But beauty has wings, and too hastily flies,
And love, unrewarded, soon sickens and dies.
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.
Beauty will snatch us by the heart
and love us until we are raw with understanding.
The purest way to communicate the human condition is through the beauty of music.
Goodness is a special kind of truth and beauty. It is truth and beauty in human behavior.
Hard features every bungler can command:
To draw true beauty shows a master's hand.
For where is any author in the world
Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?
Nothing teems
But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs,
Losing both beauty and utility.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.
The work of John Lennon was marked by its exquisite beauty and by its brutal honesty.
"Let beauty be your end. Why should you mint beauty into gold? Anyway, you can’t."