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.
O beloved Pan, and all ye other gods of this place, grant me to become beautiful in the inner man.
Do not beautify your appearance, but be beautiful in your way of life.
The flowers anew returning seasons bring!
But beauty faded has no second spring.
Good manners without sincerity are like a beautiful dead lady.
There is in true beauty, as in courage, somewhat which narrow souls cannot dare to admire.
Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it.
Many a temptation comes to us in fine, gay colours that are but skin deep.