Quotes on Beauty
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988. Beauty
"It is ... apparent that this quality is merely relative and comparative; that we pronounce things beautiful because they have something which we agree, for whatever reason, to call beauty, in a greater degree than we have been accustomed to find it in other things of the same kind; and that we transfer the epithet as our knowledge increases, and appropriate it to higher excellence, when higher excellence comes within our view."
Johnson: Rambler #92 (February 2, 1751)
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1,111. Beauty
"Beauty is well known to draw after it the persecutions of impertinence, to incite the artifices of envy, and to raise the flames of unlawful love; yet among the ladies whom prudence or modesty have made most eminent, who has ever complained of the inconveniencies of an amiable form? or would have purchased safety by the loss of charms?"
Johnson: Rambler #111 (April 9, 1751)
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1,122. Beauty
"Beauty has often overpowered the resolutions of the firm, and the reasonings of the wise, roused the old to sensibility, and subdued the rigorous to softness."
Johnson: Rambler #113 (April 16, 1751)
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1,183. Beauty
"The condition of a young woman who has never thought or heard of any other excellence than beauty, and whom the sudden blast of disease wrinkles in her bloom, is indeed sufficiently calamitous. She is at once deprived of all that gave her eminence or power; of all that elated her pride or animated her activity; all that filled her days with pleasure and her nights with hope; all that gave pleasure to the present hour or brightened her prospects of futurity."
Johnson: Rambler #133 (June 25, 1751)
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1,514. Academia; Beauty; Competition
"The friendship of students and of beauties is for the most part equally sincere, and equally durable: as both depend for happiness on the regard of others, on that which the value arises merely from comparison, they are both exposed to perpetual jealousies, and both incessantly employed in schemes to intercept the praises of each other."
Johnson: Adventurer #45 (March 27, 1753)
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