A Quote by Vladimir Nabokov

The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.

Vladimir Nabokov

Quote Topics

Art Back Beauty Being Contemplation Face Glance Inner Makes Our Ourselves Past Personal Radiant Revealed Sunset Unattainable Uniquely Us Utterly Whether Work

Quote Author

Vladimir Nabokov
American - Novelist
April 22, 1899 - July 2, 1977

Take care of your inner beauty, your spiritual beauty, and that will reflect in your face. We have the face we created over the years. Every bad deed, every bad fault will show on your face. God can give us beauty and genes can give us our features, but whether that beauty remains or changes is determined by our thoughts and deeds.

Dolores del Rio

Beauty is transcendent. It is our most immediate experience of the eternal. Think of what it's like to behold a gorgeous sunset or the ocean at dawn. Remember the ending of a great story. We yearn to linger, to experience it all our days. Sometimes the beauty is so deep it pierces us with longing. For what? For life as it was meant to be. Beauty reminds us of an Eden we have never known, but somehow our hearts were created for.

Stasi Eldredge

[Grace] is given not to make us something other than ourselves but to make us radically ourselves. Grace is given not to implant in us a foreign wisdom but to make us alive to the wisdom that was born with us in our mother?s womb. Grace is given not to lead us into another identity but to reconnect us to the beauty of our deepest identity. And grace is given not that we might find some exterior source of strength but that we might be established again in the deep inner security of our being and in learning to lose ourselves in love for one another to truly find ourselves.

John Philip Newell

I think exercise tests us in so many ways, our skills, our hearts, our ability to bounce back after setbacks. This is the inner beauty of sports and competition, and it can serve us all well as adult athletes.

Peggy Fleming

The three of us have worked on the development of the small and totally harmless fruit fly, Drosophila. This animal has been extremely cooperative in our hands - and has revealed to us some of its innermost secrets and tricks for developing from a single celled egg to a complex living being of great beauty and harmony. ... None of us expected that our work would be so successful or that our findings would ever have relevance to medicine.

Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

Indeed, beauty is one of mankind's greatest needs; it is the root from which the branches of our peace and the fruits of our hope come forth. Beauty also reveals God because, like him, a work of beauty is pure gratuity; it calls us to freedom and draws us away from selfishness.

Pope Benedict XVI

The experience of beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. The artist's relation to the object of beauty, how the art makes that happen, is a whole other subject. Beauty is an event. Beauty is something that happens. There is no such thing as a beautiful object or a beautiful woman. These things do not come near it - the experience of beauty, the event of beauty. The anxiety about it is what makes it such a central concern of culture and makes us so interested in it.

Jonathan Santlofer

Beauty does not come with creams and lotions. God can give us beauty, but whether that beauty remains or chagnes is determined by our thoughts and deeds.

Dolores del Rio

Many of us fear that we are not attractive or desirable enough to attract others. We have believed that we are "not enough." Today let's remind ourselves that we all receive our beauty, energy, and light from the same inexhaustible source. As we acknowledge this and begin to love and appreciate ourselves as we are, our channel opens and we have available to us the infinite vitality, beauty, and magnetism of the life force.

Shakti Gawain

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.

Adrienne Rich

Beauty saves. Beauty heals. Beauty motivates. Beauty unites. Beauty returns us to our origins, and here lies the ultimate act of saving, of healing, of overcoming dualism.

Matthew Fox

Let us each grasp a new idea this year. Let us grasp the awareness of what it is that makes us truly happy. Let us consider our personal preferences and learn how to recognize, then embrace, moments of happiness that are uniquely our own.

Sarah Ban Breathnach

People are fighting over how our heartsongs are different. But they don't need to be the same. That's the beauty. We are a mosaic of gifts. Each of us has our inner beauty no matter how we look.

Mattie Stepanek

It is the search for beauty...That is what it is. We find ourselves on this earth--gods and men--and we know that it is beautiful. That is one of the few things we understand--beauty; because it is there, in the world, and we can see it all about us. We want beauty. It requires our love. It just does.

Alexander McCall Smith

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.