Beauty Myth Quotes

#1. The idea that beauty is unimportant is the real beauty myth.

Nancy Etcoff

#2. Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.

Naomi Wolf

#3. There is no legitimate historical or biological justification for the beauty myth; what it is doing to women today is a result of nothing more exalted than the need of today's power structure, economy, and culture to mount a counteroffensive against women.

Naomi Wolf

#4. No matter what a woman's appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize - as her personal problem - observations she makes about the beauty myth in society.

Naomi Wolf

#5. The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men's institutions and institutional power.

Naomi Wolf

#6. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.

Naomi Wolf

#7. the central rule of the myth: For every feminist action there is an equal and opposite beauty myth reaction.

Naomi Wolf

#8. As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women's advancement.

Naomi Wolf

#9. The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.

Naomi Wolf

#10. If we want liberation, we must rewrite the Sleeping Beauty myth. No one is coming and no one else is to blame.

Elizabeth Lesser

#11. The truth about an animal is far more exciting and altogether more beautiful than all the myths woven about it.

Konrad Lorenz

#12. We need to insist on making culture out of our desire: making paintings, novels, plays and films potent and seductive and authentic enough to undermine and overwhelm the Iron Maiden.

Naomi Wolf

#13. Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.

Milan Kundera

#14. You think I'm cute?" He said thinkly, pulling on her hand.
She was glad he couldn't see her face. "I think you're ... "
Beautiful. Breathtaking. Like the person in a Greek myth who makes one of the gods stop caring about being a god.

Rainbow Rowell

#15. You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these last twenty years at least.

Jane Austen

#16. Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty; women are allowed a mind or a body but not both.

Naomi Wolf

#17. [Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job ... into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.

Milan Kundera

#18. I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful

Oscar Wilde

#19. A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.

Naomi Wolf

#20. You are in obscurity when you are still needed but no one cares a lot what you say or think, or even where you are working from. You have no voice or presence that makes you relevant. Grow your voice.

Archibald Marwizi

#21. There were rules in the monastery, but the Master always warned against the tyranny of the law. 'Obedience keeps the rules,' he would say. 'Love knows when to break them.'

Anthony De Mello

#22. I do love playing games, but once I have a girlfriend, she will be my princess.

Cho Kyuhyun

#23. And one day the mind leaps from imagination to hallucination, and the congregant hears God, sees God.

Oliver Sacks

#24. The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.

Joseph Campbell

#25. Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods, is very different from that of the North American, who wanders in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens and moral precepts.

Octavio Paz

#26. No more free steps to heaven.

David Bowie

#27. The villainous sun and the starved bank did not seem related - yet.

Timothy Egan

#28. People only picked the pretty, sweet-smelling flowers. The ones with thorns were left alone.

Nenia Campbell

#29. The Rape of Europa. Both the myth and the picture only prove the power of beauty to turn anyone into a beast.

Lara Biyuts

#30. There are truths, that are beyond us, transcendent truths, about beauty, truth, honor, etc. There are truths that man knows exist, but they cannot be seen - they are immaterial, but no less real, to us. It is only through the language of myth that we can speak of these truths.

J.R.R. Tolkien