Quotes about faces

My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.

— W. H. Auden

Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of men and women who look like elderly babies. If he stays in the States for any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack of sensibility -- the American feels the joys and sufferings of human life as keenly as anybody else. The only plausible explanation I can find lies in his different attitude to the past. To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.

— W. H. Auden

I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that.

— Lauren Bacall

Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.

— Natalie Clifford Barney

I have eyes like those of a dead pig.

— Marlon Brando

People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart.

— Bertolt Brecht

It is the common wonder of all men, how among so many million faces, there should be none alike.

— Sir Thomas Browne

It has been said that a pretty face is a passport. But it's not, it's a visa, and it runs out fast.

— Julie Burchill

When matters are desperate we must put on a desperate face.

— Robert Burn

Alas after a certain age, every man is responsible for his own face.

— Albert Camus

A blank helpless sort of face, rather like a rose just before you drench it with D.D.T.

— John Carey

He had a face like a blessing.

— Miguel De Cervantes

The eyes those silent tongues of love.

— Miguel De Cervantes

A strange and somewhat impassive physiognomy is often, perhaps, an advantage to an orator, or leader of any sort, because it helps to fix the eye and fascinate the mind.

— Charles Horton Cooley

A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

As a beauty I'm not a great star. Others are handsomer far; but my face -- I don't mind it because I'm behind it; it the folks out in front that I jar.

— A. H. Euwer

The human face is the organic seat of beauty. It is the register of value in development, a record of Experience, whose legitimate office is to perfect the life, a legible language to those who will study it, of the majestic mistress, the soul.

— Eliza Farnham

It has to be displayed, this face, on a more or less horizontal plane. Imagine a man wearing a mask, and imagine that the elastic which holds the mask on has just broken, so that the man (rather than let the mask slip off) has to tilt his head back and balance the mask on his real face. This is the kind of tyranny which Lawson's face exerts over the rest of his body as he cruises along the corridors. He doesn't look down his nose at you, he looks along his nose.

— James Fenton

A good face they say, is a letter of recommendation. O Nature, Nature, why art thou so dishonest, as ever to send men with these false recommendations into the World!

— Henry Fielding

The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.

— Jack Handy

I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion.

— Thomas Hardy

Her face was her chaperone.

— Rupert Hughes

Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking, in need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware, keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces.

— Carolyn Kizer

The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen.

— Milan Kundera

We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Every man over forty is responsible for his face.

— Abraham Lincoln

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?

— Abraham Lincoln

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ileum?

— Christopher Marlowe

I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception.

— Groucho Marx

A face is too slight a foundation for happiness.

— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

That the public can grow accustomed to any face is proved by the increasing prevalence of Keith's ruined physiognomy on TV documentaries and chat shows, as familiar and homely a horror as Grandpa in The Munsters.

— Philip Norman

What is your fortune, my pretty maid? My face is my fortune, Sir, she said.

— Nursery Rhyme

After a certain number of years our faces become our biographies. We get to be responsible for our faces.

— Cynthia Ozick

What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.

— Pablo Picasso

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.

— Marcel Proust

The face is the index of the mind.

— Proverb

A man's face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth, for it is a compendium of everything his mouth will ever say, in that it is the monogram of all this man's thoughts and aspirations.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

It is only at the first encounter that a face makes its full impression on us.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

Wicked thoughts and worthless efforts gradually set their mark on the face, especially the eyes.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

The faces that have charmed us the most escape us the soonest.

— Sir Walter Scott

The tartness of his face sours ripe grapes.

— William Shakespeare

Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn.

— William Shakespeare

God had given you one face, and you make yourself another. [Hamlet]

— William Shakespeare

The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.

— Source Unknown

Clowns wear a face that's painted intentionally on them so they appear to be happy or sad. What kind of mask are you wearing today?

— Source Unknown

This face is a dog's snout sniffing for garbage, snakes nest in that mouth, I hear the sibilant threat.

— Walt Whitman

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

— Oscar Wilde

Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face -- as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; and thought.

— Virginia Woolf