erick John Blore

Our unfathomable evolutionary past paints a picture vastly more immense than any spiritual story could ever create because it is raw and real, violent, dirty and beautiful - and because of that - it's spectacular! — Christopher Zzenn Loren

He had simply typed the words something beautiful into the Google images box. Up came a picture of some leaves against the sun. A picture of a blonde photoshop-smooth woman and baby sleeping. A picture of a bird. A picture of Mother Teresa. A picture of a modernist building made of shiny metal. A picture of two people sticking knives into their own hands. Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn't there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google — Ali Smith

I could Google image search 'the sky' and I would probably see beautiful images to knock my socks off. But I can't Google, you know, 'What does my friend look like today?' For you to be able to take a picture of yourself that you feel good enough about to share with the world - I think that's a great thing. — Ezra Koenig

The onus is on us as a community to really put forward a different face for our religion, for our community, and for our Lord, and for our Prophet, peace be upon him, because it's really unacceptable that a religion with all of this beauty should be painted with such ugly strokes. So we're really here trying to paint a beautiful picture of our faith in action. — Hamza Yusuf

Christ does not dress up a moral picture, and ask you to observe its beauty. He only tells you how to live; and the most beautiful characters the world has ever seen, have been those who received and lived these precepts without once conceiving their beauty. — Horace Bushnell

It is beautiful in a picture to wash the disciples' feet; but the sands of the real desert have no lustre in them to compensate for the servile nature of the occupation. — John Henry Newman

The first time I saw a picture of Elvis - I was in a state of shock, because I couldn't believe that a human being could be so beautiful. — Gottfried Helnwein

Last night meant as much to me as it did to her and she painted it, capturing it in a way unique to Echo. [ ... ] Up close all those colors would look like chaos, but when viewed as a whole it creates this beautiful picture. In the end, that's the best way to describe me and Echo, our relationship. Our love. — Katie McGarry

I looked in the audience. There were no strangers. Everybody was singing and cheering and hugging. That was a beautiful picture to look at. — Celine Dion

Alas, poor Yorick! How surprised he would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged and neatly dressed - transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture. — Jessica Mitford

S death one of those adventures from which I can't emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists ... A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? Can she remember that summer's day while I cannot? — Rebecca Goldstein

I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be - in a light better than any light that ever shone - in a land no one can define, or remember, only desire — Edward Burne-Jones

A picture that is beautiful, or that comes off, or that works, looks as if it was all made at one stroke. — Helen Frankenthaler

Luxury is anything that feels special. I mean, it can be a moment, it can be a walk on the beach, it could be a kiss from your child, or it could be a beautiful picture frame, a special fragrance. I think luxury doesn't necessarily have to mean expensive. — Aerin Lauder

"You see, I do a little in this way myself," he explained; "here is my most prized piece." He took from his pocket a snuffbox, which looked to be of eighteenth-century workmanship. Inside the lid was an enamel picture of Leda and the Swan, and when a knob was pushed to and fro the swan thrust itself between Leda's legs, which jerked in mechanical ecstasy. A nasty toy, I thought, but Urky doted on it. "We single gentlemen like to have these things," he said. "What do you do, Darcourt? Of course we know that Hollier has his beautiful Maria."
To my astonishment Hollier blushed, but said nothing. His beautiful Maria? My Miss Theotoky, of New Testament Greek? I didn't like it at all. — Robertson Davies

The autopilot is a hands-free piece of electronic wizardry. It's not some brutal application of electricity like one of the Pubyok's car batteries ... Think of its probing as a conversation with the mind, imagine it in a dance with identity. Yes, picture a pencil and eraser engaged in a beautiful dance across the page. The pencil's tip bursts with expression - squiggles, figures, words - filling the page, as the eraser measures, takes note, follows in the pencil's footsteps, leaving only blankness in its wake. The pencil's next seizure of scribbles is perhaps more intense and desperate, but shorter lived, and the eraser follows again. They continue in lockstep this way, the self and the state, coming closer to one another until finally the pencil and the eraser are almost one, moving in sympathy, the line disappearing even as it's laid down, the words unwritten before the letters are formed, and finally there is only white. — Adam Johnson

Of all the things I've done in life, directing a motion picture is the most beautiful. It's the most exciting and the nearest than an interpretive craftsman, such as an actor can possibly get to being a creator. — Laurence Olivier

What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it's pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is - did I make a beautiful picture? — Helen Frankenthaler

I remember writing 'The One I Can't Have' at the kitchen table. I was looking at a picture of Truman Capote with Marilyn Monroe and that's where I started. It doesn't make any sense because he was gay, but it was just the idea of the short guy and the beautiful blonde out of his league. That's where I started, but very quickly it became about me. — Teddy Thompson

As she watched, he examined the can intently, read the ingredients, then returned it to the shelf and chose another, repeating his thorough study of it.
The contrast between his rough, tough-guy appearance and the domestic act he was performing did funny things to her head.
She had a sudden, breathtaking vision of a dark-haired little boy sitting in the seat of the cart, laughing up at Cian, grabbing at his swinging braids with chubby little fists, while his daddy inspected the ingredients on a jar of baby food. Her mind's eye
picture of sexy, strong man with beautiful, helpless child made something soft and warm blossom behind her chest. — Karen Marie Moning

ATTACHED TO MY HEART Ogedengbe Tolulope Impact Attached to my heart Is a wonderful picture, A symbol of love Given to me from above. Attached to my heart Are memories unforgotten, Issues that were begotten On my short journey on earth. Attached to my heart Is a beautiful picture, With a radiant face Smiling at the world. — Abegunde Sunday Olaoluwa

...girl reached across her desk and pulled the computer keyboard over. "What's his name?" she said. "Crowley," Julianna said, surprised. "Christopher Wayne Crowley." "I shouldn't do this." The girl looked back up at Genevieve and laughed. "But fuck it, right?" Genevieve's disappearance from the state fair had been news for about a day. Okay, maybe for a couple of weeks. She was beautiful - the Daily Oklahoman ran her picture with every story, a photo of her from the previous year's U. S. Grant High School yearbook. Genevieve had thought the photo... — Lou Berney

Q What makes a question "beautiful"? A beautiful question reframes an issue and forces you to look at it in a different way. It challenges assumptions and is really ambitious. Often, these questions begin with the phrase "How might we..." They have a magnetic quality that makes people want to answer them, to talk about them, to work on them. They make the imagination race. The Polaroid camera came out of a 3-year-old girl's asking, "Why do we have to wait for the picture?" That's a beautiful question. — Anonymous

I do think that this planet is a totally unjust planet. I mean throughout history - history paints a beautiful picture when it's written by the victorious, but it's a planet that belongs to the strong and the more able, and usually they are tyrants. So basically, I don't see justice happening to the crushed and the weak. — Bassem Youssef

Minnesota! It smelled like raspberries and sunlight and tender grass. It was summer and everything was more beautiful than any picture she had carried with her ... There had never been a place in the world as beautiful as Minnesota. — Ann Patchett

He positively forgot where he was, and not even hearing what was said, he could not take his eyes off the marvelous portrait. It was not a picture, but a living, charming woman, with black curling hair, with bare arms and shoulders, with a pensive smile on the lips, covered with soft down; triumphantly and softly she looked at him with eyes that baffled him. She was not living only because she was more beautiful than a living woman can be. — Leo Tolstoy

When you begin a picture you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds. Otherwise you become your own connoisseur. — Pablo Picasso

In my head I think, There is a beautiful picture here and by God, short of murder, I'm going to get it. So shut up and hold still! But what I say is: You look wonderful. It'll just take a minute. It's marvelous. We're doing something very special. — John Loengard

That early community taught me how wonderful it is to connect with like-minded people. No matter how lonely and isolated and starved for connection you are, there's always the possibility in the online world that you can find a place to be accepted, or discover a friendship that's started with the smallest of interests but could last a lifetime. Your qualification for finding a place to belong is enthusiasm and passion, and I think that's a beautiful thing.
No one should feel lonely or embarrassed about liking something. Except for illegal sex picture stuff. And murder and dogfighting ... I'll make a list. It'll be pretty long, now that I think about it. But you get the gist. — Felicia Day

I think it was probably the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
"I can't believe I don't have my camera," Jane said again, her voice almost reverent.
"You couldn't ever get this into a picture," I said. "And you'd miss it while you were trying to. — Emily M. Danforth

Picture to yourself the most beautiful girl imaginable! She was so beautiful that there would be no point, in view of my meagre talent for storytelling, in even trying to put her beauty into words. That would far exceed my capabilities, so I'll refrain from mentioning whether she was a blonde or a brunette or a redhead, or whether her hair was long or short or curly or smooth as silk. I shall also refrain from the usual comparisons where her complexion was concerned, for instance milk, velvet, satin, peaches and cream, honey or ivory, Instead, I shall leave it entirely up to your imagination to fill in this blank with your own ideal of feminine beauty. — Walter Moers