Skip to content

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.

Random quote on Beauty

Most quoted on beauty:

The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own — even more, one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.

Katherine Anne Porter

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

George Eliot Middlemarch (1871)

No one can imagine the beauty of the view from anything witnessed in England. It had never been seen before by European eyes; but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight.

David Livingstone

Good and beautiful things may easily be spoiled by suggestions of rights and duties

A. C. Benson

Of two evils choose the prettier.

Carolyn Wells

Life is not always perfect. Like a road, it has many bends, ups and down, but that’s its beauty.

Amit Ray World Peace: The Voice of a Mountain Bird (2014)

The meaning of life is beauty and love.

Rudy Rucker The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul (2016)

The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers.

Maryam Mirzakhani

Beauty is a splendour that must detach itself from those who possess it without them noticing and without returning to them.

Jean Guitton

Beauty, which is what is meant by art, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life.

William Morris

What distressed me most — more even than my own folly — was the perplexing question, How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near?

George MacDonald Phantastes (1858)

Some say I have a beautiful voice, some say I have not. It is a matter of opinion. All I can say, those who don't like it shouldn't come to hear me.

Maria Callas

We must uphold traditional social values, which do not permit this kind of vulgar display of beauty. I will just not allow any beauty contest to be held in this state.

Rajnath Singh

It was, therefore, the sort of loveliness which is not perfect, but draws its charm from a measure of imbalance, which can accommodate flaws and make little of them, for a while at least.

Tanith Lee Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977)

There is a reason that truth is considered to be a fundamentally different category than the beautiful or even the good. Sometimes, the truth can be ugly indeed, but even the ugliest truth is of intrinsic value.

Vox Day

Beauty is a kind of supplement to being, a radiance that is added to being.

Jean Guitton

The beautiful lies in the very moment when one senses that beauty is no longer. Forever now, perhaps.

Manlio Sgalambro La morte del sole (1982)

That's the beauty of the Web: You can roll around in a stranger's obsession without having to smell his or her house. You can amscray whenever you want without being rude. The site gets its "hit" and you know more about our species' diversity.

Penn Jillette

Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.

George Eliot Adam Bede (1859)

Beauty; beauty. What was the good of beauty, once it was over? It left nothing behind it but acid regrets, and no heart at all to start fresh. Nearly everything else left something.

Elizabeth von Arnim Mr. Skeffington (1940)

Related topics