Brief Beauty Quotes & Sayings

Most craft give a nod, however brief and unfriendly, towards beauty. Vogon ships did not nod towards beauty. They pulled on ski masks and mugged beauty in a dark alley They spat in the eye of beauty and bludgeoned their wait through the notions of aesthetics and aerodynamics. Vogon cruisers did not so much travel through space as defile it and toss it aside. — Eoin Colfer

The melancholic breeze of another morning caressing senses tired of a brief life, yet longing for more. But my Lord, who knows the moments next, who sees the path ahead, who decides a life as delicate as a dew drop upon the tip of a grass that sways looking at the beauty of the skies? — Preeth Nambiar

A mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place. She teaches you the nature of happiness: what is the right amount, what is too much, and the kind that makes you want more of what is bad for you. A mother helps her baby flex her first feelings of pleasure. She teaches her when to later exercise restraint, or to take squealing joy in recognizing the fluttering leaves of the gingko tree, to sense a quieter but more profound satisfaction in chancing upon an everlasting pine. A mother enables you to realize that there are different levels of beauty and therein lie the sources of pleasure, some of which are popular and ordinary, and thus of brief value, and others of which are difficult and rare, and hence worth pursuing. — Amy Tan

Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come. — Frances Mayes

O brief, bright smile of summer! O days divine and dear The voices of winter's sorrow Already we can hear. And we know that the frosts will find us, And the smiling skies grow rude, While we look in the face of Beauty, And worship her every mood. — Celia Thaxter

For a few minutes the anxiety that tormented him had vanished, leaving his mind as serene as the beauty he looked at. Very lovely, he thought, are the sudden moments of relief that come in the midst of strain, those moments of forgetfulness when we are "teased out of thought" by a bird or a flower or the sight of old roofs in the sun; lovely though so transient, the reversal of those brief moments of misery that visit us even in the midst of joy. — Elizabeth Goudge

The fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness - the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined. — F Scott Fitzgerald

In my opinion, I think we have brief moments of great beauty and great pain, and as we journey we try to grasp one, so we can avoid the other. — Brandon Shire

The pain is stronger than ever. I've seen bit of lost Paradises and I know I'll be hopelessly tryng tu return even if it hurts. The deeper I swing into the regions of nothingness the further I'm thrown back into myself, each time more and more frightening depths below me, until my very being becomes dizzy. There are brief glimpses of clear sky, like falling out of a tree, so I have some idea where I'm going, but there is still too much clarity and straight order of things, I am getting always the same number somehow. So I vomit out broken bits of words and sintaxes of the countries I've passed through, broken limbs, slaughtered houses, geographies. My heart is poisoned, my brain left in shreds of horror and sadness. I've never let you down, world, but you did lousy things to me.
(from "As I was moving ahead occasionally I saw brief glimpses of beauty", 2000) — Jonas Mekas

I found a brief piece of by Antonio Vivaldi around this time which became my 'Pinhead Mood Music'. Called Al Santo Sepolcro (At The Holy Sepulchre), it opens more like a piece of modern orchestral music, and although it it moves toward Vivaldi's familiar harmonies, there is always the threat that it will fall back into dissonance. The piece progresses in an exquisite agony, poised on a knife edge between beauty and disfigurement, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. Perfect. — Doug Bradley

They're about a woman whose beauty is like a rare flower. There is a man who has a great love for her, a love he's been saving up for his entire life, and it doesn't matter that he must make a great journey to her, and it doesn't matter if their time together is brief, that afterward he might lose her, for she is the flower of his heart and nothing will keep him from her. — Adam Johnson

And I sit here alone and far from you and it's night and I'm reflecting on everything all around me and I am thinking of you. I saw it in your eyes, in your love, you too are swinging towards the depths of your own being in longer and longer circles. I saw happiness and pain in your eyes and reflections of the paradises lost and regained and lost again, that terrible loneliness and happiness, yes, and I reflect upon this and I think about you.
(from As I Was Moving Ahead I Occasionally Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, 2000) — Jonas Mekas

Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough — Jeanette Winterson

I held a brief debate with myself as to whether I should change my ordinary attire for something smarter. At last I concluded it would be a waste of labour. "Doubtless," though I, "she is some stiff old maid ; for though the daughter of Madame Reuter, she may well number upwards of forty winters; besides, if it were otherwise, if she be both young and pretty, I am not handsome, and no dressing can make me so, therefore I'll go as I am." And off I started, cursorily glancing sideways as I passed the toilet-table, surmounted by a looking-glass: a thin irregular face I saw, with sunk, dark eyes under a large, square forehead, complexion destitute of bloom or attraction; something young, but not youthful, no object to win a lady's love, no butt for the shafts of Cupid. — Charlotte Bronte

I reply with a letter as brief as his: 'My brother, after my first battle the only thing I now worship is the sun, a star that represents death's constancy. Beware of the moon, which reflects our world of beauty. It waxes and wanes, it is treacherous and ephemeral. We will all die some day ... — Shan Sa

Who's that man you were talking to?"

"Oh, that's Norwood. He was checking you in for your first shift. I'll introduce you tomorrow."

She made a face. "No rush."

"I mean, you were scheduled to have a brief orientation with him today, but you know, you needed your beauty sleep, so we don't have time. Are you aware, Lex, that sloth is a deadly sin?"

She made a face at him, then glanced back at the hallway. She thought she could make out a bustle of activity behind the array of frosted glass tiles that lined its right-hand wall, but Uncle Mort ushered her out the front door too quickly for her to get a closer look.

"Wait, we're done here?"

"Well, I was going to show you around upstairs as well, but - "

"No time. Sloth. I get it."

"Deadly sin. — Gina Damico

Between the Biblical writers and our own times have intervened ages in which all interest in literary beauty was lost, and philosophic activity took the form of protracted discussions of brief sayings or 'texts.' Accordingly this solidified matter of Hebrew literature has been divided up into single sentences or 'verses,' numbered mechanically one, two, three, etc., and thus the original literary form has still further been obscured. It is not surprising that to most readers the Bible has become, not a literature, but simply a storehouse of pious 'texts. — Richard Green Moulton

From that historically brief quite opaque moment, came the chaos of our material history, an anarchy of chronology, of mismatched remnants that delighted and horrified investigators. — China Mieville

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked - as I am surprisingly often - why I bother to get up in the mornings. — Richard Dawkins

He opened his mouth to ask what she was about, but the question never made it past his lips. She was naked from the top of her head to the tips of her toes . . . and absolutely beautiful. His bride was a fine figure of a woman, all soft and round. Just the way he liked his women, and his mouth watered at the sight. But it was a very brief view he got before she tugged a long shirt on and let it drop to curtain all that loveliness. "What the bloody hell is that?" As the first real words he'd said since marrying the woman, Ross supposed they left much to be desired. But he was just so shocked at the sight of the ugly shirt covering all that beauty, he couldn't help himself. — Lynsay Sands

From 'Midnight Cowboy' to 'Taxi Driver' is a brief era whose grit, beauty, and violence has been quite mythologized. — Rachel Kushner

I have, for my own projected works and ideas, only the silliest and dewiest of hopes; no matter what, I am romantic enough or sentimental enough to wish to contribute something to life's fabric, to the world's beauty ... [S]imply to live does not justify existence, for life is a mere gesture on the surface of the earth, and death a return to that from which we had never been wholly separated; but oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, of that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful! — Frank O'Hara

We [people] may enjoy this fleeting beauty [of life] for such a brief instance. And then we are compost. G - , the creator-destroyer, certainly has a strange sense of humor! — Sam Keen

Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn! Look to this Day! For it is Life, the very Life of Life. In its brief course lie all the Verities and Realities of your Existence. The Bliss of Growth, The Glory of Action, The Splendor of Beauty; For Yesterday is but a Dream, And To-morrow is only a Vision; But To-day well lived makes Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness, And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope. Look well therefore to this Day! Such is the Salutation of the Dawn! — Kalidasa

An introspective person seeks to attain a pure state of consciousness by merging finitude in infinity and by expressing the rapture of the soul through the contemplation and adoration of beauty. In this brief interlude of time, I surrender to becoming a cog in the roadway, an insentient time traveler, a ward of eternity, a day-tripper, a nighttime dream weaver, a blip in the cosmos, a freebase glob of energy, an imaginable disk of bundled vitality that wants for nothing. — Kilroy J. Oldster

He was too good to be
Where ill men were, and was the best of all
Amongst the rar'st of good ones- sitting sadly
Hearing us praise our loves of Italy
For beauty that made barren the swell'd boast
Of him that best could speak; for feature, laming
The shrine of Venus or straight-pight Minerva,
Postures beyond brief nature; for condition,
A shop of all the qualities that man
Loves woman for; besides that hook of wiving,
Fairness which strikes the eye-
CYMBELINE. — William Shakespeare

Linus closes his eyes and puts his arms out at his sides. "Look to this day. For it is life. The very life of life." I stand beside him. Quiet. He continues. "It its brief course lie all the verities and realities of your existence. The splendor of beauty, the bliss of growth, the glory of action. Today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope." He opens his eyes and looks at me. "It's an ancient Sufi text." He smiles. "My mantra." He folds his paper, bats me over the head with it and walks away. — Dana Reinhardt

Today, find a point of stillness: brief, but precious slight, but full small, but luminously real. Find a point stillness in the balance of all things between the breathing out and breathing in. — Na'ama Yehuda

From the days of our ancestors, those forgotten few who birthed us all, mankind has gazed awestruck into the heavens above. Night falls and the brilliant blue sky rolls away, allowing us a brief glimpse into a universe we will never fully understand. Yet we do not need its secrets to bathe in its beauty. Its empty blackness resonates in the depths of our souls, kindling a longing in our hearts that we can never fill. — Taylor P. Davidson

Of the two classes of Prussian officer, the bull-necked and the wasp-waisted, he belonged to the second. Monocled and effete in appearance, cold and distant in manner, he concentrated with such single-mindedness on his profession that when an aide, at the end of an all-night staff ride in East Prussia, pointed out to him the beauty of the river Pregel sparkling in the rising sun, the General gave a brief, hard look and replied, 'An unimportant obstacle. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Sapiens: A Brief History of Us

I am
Four billion years of mutations
Hurling through space on a rock that grew green
And beauty.
Berry-picker, mammoth-hunter, storyteller,
Begetter of souls.
Cognition.
And I imagine. I believe. I surrender. We love.
And I believe
Bravely.
Shared myths, illusions weeping, a world
Connected by chafe and
Poetry.
Life-giving secrets in
Immortal words in a la la land
Cresting.
I am
A wave
Breathing. Would die for you.
I believe.
I am. — Anne P. Collini

Edmund would miss him, if no one else. And there hadn't been a single brown-haired little girl to play peekaboo with during church or an emerald-eyed beauty to watch from a distance. And he lived for the brief glimpses he had of Clara. Sweet, beautiful, loving Clara. — Sarah M. Eden

Is the beauty of the Whole really enhanced by our agony? And is the Whole really beautiful? And what is beauty? Throughout all his existence man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres, and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he can never be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard. Inevitably so, for if it exists, it is not for him in his littleness. But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man. — Olaf Stapledon

For a brief while, the women ask us questions: are we looking forward to our debuts? Did we enjoy this opera or that play? As we give our slight answers, they smile, and I cannot read what is behind their expressions. do they envy us our youth and beauty? Do they feel happiness and excitement for the lives that lie ahead of us? Or do they wish for another chance at their own lives? A different chance? — Libba Bray

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty. — Edgar Allan Poe

Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into pure continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short-lived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music. — Yukio Mishima

What is important is that our optical awareness rids itself of classical notions of beauty and opens itself more and more to the beauty of the instant and of these surprising points of view that appear for a brief moment and never return; those are what make photography an art. — Raoul Hausmann

The Americans fished on, not hoping for much anymore, perhaps for a miracle, searching for small things to be happy about, because they were Americans and this was what their upbringings had taught them to do. They found a brief happiness, for example, in the potato chips that came to their rooms on expensive china and in the genuinely hopeful way the hotel girl asked if they'd had any luck. They took pleasure in their morning calls to the Lufthansa man, his wriggly explanations for the canceled flights to Norway. They smiled at the way a church had been built so the setting sun hit it high and perfect and orange, and the way they could follow the river to a park where miniskirted women lay in the grass with headphones clamped over their ears, and even at the way the little student-girls came filing down at noon behind their English-teaching beauty to call them fools. — Anthony Doerr

Some moralist or mythological poet
Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
I am satisfied with that,
Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,
Before that brief gleam of its life be gone ... — William Butler Yeats

She was not the sort of woman guys settle for. She was the one they lust after and strive for. She was the one who ruins other people's relationships simply by existing, but she will always be surmounted as guys come to realize the virtues of the approachable girl next door. She was, in brief, too pretty to be trusted or had. — Thomm Quackenbush

It was language I loved, not meaning. I liked poetry better when I wasn't sure what it meant. Eliot has said that the meaning of the poem is provided to keep the mind busy while the poem gets on with its work
like the bone thrown to the dog by the robber so he can get on with his work ... Is beauty a reminder of something we once knew, with poetry one of its vehicles? Does it give us a brief vision of that 'rarely glimpsed bright face behind/ the apparency of things'? Here, I suppose, we ought to try the impossible task of defining poetry. No one definition will do. But I must admit to a liking for the words of Thomas Fuller, who said: 'Poetry is a dangerous honey. I advise thee only to taste it with the Tip of thy finger and not to live upon it. If thou do'st, it will disorder thy Head and give thee dangerous Vertigos. — P.K. Page

He tries to get close to her because he wants to know what her glow feels like. She's alone on the dance floor and even though she's dancing, there's a kind of sadness lurking about her, like her heart is somewhere else. Roman doesn't think he has ever seen a woman look this beautiful. It's not just her halo either. Even in that one brief moment Roman feels it. He feels her become a part of his life. Her halo is glowing a little less bright now, and Roman doesn't know why. But he wants to find out. — Sam Hunter

As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It's as close as we get to God in this life, and reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go. — Richard Russo

I've been reading about moths," she said, to fill the silence.
"What have you read?"
Maggie shrugged. "They navigate by the light of the moon. They fling themselves into flames and electric lights because they think they're headed toward the moon's light."
"I guess they die in ecstasy then," Liam said. — Jodi Lynn Anderson

How strange it was, I thought, that when the tiny though thousandfold beauties of the Earth disappeared and the immeasurable beauty of outer space rose in the distant quiet splendor of light, man and the greatest number of other creatures were supposed to be asleep! Was it because we were only permitted to catch a fleeting glimpse of those great bodies and then only in the mysterious time of a dream world, those great bodies about which man had only the slightest knowledge but perhaps one day would be permitted to examine more closely? Or was it permitted for the great majority of people to gaze at the starry firmament only in brief, sleepless moments so that the splendor wouldn't become mundane, so that the greatness wouldn't be diminished? — Adalbert Stifter

We see, surrounding the narrow raft illuminated by the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour; all the loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces is concentrated on the individual soul, which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears. Victory, in this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into the overmastering beauty of human existence. — Bertrand Russell

But it happens, and I am thankful enough for that, for those fleeting, wakeful moments of beauty and truth. They are the real joy of being human, brief matches that flare in the dark. — Roger Housden

We were thirsty for some form of beauty, even in an incomprehensible, overintellectual, abstract film with no subtitles and censored out of recognition. There was a sense of wonder at being in a public place for the first time in years without fear or anger, being in a place with a crowd of strangers that was not a demonstration, a protest rally, a breadline or a public execution...For a brief time we experienced collectively the kind of awful beauty that can only be grasped at through extreme anguish and expressed through art. — Azar Nafisi

Life itself is brief, and that is what charges the day with such ridiculous beauty. — Garrison Keillor