On Ugliness Quotes & Sayings

The North Americans' sense of time is very special. They are short on patience. Everything must be quick, including food and sex, which the rest of the world treats ceremoniously. Gringos invented two terms that are untranslatable into most languages: "snack" and "quickie," to refer to eating standing up and loving on the run ... that, too, sometimes standing up. The most popular books are manuals: how to become a millionaire in ten easy lessons, how to lose fifteen pounds a week, how to recover from your divorce, and so on. People always go around looking for shortcuts, and ways to escape anything they consider unpleasant: ugliness, old age, weight, illness, poverty, and failure in any of its aspects. — Isabel Allende

At a small table, sitting very upright, was one of the ugliest old ladies he had ever seen. It was an ugliness of distinction- it fascinated rather than repelled. She sat very upright. Round her neck was a collar of very large pearls which, improbable though it seemed, were real. Her hands were covered with rings. Her sable coat was pushed back on her shoulders. A very small and expensive black toque was hideously unbecoming to the yellow, toad-like face beneath it. — Agatha Christie

It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness. — Thornton Wilder

O brave new world, O brave new world ... ' In his mind the singing words seemed to change their tune. They had mocked him through his misery and remorse, mocked him with how diseous a note of cynical derision! Fiendishly laughing, they had insisted on the low squalor, the nauseous ugliness of the nightmare. Now, suddenly, they trumpeted a call to arms. 'O brave new world!' Miranda was proclaiming the possibility of loveliness, the possibility of transforming even the nightmare into something fine and noble. 'O brave new world!' It was a challenge, a command. — Aldous Huxley

There are plenty of good reason for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive. "It's that part of an imbecile," I said, "that punishes and vilifies and makes war. — Kurt Vonnegut

Why did the world go on being so beautiful in spite of the ugliness he had experienced? The lake was beautiful, serenely beautiful. The forest was beautiful, greenly beautiful. Lake and forest, the whole shimmering world was painfully beautiful. He loved this world, but he was too hurt to enjoy it. — William Steig

They call me corrupt, frivolous. I am not at all privileged. Maybe the only privileged thing is my face. And corrupt? God! I would not look like this if I am corrupt. Some ugliness would settle down on my system. — Imelda Marcos

You cannot have a beautiful life if you always focus on ugliness in others. — Debasish Mridha

A connection could be drawn between the secular ascent of biblical values in today's world and the depreciation of beauty that characterizes it on so many levels. Beauty today is often depreciated as monotonous or denounced as a constraining norm, when it is simply reduced to a pure spectacle accompanied by a rehabilitation or even exaltation of deformity and ugliness, as can be seen in many areas. The degeneration of beauty and the promotion of ugliness, tied to the flowering of intellectualism, could be certainly be part of the Umwertung stigmatized by Nietzsche. — Alain De Benoist

They shared a moment of crushing sadness that tightened her chest and suddenly made it hard to breathe. It was the kind of sadness brought on by turning corners that led you to places there was no finding your way home from. They had both looked deep within themselves and found an ugliness that couldn't be stuffed back inside. — Brian Panowich

Forgive and forget ugliness. Look around to find beauty and focus on it. — Debasish Mridha

I know that I go through life like a drunkard. I'm drunk on illusion. But no matter how drunk I am, there are things I can't help seeing, ferociously real things. I close my eyes, and I reel, I reel. I reel, I believe, I live in a fever and turmoil, I rise into ecstasy, but all the time there is the face of reality staring at me with ugly eyes. I know that if I open my eyes I will be intolerably hurt by the ugliness. — Anais Nin

Listen to me. I know something else. It will begin again. 200,000 dead and 80,000 wounded in nine seconds. Those are the official figures. It will begin again. It will be 10,000 degrees on the earth. Ten thousand suns, people will say. The asphalt will burn. Chaos will prevail. An entire city will be lifted off the ground, and fall back to earth in ashes ... I meet you. I remember you. Who are you? You're destroying me. You're good for me. How could I know this city was tailor-made for love? How could I know you fit my body like a glove? I like you. How unlikely. I like you. How slow all of a sudden. How sweet. You cannot know. You're destroying me. You're good for me. You're destroying me. You're good for me. I have time. Please, devour me. Deform me to the point of ugliness. Why not you? — Marguerite Duras

As he lifted his head, he saw himself in the crude metal sheets that were supposed to be mirrors. Even though the reflection was dull, he noted his ugliness and thought of Throe just now. In spite of the fact that the soldier had been out fighting all night, his handsome visage had appeared fresh as a daisy, his well-bred looks overshadowing the reality that he had slayer blood on his clothes and had been scraped and bruised.
Xcor, however, could have taken rest for two weeks straight, eaten a large meal, and fed from a fucking Chosen, and he would still appear as repulsive. — J.R. Ward

After the dazzling orgies in form and color of the eighteenth century, art was put on a diet, and allowed nothing but the straight line. This sort of progress ended in ugliness. Art reduced to a skeleton, was the result. This was the advantage of this kind of wisdom and abstinence; the style was so sober that it became lean. — Victor Hugo

Tremendous beauty and tremendous ugliness puts you on the outside of things. — Peter Bogdanovich

In all your years, Anadyr, have you ever encounted the Dark Mage?" asked Aynara.
"I have not, my Lady, but I would hope for my entire existence not to happen on his ugliness."
Aynara turned to Anadyr. "I have, just once before. When he appears, he is anything but ugly, my Lord. In fact, one might consider him the most beautiful entity you have ever seen. Strange that it is often the case for many a foe we encounter. Evil often comes with a smile."
(from Stormling, 2014) — John Hennessy

There is ugliness of mass production and consumerism, the banality of advertising. Although it claims to do just the opposite, it's predicated on disempowering and effacing persons. — Stephanie Mills

Thomas was like a drug, so smooth and overwhelming that he took one up a level in their emotions just by watching him and listening to him. He was a natural entertainer, filled with talent and knowledge on many subjects and a keen sense of the arts and music. I admired him as he performed for us, and I forgot the ugliness again — Sara Niles

All these nights would stretch on and on and on, and she would fall asleep in my arms with all my darkness and all my demons and all my ugliness stored safely in her heart. In a perfect world, she would hold it there, away from me, so she could understand me better, so I would never be harmed again. — Karina Halle

Aesthetic culture is not the high-road to all the virtues, and, indeed, certain of the vices have been known to infest it. Neither, on the other hand, is there any special grace in ugliness. Art is only utterance. It must express something; and the vital question is, what does it express? — Lewis Foreman Day

Look!You want to see? See! Feast your eyes, glut your soul on my cursed ugliness! Look at Erik's face! Now you know the face of the voice! You were not content to hear me, eh? You wanted to know what I looked like? Oh, you women are so inquisitive! Well, are you satisfied? I'm a good-looking fellow, eh? ... When a woman has seen me, as you have, she belongs to me.She loves me forever! I am a kind of Don Juan, you know! ... Look at me! I am Don Juan Triumphant!
-Erik in The Phantom of the Opera — Gaston Leroux

If we focus on what's ugly, we attract more ugliness into our thoughts, and then into our emotions, and ultimately into our lives — Wayne W. Dyer

We all wish not to be disturbed. Instead we want to live out our lives in feasting and idleness, hoping the ugliness of this rebelius world will never touch us. Ignoring death, pretending it will never happen, or that if it does, the great, kind, merciful God will overlook our years of defiance and whisk us off to some magical land where we can go right on in our wicked ways. — June Strong

Abraham Zogoiby covered his face that night in August 1939 because he had been assailed by fear, [ ... ] a sudden apprehension that the ugliness of life might defeat its beauty; that love did not make lovers invulnerable. Nevertheless, he thought, even if the world's beauty and love were on the edge of destruction, theirs would still be the only side to be on; defeated love would still be love, hate's victory would not make it other than it was. — Salman Rushdie

If you have lived in cities and have walked in the park on a summer afternoon, you have perhaps seen, blinking in a corner of his iron cage, a huge, grotesque kind of monkey, a creature with ugly, sagging, hairless skin below his eyes and a bright purple underbody. This monkey is a true monster. In the completeness of his ugliness he achieved a kind of perverted beauty. Children stopping before the cage are fascinated, men turn away with an air of disgust, and women linger for a moment, trying perhaps to remember which one of their male acquaintances the thing in some faint way resembles. — Sherwood Anderson

This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII. At a point in the not-too-remote future, the stout heart of Queen Elizabeth II will cease to beat. At that precise moment, her firstborn son will become head of state, head of the armed forces, and head of the Church of England. In strict constitutional terms, this ought not to matter much. The English monarchy, as has been said, reigns but does not rule. From the aesthetic point of view it will matter a bit, because the prospect of a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts, is a distinctly lowering one. — Christopher Hitchens

All of us
all who knew her
felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on
her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity
decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her
awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us
believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams
we used
to silence our own nightmares. — Toni Morrison

Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty, how many ghastly, mortifying missteps, how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment, how partial all accomplishment is, how incomplete? — Tony Kushner

The real reason a husband and wife always fight is because they always focus on the ugliness in each other and have forgotten to focus on the beauties that attracted them at first. — Debasish Mridha

Ugliness is an illusion, gentlemen. Like beauty. Like color. All depends on the light. The only reality is action. — Karen Traviss

We've been very lonely, but we had it easy. Because death is so heavy - we, too young to know about it, couldn't handle it. After this you and I may end up seeing nothing but suffering, difficulty and ugliness, but if only you'll agree to it, I want for us to go on to more difficult places, happier places, what ever comes, together. I want you to make the decision after you're completely better, so take your time thinking about it. In the mean time, though, don't disappear on me. — Banana Yoshimoto

I'm not Dead-Eye Dan. I gave up chasin' bounties and don't plan on ever goin' back. I ain't a dime-novel hero, but I'm steady, I work hard, and I'll do my best to give you the life you deserve." Etta opened her mouth, but he shook his head at her, needing to get everything said at once. "I know I'm a good deal older than you, twelve years by my count, and most young ladies would probably wish for someone younger, less tarnished. I've seen a lot of ugliness in this life, Etta. I won't lie to you about that. I'm rather set in my ways and opinionated about how things oughta be done, but I'd like to think that God gave me some wisdom over the years, too. Wisdom that will help me be the husband and father I want to be, one who will lead his family in a way that honors the Lord." Dan — Karen Witemeyer

Jesus could weep. Sometimes when you look at the ugliness that makes you weep, you know that the heart of God is also weeping. Jesus is for real. He does not give up on anyone, least of all on me. — Desmond Tutu

My dignified weeping gives way to full-on ugliness, my mouth open and my face contorted and sounds like a dying animal coming from my throat. — Veronica Roth

(One character on another
Don't you know that I passionately dote on every chin on his face? — Dorothy L. Sayers

If we focus just on what's ugly and bad, we attract more ugliness into our thoughts, and then into our emotions, and eventually into our lives ... — Jose N. Harris

Classical mythology is a catalogue of indescribable cruelty: [ ... ] It is a world dominated by evil, where even the most beautiful beings carry out atrocities. — Umberto Eco

Life may not be pretty but it's always beautiful. We may only see the ugliness on the surface. The shit that only the world chooses to notice. But, if we dig deep, if we get to the heart of life, where there's no pain or fear, where we can just be who we are and love freely without judgement, it's really beautiful. — S.L. Jennings

America today stands poised on a pinnacle of wealth and power, yet we live in a land of vanishing beauty, of increasing ugliness, of shrinking open space, and of an over-all environment that is diminished daily by pollution and noise and blight. — Stewart Udall

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural. — Marcus Aurelius

Ook, though very clever, was the worst fighter in the tribe. That is how he ended up with Grot-Grot as his woman. Grot-Grot had a bald patch on the top of her head, she was missing an eye and she smelled like a dead skunk. She did have a good sense of humour though. — Aussiescribbler

The intensest feeling of the beauty of a cloud lighted by the setting sun, is no hindrance to my knowing that the cloud is a vapour of water, subject to all the laws of vapours in a state of suspension; and I am just as likely to allow for, and act on, these physical laws whenever there is occasion to do so, as if I had been incapable of perceiving any distinction between beauty and ugliness. — John Stuart Mill

Architecture is a very dangerous job. If a writer makes a bad book, eh, people don't read it. But if you make bad architecture, you impose ugliness on a place for a hundred years. — Renzo Piano

Well, I've always read in bed, in early years by candlelight, succeeded by lamplight, gaslight, and now electric light, and I'll probably be found dead there with some ponderous tome or book of poems on my chest and a seraphic smile of peace and contentment smoothing out all the ugliness of my visage... — E. Norman Torry

On the whole, it was not the crudest, the simplest, the most animalistic and primitive aspects of the human species that were reflected in the natural phenomena. It was, rather, the more complex, the aesthetic, the intricate, and the elegant aspects of people that reflected nature. It was not my greed, my purposiveness, my so-called 'animal,' so-called 'instincts,' and so forth that I was recognizing on the other side of that mirror, over there in 'nature.' Rather, I was seeing there the roots of human symmetry, beauty and ugliness, aesthetics, the human being's very aliveness and little bit of wisdom. His wisdom, his bodily grace, and even his habit of making beautiful objects are just as 'animal' as his cruelty. — Gregory Bateson

It is better to sit in appreciative contemplation of a world in which beauty is eternally supported on a foundation of ugliness: cut out the support, and beauty will sink from sight. — John Steinbeck

I am apparently gentle, unstable, and full of pretenses. I will die a poet killed by the nonpoets, will renounce no dream, resign myself to no ugliness, accept nothing of the world but the one I made myself. I wrote, lived, loved like Don Quixote, and on the day of my death I will say: 'Excuse me, it was all a dream,' and by that time I may have found one who will say: 'Not at all, it was true, absolutely true. — Anais Nin

But to Fitz she'd always be invisible. An impossible task of face and body for which he had yet to conquer. And should he somehow manage to crack her open like rotten fruit on the vine, he'd only find decay and ugliness, from which she had to assume he'd run. Damaged goods were damaged goods. — L. Donsky-Levine

As a young man, he had instinctively husbanded the freshness of his powers. At the time, it was too soon to see that this freshness was giving birth to vivacity and gaiety, and shape to the courage needed to forge a soul that does not pale, no matter what life brings, regards life not as a heavy burden, a cross, but merely as a duty, and does battle with it with dignity.
He had devoted much mental care to his heart and its wise laws. Observing the reflection of beauty on the imagination, both consciously and unconsciously, then the transition from impression to emotion, its symptoms, play, and outcome and looking around himself, advancing into life, he derived for himself the conviction that love moves the world like Archimede's lever, that it holds as much universal and irrefutable truth and good as misunderstanding and misuse do hypocrisy and ugliness.
p. 494 — Ivan Goncharov

I understand how people come to such conclusions. They see the church painting ugliness, arrogance, and lust on the canvas of this world, and so they walk or run away. There's only one way to address this: We need to be painting different pictures - of justice, mercy, love, hospitality, celebration, and hope. — Richard Dahlstrom

You would keep the people in their hopeless squalid misery? you would fill those infamous prisons again with the noblest spirits in the land? you would thrust the rising sun of liberty back into the sea of blood from which it has risen? And all because there was in the middle of the dirt and ugliness and horror a little patch of court splendor in which you could stand with a few orders on your uniform, and yawn day after day and night after night in unspeakable boredom until your grave yawned wider still, and you fell into it because you had nothing better to do. How can you be so stupid, so heartless? — Anonymous

people were like icebergs--most of what really went on, especially the ugliness, was submerged — Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child

Think on blessings and not curses, beauty not ugliness, health not sickness. Meditate on wealth not poverty, success not failure, grace not disgrace! — Jaachynma N.E. Agu

There is perhaps some hope to be derived from the fact that in most instances where an attempt to realize an ideal society gave birth to the ugliness and violence of a prolonged active mass movement the experiment was made on a vast scale and with a heterogeneous population. Such was the case in the rise of Christianity and Islam, and in the French, Russian and Nazi revolutions. The promising communal settlements in the small state of Israel and the successful programs of socialization in the small Scandinavian states indicate perhaps that when the attempt to realize an ideal society is undertaken by a small nation with a more or less homogeneous population it can proceed and succeed in an atmosphere which is neither hectic nor coercive. — Eric Hoffer

It really is the relationship you have with your self that presents the key to the "kingdom", so to speak ... Fighting is good, but not when it is fighting yourself. Changing the world is good but first one has to start inside and concurrently make that place right. The strife and the ugliness in the world is the outward manifestation of this troubled relationship we have within on a whole. — Mark Ruffalo

It is not true what everyone always says that the only way to see America is to go across it by car. Apart from the fact that it is impossible given its enormous size, it is also deadly boring. A few outings on the motorway are enough to give an idea of what small-town and even village America is like on average, with the endless suburbs along the highways, a sight of desperate squalor, with all those low buildings, petrol stations or other shops which look like them, and the colours of the writing on the shop signs, and you realize 95 per cent of America is a country of ugliness, oppressiveness and sameness, in short of relentless monotony. — Italo Calvino

Blackberry Beauty has all eyes on her.
She slowly raises her head and smiles at the onlookers.
Her walk is still graceful and delicate.
Her voice is still a whisper.

She says, "I am the beautiful Blackberry. I was made to be way too dark because I am ripe. My beauty comes from my blackberry skin and your ugliness comes from your unripe ones. — Sandra Proto

He fought back tears again, still unable to get himself under control. Life overwhelmed him, tugging him in opposite directions while he stood stagnant, trying to remain whole. He was surrounded by violence and death, the ugliness eating away at him, but then, on the other side, there was her. She was peace, and hope, and pure fucking beauty. She was the good that he hoped would overpower the bad. — J.M. Darhower

The universe and the events in it are thus perfect examples to imitate. However, no matter how perfect the example is, everyone will draw and interpret objects according to their abilities. Charles Lako, commenting on aesthetics once said, that the magnificent scene at sunset would remind a farmer of the rather unaesthetic thought of dinner; the physicist, not of beauty or ugliness, but of the rightness or wrongness of the analysis of a matter. Thus, for Lalo, the sunset is beautiful only for those who are aware of beauty. Therefore, only those who see with God and hear with God can appreciate the beauty that spreads throughout existence as their senses are tuned to the spiritual realms. — M. Fethullah Gulen

Men and women make their own beauty or their own ugliness. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton speaks in one of his novels of a man "who was uglier than he had any business to be;" and, if we could but read it, every human being carries his life in his face, and is good-looking or the reverse as that life has been good or evil. On our features the fine chisels of thought and emotion are eternally at work. — Alexander Smith

It was as though the people needed the ugliness of the village, and fed on it. The houses and the stores seemed to have been set up in contemptuous haste to provide shelter for the drab and the unpleasant. — Shirley Jackson

It was the first time I saw the look on the face of the people I robbed: it was ugly. I was the cause of such ugliness, and the only thing that made me feel was a cruel pleasure which, I thought, was bound to transfigure my own face, to make me resplendent. I was then 23 years old. From that moment on, I felt capable of advancing in cruelty. — Jean Genet

A stab had clearly once been made at de-uglifying these public spaces by painting a corridor a jaunty yellow. This was because, it turned out, babies come here to have their brains tested and someone thought the yellow might calm them. But I couldn't see how. Such was the oppressive ugliness of this building it would have been like sticking a red nose on a cadaver and calling it Ronald McDonald. — Jon Ronson

We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children, between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering him the solidarity and hope he deserves. Or not. — Elie Wiesel

Modern barber college, Smith eyes closed suffers a haircut fearing its ugliness 50 cents, a barber student olive-skinned 'Garcia' on his coat, two blond small boys one with feared face and big ears watching from seats, tell him 'You're ugly little boy & you've got big ears' he'd weep and suffer and it wouldn't even be true, the other thinfaced conscious concentrated patched bluejeans and scuffed shoes who watches me delicate, suffering child that grows hard and greedy with puberty. — Jack Kerouac

Beauty is a creature which lives everywhere: Under the ocean, above the clouds, even in the remote deserts! Wherever the ugliness may be on this universe, beauty will also be there giving hope to our lives! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

If you cannot find beauty in the midst of ugliness to find heaven on earth, you will not be able to find heaven in space. — Debasish Mridha

even in a world of pain and ugliness, cruelty and loss, there are still amazing things to cling to, to tell us not to give up, not to lose hope, and continue on to another day. There is life in death, always. — Lindy Zart

Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about. — Ray Bradbury

The idea of beauty which man creates for himself imprints itself on his whole attire, crumples or stiffens his dress, rounds off or squares his gesture, and in the long run even ends by subtly penetrating the very features of his face. Man ends by looking like his ideal self. These engravings can be translated either into beauty or ugliness; in one direction, they become caricatures, in the other, antique statues. — Charles Baudelaire

Do you think, if Columbus had stood on the bow of his ship, looked at the New World and understood everything to come, all the disease and death and betrayal, all the ugliness, all the blood - do you think he would have embraced it, called it paradise? — Catherynne M Valente

...but she kept on, trying to reshape the ugliness. — A. Lynn

Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the brink. Which will be soon, and then the dark, and then be done with this ugliness ... — William Styron

Your imagination can focus on ugliness, distress and failure, or it can picture beauty, success, desired results. You decide how you want your imagination to server you. — Philip Mallory Conley

The real problem here is a massive elephant in the room: our own culture. Our social values, our media - so influential on impressionable young girls - that have been allowed, for millenia, to send out this powerful, alienating message about girls and sport: that sport is unfeminine, that sport makes you sweaty and muscular, that sport is swearing and violence, that sport is ugliness in a world where women's sole priority, value and focus should be beauty and becoming an object of desire. — Anna Kessel

I feel ugly I said and you looked at me as if I spoke a different language. There are things you will never understand and if there were words to describe the rapture that takes place in my head from time to time I would put my hand in front of your eyes to protect you from all the ugliness in the world.
I kept my eyes on the streetlights outside the window and you kissed every inch of my body as if you could kiss the pain away. — Charlotte Eriksson

Normal humanity has only the courage to react to the usual gradations that range from the beautiful to the ugly, which in the long run are nothing but nuances of the same thing. The monster, on the other hand, Don Jeronimo contended with feeling, in order to exalt them with his mystique, belongs to a different, privileged species, with its own rights and particular canons that exclude the concepts of beauty and ugliness as tenuous categories, because, in essence, monstrosity is the culmination of both qualities synthesized and exacerbated to the sublime. — Jose Donoso

At my age I can handle people writing junk about me on social media, but I sometimes air "mean tweets" on my show to highlight how destructive this meanness and bullying is to young people. I know how devastating it is for a young person to be the victim of such ugliness. — Gretchen Carlson

But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. Mediocrity's a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation. — Tom Robbins

Just because the world often seemed to reward ugliness was no excuse to give up on beauty. — Kathryn Davis

We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain make us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humour. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous ... We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty ... — Toni Morrison

A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live; a society where all were seers could live even more fully. But a society where the mass is still simple and the seers are no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back we must go: to stay here is death. — C.S. Lewis

Time passes, day by day. The greatness of this country lies in the inexorable journey it has taken through time.
Time is like an enormous pot, into which all ugliness and beauty are thrown, all happiness and grief, all life and all death.
Cycle follows cycle, living life and dying death. Only the great River rolls on, unending. — Yo Yo

...beneath his youth and his daredevil attitude lay the kind of decency that could stand up to the ugliness of the world. On Pamarthe they called that quality bedrock. A warrior of bedrock was one on whose loyalty a kingdom could be built. — Claudia Gray

In another world, a merciful world, it wouldn't be the first time and it wouldn't be the last. All these nights would stretch on and on and on, and she would fall asleep in my arms with all my darkness and all my demons and all my ugliness stored safely in her heart. — Karina Halle

Violence, once committed, lingered behind and subtly worked on those sensitive to its ugliness. — Christine Feehan

Beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation. — Ian McEwan

There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always - do not forget this, Winston - always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. — George Orwell

You lose somebody you've possibly known for years and on top of that you lose a character that you love seeing on TV so I think that kind of makes it cool that we pay a price too. That it is painful on many levels and its amazing to be writing that moment and crossing that line right on the page and seeing the ugliness of it and having to deal with it. It's a very weird thing. — Scott M. Gimple

The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told;
I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart ... — William Butler Yeats

Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus. — John Ortberg

They no longer shouted, because the thread of their lives had been cut off. They had no more needs or desires. Even in death, mothers held their children tightly in their arms. There were no more friends or foes. There was no more jealousy. All were equal. There was no longer any beauty or ugliness, for they all were yellow from the gas. There were no longer any rich or poor, for they all were equal before God's throne. And why all this? I keep asking myself that question. My life is hard, very hard. But I must live on to tell the world about all this barbarism. — Jankiel Wiernik

If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see more ugliness, or you'll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from. — Barbara Kingsolver

Is there any creature on earth as unfortunate as an ugly woman? (wonders Lady Catelyn Stark) — George R R Martin

When I focus on beauty, I can find it even in the midst of ugliness. — Debasish Mridha

ROXANE:
Live, for I love you!
CYRANO:
No, In fairy tales
When to the ill-starred Prince the lady says 'I love you!' all his ugliness fades fast
But I remain the same, up to the last!
ROXANE:
I have marred your life
I, I!
CYRANO:
You blessed my life!
Never on me had rested woman's love.
My mother even could not find me fair:
I had no sister; and, when grown a man,
I feared the mistress who would mock at me.
But I have had your friendship
grace to you
A woman's charm has passed across my path.
— Edmond Rostand

This was part of the Nazis' plan, do you see? To make even us believe that we had no place on this earth. But then the ugliness, the brutality would be pierced by this ray of beauty, and you'd think . . . — Laura Marx Fitzgerald

A group photo of the top ten journalists in America on any given day would be a monument to human ugliness. — Hunter S. Thompson

There is a level of consciousness between sleeping and fully wakening when the worries of the day have not settled upon us; the body is stilled, and the senses wholly receptive. If the sun is bright, there is pure silence, or the birds are beginning to sing, this shining level of consciousness can come to be the nearest we will get to paradise this side of our quietus, Every day should begin so, This is no dream. This is the reality. The world outside is beautiful. We do our best to hide it. We cover it. We push it father back. The ugliness we make ourselves. We originate our own worries. We put on our own shackles; build our prisons. We can only glimpse the golden reality, briefly, through our tiny barred windows. — John Wyatt