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.
Verily by Beauty it is that we come at Wisdom,
yet not by Reason at Beauty.
And behold there was a very stately palace before him, the name of which was Beautiful.
For, when with beauty we can virtue join,
We paint the semblance of a form divine.
I pray the prayer of Plato old:
God make thee beautiful within.
She had gained a reputation for beauty, and (which is often another thing) was beautiful.
And ladies of the Hesperides, that seemed
Fairer than feign'd of old.
Of Nature's gifts thou may'st with lilies boast
And with the half-blown rose.