The beauty of a move lies not in its appearance but in the thought behind it.
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.
Were I no queen, did you my beauty weigh,
My youth in bloom, your age in its decay.
That prudery which survives youth and beauty resembles a scarecrow left in the fields after harvest.
There is certainly no beauty on earth which exceeds the natural loveliness of woman.
There is no beauty on earth which exceeds the natural loveliness of woman.
Even in days of loss and sorrow, beauty remains, and I am ever grateful.
Thus was beauty sent from heaven, the lovely ministress of truth and good in this dark world.