Unbeautiful Quotes & Sayings

There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer. — Eugene Ionesco

Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking-
glass, that night when he got back to his room. He gazed at
himself long and curiously. Who are you? What are you? Where do
you belong? You belong by rights to girls like Lizzie Connolly.
You belong with the legions of toil, with all that is low, and
vulgar, and unbeautiful. You belong with the oxen and the drudges,
in dirty surroundings among smells and stenches. There are the
stale vegetables now. Those potatoes are rotting. Smell them,
damn you, smell them. And yet you dare to open the books, to
listen to beautiful music, to learn to love beautiful paintings, to
speak good English, to think thoughts that none of your own kind
thinks, to tear yourself away from the oxen and the Lizzie
Connollys and to love a pale spirit of a woman who is a million
miles beyond you and who lives in the stars! Who are you? and what
are you? damn you! And are you going to make good? — Jack London

5. That people do not believe in you or in your ideas does not necessary mean that you are not good or that your ideas are not good enough. The problem is not with you but with them. For every great invention, we have today encountered this opposition. If you, therefore want to be great you must learn not to live your life based on the opinion of others but on your convictions. — Bien Sufficient

Because English has so many words of foreign origin, and words that look the same but mean something different depending on their context, and words that are in flux, opening and closing like flowers in time-lapse photography, the human element is especially important if we are to stay on top of the computers, which, in their determination to do our job for us, make decisions so subversive that even professional wordsmiths are taken by surprise. — Mary Norris

The Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds. — E. E. Cummings

Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the unbeautiful. — Kahlil Gibran

Aging in women is 'unbeautiful' since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken. — Naomi Wolf

No one knew his first name, and in general he was known in the country as Beauty Smith. But he was anything save a beauty. To antithesis was due his naming. He was preeminently unbeautiful. Nature had been niggardly with him. — Jack London

Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about. — Marilyn Hacker

Aesthetic values are changed under the influence of sexual emotion; from the lover's point of view many things are beautiful which are unbeautiful from the point of view of him who is not a lover, and the greater the degree to which the lover is swayed by his passion the greater the extent to which his normal aesthetic standard is liable to be modified. — Havelock Ellis

The human brain finds it extremely hard to cope with a new level of abstraction. This is why it was well into the eighteenth century before mathematicians felt comfortable dealing with zero and with negative numbers, and why even today many people cannot accept the square root of minus-one as a genuine number. — Keith Devlin

If these Mount Everests of the financial world are going to labor and bring forth still more pictures with people being blown to bits with bazookas and automatic assault rifles with no gory detail left unexploited, if they are going to encourage anxious, ambitious actors, directors, writers and producers to continue their assault on the English language by reducing the vocabularies of their characters to half a dozen words, with one colorful but overused Anglo-Saxon verb and one unbeautiful Anglo-Saxon noun covering just about every situation, then I would like to suggest that they stop and think about this: making millions is not the whole ball game, fellows. Pride of workmanship is worth more. Artistry is worth more. — Gregory Peck

True she was old, true she was unbeautiful, true she therefore had no reason to smile, but kind ladies smiled, reason or no. They smiled not because they were happy but because they wished to make happy. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

My mother is a strong, wonderful woman. I could never be anything she didn't want me to be. — Mr. T

A woman's greatest and most perduring failure will be her failure to love. It is certainly not without significance that so many women presently pressing for power on the political, sociological or ecclesial scene are unbeautiful in their unsmilling press for dominance. Contorted faces and clenched fists are particularly repellant in woman, who is gifted with unique powers to radiate love and extend healing hands. — Mother Mary Francis P.C.C.

Boy's Room"

A friend saw the rooms
Of Keats and Shelley
At the lake, and saw 'they were just
Boys' rooms' and was moved

By that. And indeed a poet's room
Is a boy's room
And I suppose that women know it.

Perhaps the unbeautiful banker
Is exciting to a woman, a man
Not a boy gasping
For breath over a girl's body — George Oppen

The strange, unbeautiful face beautiful in its ugliness; the perfect, beautiful face ugly in its perfection. — Eric Maisel

Most of my stuff is just a series of false leads. I'll approach a story as a subject and then make a whole bunch of different runs at the lead. They're all good writing but they don't connect. So I end up having to string leads together. — Hunter S. Thompson

When you see a man led to prison say in your heart, "Mayhap he is escaping from a narrower prison." And when you see a man drunken say in your heart, "Mayhap he sought escape from something still more unbeautiful. — Kahlil Gibran

That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality. — Jeff VanderMeer

The thought of being President frightens me and I do not think I want the job. — Ronald Reagan

What is beautiful is right: what is unbeautiful is wrong. — Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie

Yes, the world is now flat for publishing as well. — Thomas Friedman

When you get to 15 and most of your teachers are priests, there's bound to be a conflict. — Ian Hart

those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength and that they must make their way back into the common enterprise of man for without they do so it cannot go forward and they themselves will wither in bitterness — Cormac McCarthy

It is very important to learn to weigh up objectively (or assess intuitively) the totality of the competitive and psychological factors. — Mark Dvoretsky

Nothing in Nature is unbeautiful. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

Her old body against his old body, unbeautiful in aging. But together, they were still beautiful, somehow. — Lauren Groff

I have been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I have never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do. — Georgia O'Keeffe