All kinds of beauty do not inspire love; there is a kind which only pleases the sight, but does not captivate the affections.

All kinds of beauty do not captivate love. There is a kind that only pleases the sight, but does not captivate the affections.

We shall have a strong desire for a woman of no remarkable beauty; whilst the greatest beauty in men, or in other animals, though it causes love, yet excites nothing at all of desire. Which shows that beauty, and the passion caused by beauty, which I call love, is different from desire, though desire may sometimes operate along with it; but it is to this latter that we must attribute those violent and tempestuous passions, and the consequent emotions of the body which attend what is called love in some of its ordinary acceptations, and not to the effects of beauty merely as it is such.

Beauty is the supreme mystery of this world. It is a gleam which attracts the attention and yet does nothing to sustain it. Beauty always promises, but never gives anything; it stimulates hunger but has no nourishment for the part of the soul which looks in this world for sustenance. It feeds only the part of the soul that gazes. While exciting desire, it makes clear there is nothing in it to be desired, because the one thing we want is that it should not change. If one does not seek means to evade the exquisite anguish it inflicts, then desire is gradually transformed into love; and one begins to acquire the faculty of pure and disinterested attention.

Beauty compelled admiration and erotic yearning; such was its organic function. But never by itself could it command love.

Further, the lover of the beautiful thing might be ugly, and since ugliness is worthy of being avoided, is it absurd for anyone to say: 'I love you because you are beautiful; you must love me even though I am ugly.' But in the event the two are equally beautiful, it does not mean that their desires are necessarily equal, for not all beauties fall in love; some are a pleasure to the eye but do not surrender their will, because if all beauties loved and surrender, there would be a whirl of confused and misled wills not knowing where they should stop, for since beautiful subjects are infinite, desires would have to be infinite, too.

It is thought that women inspire by their beauty; more often they do so by their longings.

Too often, though, the beauty that is thrust upon us is illusory and deceitful, superficial and blinding, leaving the onlooker dazed; instead of bringing him out of himself and opening him up to horizons of true freedom as it draws him aloft, it imprisons him within himself and further enslaves him, depriving him of hope and joy. It is a seductive but hypocritical beauty that rekindles desire, the will to power, to possess, and to dominate others, it is a beauty which soon turns into its opposite, taking on the guise of indecency, transgression or gratuitous provocation. Authentic beauty, however, unlocks the yearning of the human heart, the profound desire to know, to love, to go towards the Other, to reach for the Beyond.

It is not beauty that endears, it's love that makes us see beauty.

Just as 'beauty' is not related to sex, neither is it related to love. Even having it does not bestow love on a woman, though the beauty myth claims that it must. It is because 'beauty' is so hostile to love that many beautiful women are so cynical about men. […] The beautiful woman is excluded forever from the rewards and responsibilities of particular human love, for she cannot trust that any man will love her 'for herself alone.' A hellish doubt inheres in the myth that makes impersonal 'beauty' a prerequisite for love: Where does love go when beauty vanishes? And, if a woman cannot be loved 'for herself alone,' for whom is she being loved?

The perception of beauty, being a strict adequation and not a subjective illusion, essentially entails, on the one hand, a sense of satisfaction for the intelligence, and on the other, a sentiment at once of security, infinity, and love. Of security: because beauty is unitive and excludes, by means of a kind of musical evidence, the fissures of doubt and worry; of infinity: because beauty, by its very musicality, melts all hardness and limitations, thus freeing the soul from its constrictions, be it only in a minute and remote manner; of love: because beauty conjures love, that is to say, it draws the soul to union and hence to unitive extinction.

Apart from pleasure, beauty also kindles imagination, hope and encouragement. If beauty ceased to exist, we would, in a very real sense, cease to exist — for we would be no longer who we are.

Beauty is a magnet: repels some, attracts many, leaves no one unmoved.

The beautiful is not that which we love and because we love it, but that which by its objective value obliges us to love it.