#nit

Then the cow asked: "What is a mirror?" "It is a hole in the wall," said the cat. "You look in it, and there you see the picture, and it is so dainty and charming and ethereal and inspiring in its unimaginable beauty that your head turns round and round, and you almost swoon with ecstasy. ↗

— Mark Twain

#self-image #vanity #beauty

My greatest work comes in the community. ↗

— Marion Barry

#community #greatest #work

...god contradicts his own perfection if he can be reached, touched, disturbed, or in any way changed from it by anything in this material world below. ↗

— Ramsay MacMullen

#change

Defence was an afterthought, prompted by necessity; and its introduction as a State function, though effected doubtless with a view to the strengthening of the State, was really and in principle the initiation of the State's destruction. ↗

— Benjamin Tucker

#defence #destruction #doubtless #effected #function

I'm not good, of course; I wouldn't give a fig to be good. So it's not vanity. It's on a far grander scale; a splendid selfishness, - authorized, too; and papa and mamma brought me up to worship beauty, -and there's the fifth commandment, you know. ↗

— Harriet Prescott Spofford

#beauty

I don't know what this definition of affirmative action is for some. ↗

— Chaka Fattah

#affirmative #affirmative action #definition #i #know

You are all beautiful, my darling, there is no flaw in thee. ↗

— Anonymous

#christianity #religious #beauty

I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#death #vanity #beauty

She talked thus, bent double, shaken with sobs, blinded by tears, her neck bare, clenching her hands, coughing with a dry and short cough, stammering very feebly with an agonised voice. Great grief is a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched. At that moment Fantine had again become beautiful. At certain instants she stopped and tenderly kissed the policeman’s coat. She would have softened a heart of granite; but you cannot soften a heart of wood ↗

— Victor Hugo

#heart-of-granite #heart-of-wood #beauty

Sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever. ↗

— Lauren Oliver

#delirium #infinite #beauty