Beauty is the promise of happiness.

Beauty is a promise of happiness.

La beauté n'est que la promesse du bonheur.

Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.

La belleza es la promesa de la felicidad

Forgetting that beauty and happiness are only ever incarnated in an individual person, we replace them in our minds by a conventional pattern, a sort of average of all the different faces we have ever admired, all the different pleasures we have ever enjoyed, and thus carry about with us abstract images, which are lifeless and uninspiring because they lack the very quality that something new, something different from what is familiar, always possesses, and which is the quality inseparable from real beauty and happiness. So we make our pessimistic pronouncements on life, which we think are valid, in the belief that we have taken account of beauty and happiness, whereas we have actually omitted them from consideration, substituting for them synthetic compounds that contain nothing of them.

beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.

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.

Could there be a snare in too much beauty? Could there be too much expectation of good, and too much fiath?

Could ever there be too much love?

And could love require lies?

Beauty is the name of something that doesn't exist

Beauty is but the cloak of happiness. Where joy tarries, there also is beauty.

Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

Our dominant story of beauty is that it is simultaneously a blessing, of genetics or gods, and a site of conversion. You can become beautiful if you accept the right prophets and their wisdoms with a side of products thrown in for good measure. Forget that these two ideas — unique blessing and earned reward — are antithetical to each other. That makes beauty all the more perfect for our (social and political) time, itself anchored in paradoxes like freedom and property, opportunity and equality.

Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.