Is she not more than painting can express,
Or youthful poets fancy when they love?
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.
Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare.
In this job an illusion of beauty is sold which doesn’t really exist like that.
Beautiful is a word for young people. Beauty is a phase you grow through, like acne.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover,
Fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense.
She, though in full-blown flower of glorious beauty,
Grows cold even in the summer of her age.
Nothing makes a woman more beautiful than the belief that she is beautiful.
Beauty by no complexion is defin'd,
Is of all colours, and to none confin'd.
Beauty, like truth, never is so glorious as when it goes the plainest.