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.
Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing!
Beauty comes, we know not how, as an emanation from sources deeper than itself.
In days of yore [in ancient Greece] nothing was sacred but the beautiful.
Elysian beauty, melancholy grace,
Brought from a pensive though a happy place.
In beauty faults conspicuous grow;
The smallest speck is seen on snow.
And should you visit now the seats of bliss,
You need not wear another form but this.
I pour into the world the eternal streams
Wan prophets tent beside, and dream their dreams.
Beauty has wings, and too hastily flies,
And love, unrewarded, soon sickens and dies.
Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll;
Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.
O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
Beauty, real beauty, is something very grave. If there is a God, He must be partly that.