Quite the ugliest face I ever saw was that of a woman whom the world called beautiful. Through its silver veil the evil and ungentle passions looked out, hideous and hateful.
We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.
Truth, like light, is blinding. Lies, on the other hand, are a beautiful dusk, which enhances the value of each object.
Too dear I prized a fair enchanting face: beauty unchaste is beauty in disgrace.
Beware of pretty faces that you find, a pretty face can hide an evil mind.
Yet is beauty the pleasing trickery that cheateth half the world.
La ve rite , comme la lumie' re, aveugle. Le mensonge, au contraire, est un beau cre puscule qui met chaque objet en valeur. Truth, like light, blinds. A lie, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight which shows the value of each object.
I like playing with light and shade. I like saying awful things in very pretty ways.
If women were by nature what they make themselves by art; if they were to lose suddenly all the freshness of their complexion, and their faces to become as fiery and as leaden as they make them with the red and the paint they besmear themselves with, they would consider themselves the most wretched creatures on earth.
Just because something is beautifully written does not mean it is true.
The lovely Hazard girls', they used to call them. Huh. Lovely is as lovely does; if they looked like what they behave like, they'd frighten little children.
Preserve me from such cordiality! It is like handling briar-roses and may-blossoms - bright enough to the eye, and outwardly soft to the touch, but you know there are thorns beneath, and every now and then you feel them too; and perhaps resent the injury by crushing them in till you have destroyed their power, though somewhat to the detriment of your own fingers.
Everyone knows that yellow, orange, and red suggest ideas of joy and plenty. I can paint you the skin of Venus with mud, provided you let me surround it as I will.
It would be a mistake to think something is wonderful just because it looks great.
I have drawn people's attention to the fact that art is a mirage. A mirage, just like the oasis that appears in the desert. It is very beautiful, until the moment when you die of thirst, obviously. But we do not die of thirst in the field of art. The mirage has substance.
Our blossoms of passion, gay and luxuriant flowers, are bright and full of fragrance, but they beguile us and lead us astray, and their odor is deadly.
why does what was beautiful shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths?
There are women who are not beautiful but only look that way.
Beware of any belief that makes you self-indulgent; it came from the pit, no matter how beautiful it sounds.
This car was a very pretty lie.
It is God who makes woman beautiful, it is the devil who makes her pretty.
The Fairy's dress rustled as she turned. Human women dressed like flowers, layers of petals around a mortal, rotting core.
Pleasure has ever more been represented by poets and by painters as clothed in perpetual smiles and adorned with the richest jewels; and in real life, we have known many who, allured by her deceptions, blandishments, and hollow but showy temptations, have followed as she pointed until ruin has befallen them.
Harmony of colouring is destructive of art? it is like the smile of a fool.
I like making images that from a distance seem kind of seductive, colorful, luscious and engaging, and then you realize what you're looking at is something totally opposite. It seems boring to me to pursue the typical idea of beauty, because that is the easiest and the most obvious way to see the world. It's more challenging to look at the other side.
