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    “Then what makes a beautiful human being? Isn’t it the presence of human excellence? Young friend, if you wish to be beautiful, then work diligently at human excellence. And what is that? Observe those whom you praise without prejudice. The just or the unjust? The just. The even-tempered or the undisciplined? The even-tempered. The self-controlled or the uncontrolled? The self-controlled. In making yourself that kind of person, you will become beautiful—but to the extent you ignore these qualities, you’ll be ugly, even if you use every trick in the book to appear beautiful.”

    Epictetus, Discourses, The Daily Stoic (Page 140)

      “It’s easy to confuse the image we present to the world for who we actually are, especially when media messaging deliberately blurs that distinction. You might look beautiful today, but if that was the result of vain obsession in the mirror this morning, the Stoics would ask, are you actually beautiful? A body build from hard work is admirable. A body build to impress gym rats is not.”

      Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 87) (Read Matt’s Blog On This Quote)

        “You are not your body and hair-style, but your capacity for choosing well. If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be.”

        Epictetus, Discourses, via The Daily Stoic (Page 87)

          “Smart isn’t easily measurable. Neither is beautiful, good or successful. And especially happy. A high SAT score is a measure of whether or not you scored well on the SAT. That’s it. A bank balance is a measure of how much money you have in the bank. That’s all. In the face of the difficulty the system has in measuring things that don’t measure, we create proxies. Things like popularity as a proxy for whether a work of human creativity has worth or not. It’s a method built to process commodities instead of people, and it’s running amok.”

          Seth Godin, Blog

            “In infatuation, the person is a passive victim of the spell of conceived attraction for the object. In love there is an active appreciation of the intrinsic worth of the object.”

            Meher Baba, Sunbeams (Page 32)

              “There is a field where all wonderful perfections of microscope and telescope fail. All exquisite niceties of weights and measure as well as that which is behind them, the keen and driving power of the mind. No facts, however indubitably detected, no effort or reason, however magnificently maintained, can prove that Bach’s music is beautiful.”

              Edith Hamilton, Sunbeams (Page 17)

                “I still wear makeup when I feel like it, though less of it, and I still enjoy experimenting with a new shade of lipstick or eye shadow. The point is that I, and everyone else, have a choice. And we should be able to freely make that choice, from one moment to the next, without society’s ‘standard of beauty’ hovering over us. I am my own standard-bearer. So are you.”

                Alicia Keys, More Myself (Page 211)

                  “It’s hard not to begin doubting ourself just a little when, with the stroke of an airbrush, someone slims down your thighs or shaves off half your booty. And if I’m doubting myself, imagine what that does for the young people forced to digest these images of so-called beauty.”

                  Alicia Keys, More Myself (Page 174)

                    “People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”

                    Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Sunbeams (Page 7)

                      “I recently read about a famous actress who died in her eighties. As her beauty started to fade and became ravaged by old age, she grew desperately unhappy and became a recluse. She, too, had identified with a condition: her external appearance. First, the condition gave her a happy sense of self, then an unhappy one. If she had been able to connect with the formless and timeless life within, she could have watched and allowed the fading of her external form from a place of serenity and peace. Moreover, her external form would have become increasingly transparent to the light shining through from her ageless true nature, so her beauty would not really have faded but simply become transformed into spiritual beauty.”

                      Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 186)