Go forward with joyful confidence.
George EliotRead
There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the simple, innocent beauty found in small creatures and babies that captivates attention.
In this quote, George Eliot reflects on a particular kind of beauty that is characterized by innocence and playfulness. She suggests that this beauty, exemplified by kittens, ducklings, and toddlers, has a unique ability to capture our attention and evoke feelings of joy and tenderness. It implies that true beauty often resides in the small, simple moments of life that remind us of purity and affection.
In practice
In a speech about appreciating the small joys in life.
Go forward with joyful confidence.
You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well.
She thought it was part of the hardship of her life that there was laid upon her the burthen of larger wants than others seemed to feel β that she had to endure this wide hopeless yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth.
Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.
I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.
Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.
I know a girl who just looks at her face in the medicine cabinet mirror and never looks below her shoulders, and she's four or five hundred pounds but she doesn't see all that, she just sees a beautiful face and therefore she thinks she's a beauty. And therefore, I think she's a beauty, too, because I usually accept people on the basis of their self-images, because their self-images have more to do with the way they think than their objective-images do.
Beauty is about perception, not about make-up. I think the beginning of all beauty is knowing and liking oneself. You can't put on make-up, or dress yourself, or do you hair with any sort of fun or joy if you're doing it from a position of correction.
Unique and different is the next generation of beautiful.
I grew up in a world where a woman who looks like me, with my kind of skin and my kind of hair, was never considered to be beautiful.
Elegance comes from being as beautiful inside as outside.
Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight.
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