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.
Virtue consists in allowing free passage, in the soul, to the Beauty of God.
Looking at beauty in the world is the first step of purifying the mind.
They look into the beauty of thy mind,
And that, in guess, they measure by thy deeds.
She was a sharp-jawed, pout-lipped beauty and her eyes were green as scum.
Here Beauty falls betray’d, despis’d, distress’d,
And hissing Infamy proclaims the rest.
The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being defeated.