'Tis impious pleasure to delight in harm.
And beauty shou'd be kind, as well as charm.
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.
Truth and beauty ... yield themselves only to whoever surrenders to them—as to a rescuer.
On this day by God's grace I resolved to give up all beauty until I had His leave for it.
Were you with these, my prince, you'd soon forget
The pale, unripened beauties of the north.
In spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.
There is an antique gem, on which her brow
Retains its graven beauty even now.
There’s too much beauty upon this earth
For lonely men to bear.