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Art's the biggest vanity: the assumption that one's view of peace or fright or beauty is permanently communicable.

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Beauty

More quotes by Ned Rorem

Art means to dare — and to have been right.

The beautiful are shyer than the ugly, for they move in a world that does not ask for beauty.

The same piece of music alters at each hearing. But oh, the need to repeat and repeat and repeat unchanged the sexual experience.

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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)

Attribution

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