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.
It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art.
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.
God can find a soul of beauty
Where it falls, as gems of worth
Are found by miners dark in earth.
Beauty of the face is the outward charm of a human being, and the beauty of soul is his inner charm.
Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.
She is the sum of nature's universe.
To her perfection all of beauty tends.
A mathematician is only perfect insofar as he is a perfect man, sensitive to the beauty of truth.
In night's darkness I've seen
raining down on my head
pure flames, flashing rays
of beauty divine.
I believe Beauty is the condition of the perfect life, just as important as Virtue and Truth.