Beauty Realized Quotes & Sayings

I realized that searching for a mentor has become the professional equivalent of waiting for Prince Charming. We all grew up on the fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty," which instructs young women that if they just wait for their prince to arrive, they will be kissed and whisked away on a white horse to live happily ever after. Now young women are told that if they can just find the right mentor, they will be pushed up the ladder and whisked away to the corner office to live happily ever after. Once again, we are teaching women to be too dependent on others. — Sheryl Sandberg

Until I saw Chardin's painting, I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house, in the half-cleared table, in the corner of a tablecloth left awry, in the knife beside the empty oyster shell. — Marcel Proust

And I sat there at the patio,
while the whole of universe,
was getting engulfed,
in the whitest whiteness of snow.

Down, near my rough paw,
is soft snow,
mannering a fidgeting embryo.

I monitored the snow that plunged,
on the soil of my backyard,
and realized it melting fast.
Was that the temperature or,
my eyes on it overcast?

While I think of this melted exalt,
I am obliged to ask,
What ought happens to the thoughts?
Where do they get tossed?
When they are forgot?

Scorched?
Scoffed?
Deformed?
Unadorned? — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

This was, I realized, a beautiful planet. Maybe it was the most beautiful of all. But beauty creates its own troubles. You look at a waterfall or an ocean or a sunset, and you find yourself wanting to share it with someone. — Matt Haig

She was walking toward the beauty shop when Shay came out the door moving fast. The first thing Jill noticed was Shay's hair and how it appeared really big. As Shay drew closer, Jill realized she looked like she was wearing a mask with big blue streaks over the eyes and giant red pouty lips. "What happened to you?" Jill asked in shock. "I'm not sure," Shay said, looking just as stunned. "One minute, I was reading a magazine, and the next, two women that looked like Dolly Parton descended on me like vultures. They started putting stuff on my face, then they did all kinds of things to my hair." Anne walked out of the shop next; her Napoleon hat 'do rode higher than ever. Ella followed with her little red hair ball reinflated. "Doesn't Shay just look beautiful?" Ella chirped. She looked like a hooker who'd just survived a wind tunnel, but Jill nodded and tried to smile. — Robin Alexander

That, I realized, is the great beauty of dreams: the devil may inevitably find a way to jerk you off, but you can always wake up before he makes you cum. — Jim Carroll

Between the wrinkles of age and her features which indicated a number of years resided a beauty that was touching and awakened trust. Since by now I had observed many faces quite closely in order to sketch them, I fully realized that it was more than mere beauty, it was the soul which shone through so kindly and self-contained, which had such a striking effect on whoever came into contact with her. — Adalbert Stifter

My body slid from human to wolf in a crack! of black smoke. Wolf was panting and I watched frost dissipate on my hot tongue, sending tiny rivulets of steam into the air. The world was sharp and clear, and I never realized how many different colors of shadow there were. It made me savor the dark beauty of night even more. — Heather Heffner

As to her rank, she should be at the very least a princess, seeing that she is my lady and my queen. Her beauty is superhuman, for in it are realized all the impossible and chimerical attributes that poets are accustomed to give their fair ones. Her locks are golden, her brow the Elysian Fields, her eyebrows rainbows, her eyes suns, her cheeks roses, her lips coral, her teeth pearls, her neck alabaster, her bosom marble, her hands ivory, her complexion snow-white. As for those parts which modesty keeps covered from the human sight, it is my opinion that, discreetly considered, they are only to be extolled and not compared to any other. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

A lot of people who know about the view from the tip-top of a bridge or tall building are dead, because they climbed up in order to jump off. But sometimes I wonder if they truly planned on jumping or if the view was just so beautiful that they realized what a wide big net beauty is, and then wanted so badly to be caught by it. — Alissa Nutting

Gregori glided through the cypress trees, tall, fit,healthy. Even his clothes were immaculate. His hair was shining clean, tied at his nape with a leather thong. His silver eyes were clear, and once more his face was a mask of sensual beauty. "Gary"-the voice, as always, was of purity and strength-"please leave us for a few moments."
"Will she be all right?" Gary asked fearfully. In spite of himself, he had checked her pulse several times.
"She must be all right," Gregori said very softly.
The voice was like velvet, but there was something in it that sent a shiver of apprehension through Gary.If anything happened to Savannah,Gary realized that no one,nothing in the world,would ever be safe again from the Carpathian.He hadn't considered that before,and he had no idea where the knowledge came from, but he knew it absolutely. — Christine Feehan

The wonder is not that there should be obstacles and sufferings in this world, but that there should be law and order, beauty and joy, goodness and love. The idea of God that humans have in their being is the wonder of all wonders. They have felt in the depths of their lives that what appears as imperfect is the manifestation of the perfect; just as a person who has an ear for music realized the perfection of a song, while in fact he or she is only listening to a succession of notes. — Victor Gollancz

A few years ago I lost 30 pounds, and people still wanted to criticize. And honestly, I'm happy with myself if I'm a little heavier. I realized: 'Why am I trying to conform to someone else's idea of beauty?' I think I'm beautiful either way. — Khloe Kardashian

And when she started becoming a "young lady," and no one was allowed to look at her because she thought she was fat. And how she really wasn't fat. And how she was actually very pretty. And how different her face looked when she realized boys thought she was pretty. And how different her face looked the first time she really liked a boy who was not on a poster on her wall. And how her face looked when she realized she was in love with that boy. I wondered how her face would look when she came out from behind those doors. — Stephen Chbosky

Until I came to New Mexico, I never realized how much beauty water adds to a river. — Mark Twain

When I was a teen, I liked to hang out around popular girls, I thought they had some magic, secrets that only they knew and I wanted to learn it ... Though pretty soon I realized ... popular girls were just like spam ... they promised a lot, but only thing they had and could use were their well-built bodies and ability to apply make-up here and there. Mostly they were deceptive and had no senses ... they had no idea about friendship, kindness and beauty as it is. Friendship for them was not something more than poor relations, sort of like in "God Father". Love for them was not something bigger than sex. Kindness for them was to have a kitty or a dog (which was already very rare case) ... And beauty for them was ... well, you can imagine. Concentrated selfishness — Galina Nelson

I want to let [my photographs] be something that comes from the model in her own way. I don't want to take the models too much out of their own skin. I realized that I wanted to create a marriage between who the person was, the nature, the beauty in the figure, and how the models sat or posed themselves. — Mario Sorrenti

That's the day I realized that there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid. Ever. Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it ... and my heart is going to cave in. — Alan Ball

The girls who were unanimously considered beautiful often rested on their beauty alone. I felt I had to do things, to be intelligent and develop a personality in order to be seen as attractive. By the time I realized maybe I wasn't plain and might even possibly be pretty, I had already trained myself to be a little more interesting and informed. — Diane Von Furstenberg

Heaven opened then, indeed. The flash was almost too novel for its inexpressibly dangerous nature to be at once realized, and they could only comprehend the magnificence of its beauty. It sprang from east, west, north, south, and was a perfect dance of death. The forms of skeletons appeared in the air, shaped with blue fire for bones - dancing, leaping, striding, racing around, and mingling altogether in unparalleled confusion. With these were intertwined undulating snakes of green, and behind these was a broad mass of lesser light. Simultaneously came from every part of the tumbling sky what may be called a shout; since, though no shout ever came near it, it was more of the nature of a shout than of anything else earthly. — Thomas Hardy

She stared at Peter, and she realized that in that one moment, when she hadn't been thinking, she knew exactly what he'd felt as he moved through the school with his backpack and his guns. Every kid in this school played a role: jock, brain, beauty, freak. All Peter had done was what they all secretly dreamed of: be someone, even for just nineteen minutes, who nobody else was allowed to judge. — Jodi Picoult

The day I bought my cane, I realized
I was through with the burden of feet. Instead,
I am going to become a mermaid.
I have always liked the ocean, the promise
of depth. I am tired of this dry world,
all of this dust and sickness, these barren fields.
I want to dive without drowning. I want to kiss sharks.
I want men to carve me into the bows of their ships
like a prayer, before I lure them into the depths
with my fishnet mouth. I want the beauty,
the gorgeous mutation, the fairytale of half body.
All the wisdom of a woman, without the failures of sex.
I am plunging. I am not coming up for air.
I do not want all this human,
my legs move like they resent being legs,
my body is wrecked by all this gravity.
I cannot face another morning waking up
with no hope of a fairytale. Here on land,
I am always drowning. Here on land,
I cannot move. — Clementine Von Radics

The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places ... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world. — William Torrey Harris

She was dressed in white, and her tunic had amazing flared sleeves which trailed on the ground behind her as she glided down the stairs. Her hair was a mass of dark curls tumbling around her face, and she had dark, dark eyes. Jack realized that this was what the chansons meant when they referred to a beautiful princess in a castle. No wonder the knights all wept when the princess died. — Ken Follett

I had accepted that all the dark memories were mine. But I had never realized that the beautiful ones were mine too. I had a right to them. And the right to embrace them, regardless of what happened before and after. I had a right to my happiness, as well as my grief. — Linda Olsson

Then, all of a sudden, those pea-green lawns where the first scarlet poppies were flowering, those canary-yellow fields which striped the tawny hills sloping down to a sea full of azure glints, all seemed so trivial to me, so banal, so false, so much in contrast with Ayl's person, with Ayl's world, with Ayl's idea of beauty, that I realized her place could never have been out here. And I realized, with grief and fear, that I had remained out here, that I would never again be able to escape those gilded and silvered gleams, those little clouds that turned from pale blue to pink, those green leaves that yellowed every autumn, and that Ayl's perfect world was lost forever, so lost I couldn't even imagine it any more, and nothing was left that could remind me of it, even remotely, nothing except perhaps that cold wall of gray stone. — Italo Calvino

This assumption that she need look for no more devotion now that her beauty had passed proceeded from the fact that she had never realized any love save love as passion. Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties. Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday. — Thornton Wilder

Nathaniel Willis, having spent his first week walking the city in drizzling rain, said that when the sun burst forth at last it so changed all his previous impressions that he had to set off and see it all a second time. "And it seemed to me another city," he wrote. "I never realized so forcibly the beauty of sunshine. Architecture, particularly, is nothing without it. — David McCullough

Isa looked down the river to the Taj Mahal. It shone harshly in the midday sun, the marble glared back at the sky and it stood isolated and alone. It needed a companion of beauty, but there was none in this world. Isa had thought long about the tomb; it had life, it breathed. He imagined the rise and fall of the stone as it sighed. He realized it was lonely. It was a perfect thing in an imperfect world, and that was an awesome burden. — Timeri N. Murari

The Perfect Person's Rule of Life:
The perfect person does not only try to avoid evil. Nor does he do good for fear of punishment, still less in order to qualify for the hope of a promised reward.
The perfect person does good through love.
His actions are not motivated by desire for personal benefit, so he does not have personal advantage as his aim. But as soon as he has realized the beauty of doing good, he does it with all his energies and in all that he does.
He is not interested in fame, or a good reputation, or a human or divine reward.
The rule of life for a perfect person is to be in the image and likeness of God. — Clement Of Alexandria

I think this is the ugliest place I've ever seen. Not just here. The whole state." I hear my parents telling me not to be negative, which is funny because I've always been the happy one. It's Eleanor who was moody. "I used to think that. But then I realized, believe it or not, it's actually beautiful to some people. It must be, because enough people live here, and they can't all think it's ugly." He smiles out at the ugly trees and the ugly farmland and the ugly kids as if he can see Oz. As if he can really, truly see the beauty that's there. In that moment I wish I could see it through his eyes. — Jennifer Niven

It is only our exactions of life that are terrible. It is only our impossible conceptions of beauty and good and justice that are terrible
because they never are realized, and at the same time they prevent us taking life as it is. That is the real source of all our sorrow and suffering. — Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

This is why the license plates say Beautiful British Columbia, and I realized just how much I would miss it. But all this natural beauty exists only in response to rain, I reminded myself, and the occasional day of technicolor spectacle was bought and paid for with weeks and weeks of dull, damp gray. I wasn't going to miss the gray. If — Michael J. Fox

It was the first time I'd really realized I'd lost my soul and that the beauty of not having a soul was that you couldn't seem to care that you no longer had one. — Maggie Stiefvater

But the longer and further I ran, the more I realized that what I was often chasing was a state of mind- a place where worries that seemed monumental melted away, where the beauty and timelessness of the universe, of the present moment, came into sharp focus. — Scott Jurek

Once, I was afraid of these walls, frightened by such beauty. But I see the cracks now. It's like the day of the bombing, when I realized Silvers were not invincible. Then it was an explosion - now a few bullets have shattered diamondglass, revealing fear and paranoia beneath. Silvers fleeing from Reds - lions running from mice. The king and queen oppose each other, the court has their own alliances, and Cal - the perfect prince, the good soldier - is a torturous, terrible enemy. Anyone can betray anyone. — Victoria Aveyard

I thank the Lord that, even though things were so wrong in my life here, I finally was brought to the realization of what all those struggles were about. There are some wonderful things from your painful past, things with a beauty you may not have realized at the time. — Ravi Zacharias

Funny thing about Gabby: you wouldn't know it from looking at him, with his golden halo and platonic beauty, but the guy was something of a pack rat. He'd been collecting little odds and ends since at least the double-digit redshifts. The interior reality of Gabriel's Magisterium burbled and shifted like convection currents in a star on the zaftig end of the main sequence. Because, I realized, that's what they were. Dull dim light, from IR to X-ray, oozed past me like the wax in a million-mile lava lamp while carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen nuclei did little do-si-dos about my toes. Every bubble, every sizzle, every new nucleus, every photodissociation tagged something of interest to Gabriel. The heart of this star smelled of roses and musty libraries. — Ian Tregillis

His eyes beheld beauty not in reality but in the printed word. Standing in the waiting-room, he realized that in his life he had accepted secondary experience
the experience of reading someone else's thoughts
over real life. — Ian Rankin

Soon I realized that if beauty equalled forgiveness, I was never going to be forgiven. — Kevyn Aucoin

He realized that his eyes were fixed on the scene not out of duty, but from sheer inability to look away from the sheen of mingled rain and blood that gleamed on muscle, tightened in anguish to a curve of wrenching beauty. — Diana Gabaldon

I had grazed along the surface of her actions and made deep judgments. Rejecting someone because you couldn't understand their love, that was a new one. The more I thought about it the longer the shadow of doubt stretched over all my conclusions. More often than not, things were as they seemed. But as I stared at her, she wasn't as bad looking as I had once thought. I realized how all this time I had seen her the wrong way, and how one's character affects one's appearance. Although she wasn't my type she was attractive. As I thought about her - the vulnerable intelligence, the violent honesty, and the fact that in the entire city she was the only one who took me in and fed me - she became more and more irresistible. Baited by an obscure beauty, trapped by an intense sorrow - all prior definitions had been overruled: this was love. — Arthur Nersesian

I realized with horror that I'd left my thesaurus in English class, and so wouldn't be able to describe their beauty in suitably poetic terms, but let me tell you, they were smokin' hot and no bullshit. — Stephfordy Mayo

If in my youth I had realized that the sustaining splendour of beauty of with which I was in love would one day flood back into my heart, there to ignite a flame that would torture me without end, how gladly would I have put out the light in my eyes. — Michelangelo

How to describe the excitement I felt when I saw this beautiful work and realized its potential? I guess it's like when, after a long journey, suddenly a mountain peak comes in full view. You catch your breath, take in its majestic beauty, and all you can say is "Wow!" It's the moment of revelation. You have not yet reached the summit, you don't even know yet what obstacles lie ahead, but its allure is irresistible, and you already imagine yourself at the top. It's yours to conquer now. But do you have the strength and stamina to do it? — Edward Frenkel

I think I did realize that early on, and then I went through a fun phase where I was figuring out who I was and the different sides of myself. I think like most women, I bought into a certain ideal of beauty that I didn't quite fit into, and I tried to pretzel myself and alter myself to be what I was told is beautiful, and then I realized that you are in control of what you think is beautiful. — Evan Rachel Wood

Beauty, brains and a brazen attitude, she was everything he'd never realized he was looking for until he'd found her. — Avery Flynn

Whatever beauty she thought she might have possessed she realized had only been through her husband's assessment of her — Molly Ringwald

Loved. I hadn't even realized how desperetly I'd wanted love.How much we both needed to know that in a world of dark corners and sharp needles, there really is a place where kisses taste like apple pie and where stars spill like suger across the sky. A place where unknown roads no longer scare you because you have another hand to hold. A place where butterflies always flutter whenever you see each other, and a single touch tells you that you are not alone. A place where every kiss still feels like the first. In that place of us, Liv and Dean, love has its own poetry and language. Allure, quartrefoil, fleur-de-lis ... Professor. Beauty. — Nina Lane

His singing made me want to fall to the ground and kiss it, as a son to a mother, grateful that someone could love it so keenly. For the first time in my life something new awoke within me, something irresistible: I still cannot explain it. It was a need to express myself, yes, to express myself, not only to see and sense the world, but to bring to others my vision, my thoughts and sensations, to describe the beauty of the earth as inspiringly as Daniyar could sing. I caught my breath for fear and joy of the unknown. At that time, however, I had not yet realized the need to take up brush and paints. — Chingiz Aitmatov

Christopher Argent kept stealing disbelieving looks at Farah, his blue eyes reflecting the ambient glow like an alley cat's. Dorian understood why the man would dare in his presence.
First, because Christopher Argent was an unfeeling, fearless killer-for-hire.
And second, because most of the incarcerated men at Newgate had considered Dougan's Fairy some mythical creature, a sight too rare and beautiful to be beheld by a common man. Maybe even a fancy born of an imagination keen enough to take possession of the prison. To meet her was to gaze upon a fantasy realized, to remember the desperate yearnings of a lonely prisoner bereft of kindness, mercy, or beauty. To be blinded by the embodiment of all three of those things. For a man like Argent, one born to incarceration, the sight might have him reassessing some long-held cynical philosophies. — Kerrigan Byrne

Just the word beautiful was seductive - but what did it really mean? Beauty was a soft word that ached with possibility, pliant as dough. You could not presume to define it, she realized, because the very idea of beauty and all it represented was a subjective thing - in the eye of the beholder - but that wasn't really true anymore. — Elizabeth Brundage

He grinned back at me, and I remembered how normal he'd made me feel the first time we'd met. Here, once again, he wasn't bothered by my silence. And I suddenly realized what made me feel so uncomfortable about Elizabeth's exploits. The people she attracted were drawn to the same thing everyone else was: our glowing skin, dreamy eyes, and air of secrecy. But this boy? He seemed to see more than that. He saw me not just as a mysterious beauty, but as a girl he wanted to know.
He didn't stare at me. He spoke to me. — Kiera Cass

He'd made love to her four times now, he realized, but this was his first chance to truly look upon her body. She was every inch as lovely as he'd imagined, if not more. He felt a bit guilty, realizing he'd chastised her for sketching his likeness, when he'd been conjuring an image of her nude form nightly for weeks. The only difference was, he hadn't committed his fantasies to paper.
It would take a Renaissance master to capture this beauty. — Tessa Dare

Her hair was hidden under a white headdress, like some kind of wimple; she wore a long white tunic and trousers, and her skin had the pale golden hue associated in our world with Orientals. The lines of her cheekbone and jaw reminded him of pictures he had seen of the head of Nefertiti, thought her neck was longer, slightly too long for an ordinary human, and as she turned toward him he realized the planes of her face were subtly different, though it would have been hard to explain in what way. A fraction of an inch here, a fraction of an inch there, and the whole visage was somehow distorted, though its beauty remained undiminished. — Amanda Hemingway

The next minute he realized what had happened to him, but not before she'd caught him staring.
For a decade, I was fixated by her beauty. I wrote an entire article on the evolutionary significance of beauty as a rebuke to myself, that I, who understood the concepts so well, nevertheless could not escape the magnetic pull of one particular woman's beauty.
She knew. With surgical precision, she had peeled back his layers of defenses, until his heart lay bare before her, all its shame and yearning exposed.
He could have lived with this if only he'd kept his secret whole and buried. But she knew. She knew. — Sherry Thomas

I realized, when I saw the forest burning, how fascinating the firelight is. It's beautiful, and people stare at it, don't they? It destroys things and kills people, but humans love it. Is it because they crave their own destruction, Sam? I want to understand your kind. I am going out into the wider world, and I must learn. But first things first. First, to escape this shell, this egg in which I have gestated, all eyes will be on the fire, all eyes blinded by the smoke, and when I walk out of here, out into your large world with its billions, no one will even see. It's the beauty of light, don't you see, Sam? It reveals, but it also distracts and blinds. It's even better than darkness. — Michael Grant

He is incredibly handsome. You never realized before how beautiful evil could be. — Teresa Lo

I consider myself someone who takes a lot of beauty risks, and I've realized what I liar I am. I change my hair a lot, from blue to blonde to bald, but I'm trying to branch out a little more with makeup. — Halsey

Lying flat on my back, with my toes dipped into the lake, I stared at the stars for a second. I guess I should have pondered their beauty and realized the rarity of a sky unsaturated by city lights, or something. But it occurred to me that you could probably see stars from the vast majority of the earth. It was city lights that were actually rare. — Emily Adrian

I realized that beauty was not a thing that I could acquire or consume, it was something that I just had to be. — Lupita Nyong'o

I waited, Rachel. I waited until you were old enough. I wasted my time looking for girls who came even remotely close to looking like you." His hand brushed through my hair as he studied it. "Long legs. Long, straight, near-black hair. Eyes the exact color of sapphires." A heavy sigh left him and his forehead creased. "But none of them were you. None of them had your temper; none of them had your fire for life. So none of them deserved to have your beauty." "Like Jenn." I realized it with dread and watched his face twist with a look of disgust. "Everything I've done up until this point has been for you and our future together. I only wish," he said against my lips, "that you would stop being so goddamn difficult. — Molly McAdams

When I look back, it saddens me to think that I was so hard on myself - when I was younger, I thought I had to look like everyone else, but I learned that beauty comes from how you feel about yourself. Once I started taking care of my mind, body, and soul, I realized that I didn't need to conform to what's "normal" and started to love myself. — Demi Lovato

Mia: I was sixteen when I first realized my mom was more concerned about my appearance than I was ... I'll be talking to my mom and realize she hasn't heard a word because she's studying my face to see if the foundation I'm using is a good match for my skin tone. — Mia Fontaine

I've backpacked to countries like Italy and Turkey and observed beautiful scenery, but then I realized that beauty was always very close to me. It is here in Belitung Island, where the rivers, beaches and the terrain captivate my attention most. — Andrea Hirata

Some said living with cancer had made them wiser, more self-realized, while others had reordered their priorities in life, grown stronger, learned to say no to activities they no longer valued and yes to things that really mattered - such as loving their family and friends, observing the beauty about them, savoring the changing seasons. — Irvin D. Yalom

Much has been said of the aesthetic values of chanoyu- the love of the subdued and austere- most commonly characterized by the term, wabi. Wabi originally suggested an atmosphere of desolation, both in the sense of solitariness and in the sense of the poverty of things. In the long history of various Japanese arts, the sense of wabi gradually came to take on a positive meaning to be recognized for its profound religious sense ... the related term, sabi, ... It was mid-winter, and the water's surface was covered with the withered leaves of the of the lotuses. Suddenly I realized that the flowers had not simply dried up, but that they embodied, in their decomposition, the fullness of life that would emerge again in their natural beauty. — Okakura Kakuzo

But there, in a little boat in Venice, as I watched the sun set - a fiery, hellish, red ball turning the water and sky into shades of heaven - my eyes had filled up with tears at the violent beauty of it all. In that moment, I realized I wanted to live again. For the first time in a long time, I was glad to be alive. — Amy Harmon

In another place, in another time, she would have felt the majesty of the beauty around her, but as she stood on the beach, she realized that she didn't feel anything at all. In a way, she felt as if she weren't really here, as if the whole thing was nothing but a dream. — Nicholas Sparks

Germany, in the summer, is the perfection of the beautiful, but nobody has understood, and realized, and enjoyed the utmost possibilities of this soft and peaceful beauty unless he has voyaged down the Neckar on a raft. The motion of a raft is the needful motion; it is gentle, and gliding, and smooth, and noiseless; it calms down all feverish activities, it soothes to sleep all nervous hurry and impatience; under its restful influence all the troubles and vexations and sorrows that harass the mind vanish away, and existence becomes a dream, a charm, a deep and tranquil ecstasy. How it contrasts with hot and perspiring pedestrianism, and dusty and deafening railroad rush, and tedious jolting behind tired horses over blinding white roads! — Mark Twain

This was the danger, the seduction of time travel, she realized - it was the opportunity, the freedom of a thousand possibilities of where to live and how to start over. It was the beauty open to you in your life if you only stopped for a moment to look. — Alexandra Bracken

Thanks to these eyes ... I came to understand how cruel and despicable people can be. But that also allowed me to appreciate true beauty. All you have to do is appreciate things from a different perspective Once I realized the things we take for granted are really miracles, I came to see everything in it's precious, empheral beauty.
... I love this world. — Jun Mochizuki

I'm convinced that a lot of people run ultramarathons for the same reason they take mood-altering drugs. I don't mean to minimize the gifts of friendship, achievement, and closeness to nature that I've received in my running career. But the longer and farther I ran, the more I realized that what I was often chasing was a state of mind - a place where worries that seemed monumental melted away, where the beauty and timelessness of the universe, of the present moment, came into sharp focus. I don't think anyone starts running distances to obtain that kind of vision. I certainly didn't. But I don't think anyone who runs ultra distances with regularity fails to get there. The trick is to recognize the vision when it comes over you. — Scott Jurek

Lynne looked as if she were really having fun, Elizabeth realized. With a smile on her face and a sparkle in her eye, Lynne Henry was actually almost pretty! — Francine Pascal

If you have a thankful heart and are using that domain to reflect God's beauty as a Creator, then you are worshiping. Listening to Hillsound United isn't worship; it's and aid for worship. I found a deeper level of joy and connection with Jesus when I realized that eating a good meal with thankfulness was just as holy as my prayer time. The truth is, Go doesn't just want your "Christian" things. He wats it all. When we realize the beauty of God's grace in the mundane, not just the religious, that's when we will begin to see him correctly. — Jefferson Bethke

It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realize their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realized, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting point for an ideal that is other than itself. This is why music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret. — Oscar Wilde

Ah, I found you." Came a voice behind me. My heart skipped a beat as a smile spread across my face. How do I already know his voice?
'My ears have not yet drunk a hundred words of thy tongue's uttering, yet I know the sound.' I remembered the line from Romeo and Juliet. I could not forget Ariston's voice if I tried. At the sound, all thoughts of the odd occurrence faded.
I turned around to see Ariston Crete walking towards me. I realized when I saw him that there was a part of my mind that had wondered if he was real, if I had not only imagined his beauty, but clearly I had not. Somehow, he is real, right down to his ancient eyes. It felt just as indescribable to look into his eyes as it had before. — Jasmine Dubroff