Beauty. The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
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.
A lovely girl is above all rank. Men, however high, must feel her higher, however low.
Spiritual deformity is worse than bodily deformity, for it contradicts a superior beauty.
Beauty is the purest feeling of the soul. Beauty arises when soul is satisfied.
Beauty, the eternal Spouse of the Wisdom of God
and Angel of his Presence thru' all creation.
O, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
A lovely being, scarcely formed or moulded,
A rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded.
All beauty is delightful; but human beauty … is the best of all.
Each ornament about her seemly lies,
By curious chance, or careless art composed.
A queen, devoid of beauty is not queen;
She needs the royalty of beauty's mien.
You are beautiful and faded
Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord.
'Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call,
But the joint force and full result of all.