To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.

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.

To be beautiful means to be yourself.You don't need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself. When you are born a lotus flower, be a beautiful lotus flower, don't try to be a magnolia flower. If you crave acceptance and recognition and try to change yourself to fit what other people want you to be, you will suffer all your life. True happiness and true power lie in understanding yourself, accepting yourself, having confidence in yourself.

Beauty, like truth, is a thing which is relative to the time in which one lives and to the individual capable of understanding it. The expression of the beautiful bears a precise relation to the power of perception acquired by the artist.

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 is that quality which, next to money, is generally the most attractive to the worst kinds of men; and, therefore, it is likely to entail a great deal of trouble on the possessor.

BEAUTY, n. The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.

Beauty means perfect to me, but it also has an additional meaning having to do with being pleasurable, rather than painful. Beauty is hard to make. The making is painful, and involves a certain amount of craft, and a relaxation of the part of the brain that says, "Don't write that. X wrote those four notes in 1542 or 1979 or 1825 or whatever period you are worried about being influenced by."

Beauty? What's that?

Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.

Beauty isn't what you see on TV or in magazine ads or even necessarily in art galleries. It's a lot deeper and a lot simpler than that. It's realizing the goodness of things, it's leaving the world a little better than it was before you got here. It's appreciating the inspiration of the world around you and trying to inspire others.

Beauty is a kind of supplement to being, a radiance that is added to being.

Beauty is the name of something that doesn't exist

Though beauty is autonomous, there seem to be occasions when human presence can become congruent with her will. In creative work no amount of force or mechanical management can guarantee beauty. Suddenly, without expecting it, beauty is there. Yet ultimately beauty is a profound illumination of presence, a stirring of the invisible in visible form and in order to receive this we need to cultivate a new style of approaching the world.