“No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes”

“For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.”

“...But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful...”

“The root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty.”

“So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not read the language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty! Tears ran down his cheeks.”

“Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.”

“And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.”