Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully.
Beauty Quotes
Shakespeare, Milton and Emerson sit at the top, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon, a poet far less read now than in the 1820s, has a surprising number of entries. Emerson’s Nature (1836) supplies the best-sourced line, that beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Coleridge’s Christabel (1797) and Emerson’s poem on the rhodora are the pieces to read in full.
Three lines carry flags. “Beauty is the promise of happiness” is credited to Edmund Burke and marked misattributed. A couplet about beauty’s fading nature having a season is credited to Robert Burns and disputed. “We all have a weakness for beauty” is credited to Albert Camus, also disputed.
I know of nothing useful in life except what is beautiful or creates beauty.
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.
In its purest distillation beauty had always been merciless.
The lustful who punish beauty would be wiser to control lust.
Beauty may be skin-deep, but horror goes all the way down to the desiccated bone beneath.
Beauty and ugliness are manifestations of the self-The lovely colorless is in each color.