Ralph Waldo Emerson on Beauty
1803–1882 United States
← All quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson
10 quotes
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.
Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.
Nature (1836)
We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.
Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it.
The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary.
Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
Society and Solitude (1870)
Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being.
Poems (1847)
Who gave thee, O Beauty,
The keys of this breast,—
Too credulous lover
Of blest and unblest?
Say, when in lapsed ages
Thee knew I of old?
Or what was the service
For which I was sold?
These preachers of beauty, which light the world with their admonishing smile.
Attributed Pearls of Thought (1881)