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 … is a relation, and the apprehension of it a comparison.
Sure Beauty's empires, like to greater states,
Have certain periods set, and hidden fates.
If I a fancy take
To black and blue,
That fancy doth it beauty make.
The glory of the day was in her face,
The beauty of the night was in her eyes.
The interiorization of beauty presupposes nobility of soul and at the same time produces it.
The immense beauty, the vast almost unbearable beauty of justice.