#ugliness

I like to have Chinese furniture in my home as a constant and painful reminder of how much has been destroyed in China. The contrast between the beauty of the past and the ugliness of the modern is nowhere sharper than in China. ↗

— Jung Chang

#been #between #china #chinese #constant

I'm not that obsessed with making representations of ugliness. Everything I've seen is beautiful. ↗

— Otto Dix

#everything #i #making #obsessed #representations

The only sin is ugliness, and if we believed this with all our being, all other activities of the human spirit could be left to take care of themselves. ↗

— Herbert Read

#being #believed #care #could #human

Beauty belongs to the sphere of the simple, the ordinary, whilst ugliness is something extraordinary, and there is no question but that every ardent imagination prefers in lubricity, the extraordinary to the commonplace ↗

— Marquis de Sade

#extraordinary #ugliness #beauty

Which natural gift would you most like to possess? The ability to master other languages (which would have hugely enhanced the scope of these answers). How would you like to die? Fully conscious, and either fighting or reciting (or fooling around). What do you most dislike about your appearance? The way in which it makes former admirers search for neutral words. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#death #languages #polyglots #questionnaires #talents

I thought the two ugly ones were sisters, but they got very insulted when I asked them. You could tell neither one of them wanted to look like the other one, and you couldn't blame them, but it was very amusing anyway. ↗

— J.D. Salinger

#ugliness #humor

[M]en, though they know full well how much women are worth and how great the benefits we bring them, nonetheless seek to destroy us out of envy for our merits. It's just like the crow, when it produces white nestlings: it is so stricken by envy, knowing how black it is itself, that it kills its own offspring out of pique. ↗

— Moderata Fonte

#dignity #empowerment #envy #feminism #gender

Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways. ↗

— Neal Stephenson

#ugliness #beauty

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served. ↗

— Jane Jacobs

#dishonest #disorder #even #exist #ignoring

It's taken me a long time to become the person I am, for all the ugliness to fall away. The rotten flesh is gone, and the seed is there. I can touch that now. ↗

— Lynn Johnston

#away #become #fall #flesh #gone