Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare,
And beauty draws us with a single hair.
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.
Beauty is brought by judgment of the eye,
Not utter'd by base sale of chapmen's tongues.
Beauty is a witch,
Against whose charms faith melteth into blood.
Her beauty makes
This vault a feasting presence full of light.
Say that she frown; I'll say she looks as clear
As morning roses newly wash'd with dew.
'Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white
Nature's own sweet and cunning hand laid on.
A daughter of the gods, divinely tall,
And most divinely fair.
Whose form is as a grove
Hushed with the cooing of an unseen dove.
Beautiful was not the opposite of terrible. The two could easily co-exist.
It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.
Her gentle limbs did she undress,
And lay down in her loveliness.
The beautiful seems right
By force of Beauty, and the feeble wrong
Because of weakness.