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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.

Random quote on Beauty

Most quoted on beauty:

There is no beauty in anything rational. Beauty emerges from the unknown, often from the inane, generally irrational, as unforseen combinations.

Herbert Read Phases in English Poetry (1928)

Beauty alone is an excellent reason for many things, but when a design is in direct conflict with common sense it cannot be a work of art.

Ernest Flagg Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)

I’d never even been on a stage before. Seeing the competitive spirit around beauty was very interesting.

Janelle "Penny" Commissiong

Art saves people. Art has the power to transform my sorrows into beauty and to turn my despair into hope.

Crystal Asige

Our task must be to free ourselves... by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

Albert Einstein

For beauty with sorrow
Is a burden hard to be borne:
The evening light on the foam, and the swans, there;
That music, remote, forlorn.

Walter de la Mare

"I will see beauty and goodness in all things. From all that is unlovely shall my vision be immune."

Walter Russell

Leader Abdullah Öcalan
“We can all learn something from the rose that protects its enchanting beauty with thorns.”

Abdullah Öcalan

For one moment seek
a lesser beauty
and a lesser grace,
but you will find
no peace in the end
save in her presence.

H.D.

Rose-cheeked Laura, come;
Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty’s
Silent music, either other
Sweetly gracing.

Thomas Campion Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602)

Superstition saw
Something it had never seen before:
Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear,
Beauty so sudden for that time of year.

Jean Toomer Poems from Cane (1923)

Beauty, whatever use man may make of it, belongs fundamentally to its Creator, who through it projects into the world of appearances something of His being.

Frithjof Schuon

Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time. (p179)

Nalo Hopkinson Sister Mine (2013)

Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Keep going. Stay fearless.

Nse Ikpe-Etim

My mission is helping to actively and creatively celebrate my culture, because I knew there was a lot of beauty surrounding it.

Amarachi Nwosu

“I thought that I didn’t want to portray her as a victim. I wanted a picture that would show this woman’s beauty.”

Jodi Bieber

His moments of most sentimental recollection were when he thought of the beauty of the sausages he had manufactured.

Randolph Bedford Naught to Thirty-three (1944)

Physics reveal the mathematical beauty of the universe at scales ranging from subatomic to cosmological.

Farida Fassi

“My first beauty memory is watching my mum apply blue mascara.”

Samantha Chapman

What I feel though, is that some people come into the industry bearing just beauty, and I resent that. News anchors must have major news track records.

Karen Davila

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