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It is the pain, it is the pain, endures.
Your chemic beauty burned my muscles through.
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.

— William Empson Villanelle (1928)

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Beauty

More quotes by William Empson

The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.

Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.

Legal Fiction (1928)

Man, as the prying housemaid of the soul.

This Last Pain (1930)

There is a supreme God in the ethnological section; . . .
His smooth wood creeps with all the creeds of the world.

Homage to the British Museum (1935)

Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis.

Bacchus (1935)

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Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.

Democritus Freeman (1948)

True beauty dwells in deep retreats,
Whose veil is unremoved
Till heart with heart in concord beats,
And the lover is beloved.

William Wordsworth

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.

William Shakespeare The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: William Empson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.