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Beauty and sadness always go together.
Nature thought beauty too rich to go forth
Upon the earth without a meet alloy.

— George MacDonald Within and Without (1855)

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Beauty

More quotes by George MacDonald

Trust to God to weave your little thread into the great web, though the pattern shows it not yet.

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Never be discouraged because good things get on so slowly here; and never fail daily to do that good which lies next to your hand.

One difference between God's work and man's is, that, while God's work cannot mean more than he meant, man's must mean more than he meant.

The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.

The Marquis of Lossie (1877)

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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: George MacDonald (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.