Beauty

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they’re seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful? ~ André Gide

Beautiful as they may be while I am alive, so ghastly they will be to look upon in the grave! ~ Joseph

Inasmuch as love grows in you, in so much beauty grows; for love is itself the beauty of the soul. ~ Augustine

Beauty, real beauty, is something very grave. ~ Jean Anouilh

She had gained a reputation for beauty, and (which is often another thing) was beautiful. ~ Charles Dickens

Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God. ~ Jean Anouilh

Everything changes, but beauty remains. ~ Kelly Clarkson

Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover. ~ Joseph Addison

Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil. ~ Democritus

Beauty is a characteristic of a person, place, object or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning or satisfaction. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology and culture. The subjective experience of beauty often involves the interpretation of some entity as being in harmony with nature, which may lead to feelings of attraction and emotional well-being.

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations · See also · External links

A

If a person's actions are not good, it does not matter how the person looks physically. Doing good is equivalent to being beautiful. ~ Molefi Kete Asante

• Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
  • Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979), Chapter 16

• Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover,
  Fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense.
  • Joseph Addison, Cato, A Tragedy (1713), Act I, scene 4.

• What is lovely never dies,
  But passes into other loveliness,
  Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or wingëd air.
  • Thomas Bailey Aldrich, "A Shadow of the Night", Unguarded Gates and Other Poems (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1895), p. 26.

• Things are beautiful if you love them.
  • Jean Anouilh, Mademoiselle Colombe (1950), Act 2, scene 2, trans. Louis Kronenberger.

• Beauty, real beauty, is something very grave. If there is a God, He must be partly that.
  • Jean Anouilh, The Rehearsal (1950), Act 2, trans. Lucienne Hill.

• Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God.
  • Jean Anouilh, Becket, (1959), Act 1.

• Beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty: so that "good" means that which simply pleases the appetite; while the "beautiful" is something pleasant to apprehend.
  • Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (1265–1274), Part I, Question 27, Article 1, Reply to Objection 3; tr. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1920, New York: Benziger Bros).

• A common expression among African Americans relates the good to the beautiful, "beauty is as beauty does" or "she's beautiful because she's good." The first statement places emphasis on what a person does, that is, how a person "walks" among others in the society. The second statement identifies the beautiful by action. If a person's actions are not good, it does not matter how the person looks physically. Doing good is equivalent to being beautiful.
  • Molefi Kete Asante, Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge (1990), p. 11

• Slow was I, Lord, too slow in loving you. ... You were waiting within me while I went outside me, looking for you there, misshaping myself as I flung myself upon the shapely things you made.
  • Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Book 10, Paragraph 38, ans translated by A. Outler

• Inasmuch as love grows in you, in so much beauty grows; for love is itself the beauty of the soul.
  • Augustine of Hippo, Ten Homilies on the First Epistle of John, Ninth Homily, §9, H. Browne and J. H. Meyers, trans. (1995).

B

• There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
  • Francis Bacon, Essays (1625), Of Beauty.

• The beautiful are never desolate;
  But some one always loves them—God or man.
  If man abandons, God himself takes them.
  • Philip James Bailey, Festus (1813), scene Water and Wood Midnight, line 370.

• Are not all young men ready to trust the promise of a pretty face and to infer beauty of soul from beauty of feature? An indefinable impulse leads them to believe that moral perfection must co-exist with physical perfection.
  • Honoré de Balzac, The Wisdom of Balzac (New York: 1923), p. 14

• Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the infinite.
  • George Bancroft, "The Necessity, the Reality, and the Promise of the Progress of the Human Race" (oration delivered before the New York Historical Society, November 26, 1854), Literary and Historical Miscellanies (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855), p. 489

• Beauty is something that disappears when you try to define it.
  • Iain Banks, The State of the Art (1989)

• Unfortunately, truth is neither a listable nor a decidable property; nor is the truth of a statement of arithmetic. The American logician John Myhill has used the term 'prospective' to characterize those attributes of the world that are neither listable nor decidable. They are properties that cannot be recognized by the application of some formula, made to conform to a rule, or generated by some computer program. They are characterized by incessant novelty that cannot be encompassed by any finite set of rules. 'Beauty', 'ugliness', 'truth', 'harmony', simplicity', and 'poetry' are names we give to some of the attributes of this sort. There is no way of listing all examples of beauty or ugliness, nor any procedure for saying whether or not something possesses either of those attributes, without redefining them in some more restrictive fashion that kills their prospective character.
  • John D. Barrow, The Artful Universe (1995)

• Too often, though, the beauty that is thrust upon us is illusory and deceitful, superficial and blinding, leaving the onlooker dazed; instead of bringing him out of himself and opening him up to horizons of true freedom as it draws him aloft, it imprisons him within himself and further enslaves him, depriving him of hope and joy. It is a seductive but hypocritical beauty that rekindles desire, the will to power, to possess, and to dominate others, it is a beauty which soon turns into its opposite, taking on the guise of indecency, transgression or gratuitous provocation. Authentic beauty, however, unlocks the yearning of the human heart, the profound desire to know, to love, to go towards the Other, to reach for the Beyond.
  • Benedict XVI, Meeting with artists of 21 November 2009.

• Beauty. The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Dictionary (1906); republished as The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

• Glance at the sun.
  See the moon and the stars.
  Gaze at the beauty of the earth's greenings.
  Now,
  Think.
  • Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), tr. Gabriele Uhlein, Meditations with Hildegard of Bingen (1983), p. 45.

• There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness.
  • Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, Desultory Thoughts and Reflections (1839), p. 90.

• Beauty will be convulsive or not at all.
  • André Breton "Nadja".

• Beauty, the eternal Spouse of the Wisdom of God
  and Angel of his Presence thru' all creation,
  fashioning her love-realm in the mind of man,
  attempteth every mortal child with influences
  of her divine supremacy.
  • Robert Bridges, The Testament of Beauty (1929), Book IV, line 1.

• Verily by Beauty it is that we come at WISDOM,
  yet not by Reason at Beauty.
  • Robert Bridges, The Testament of Beauty (1929), Book IV, line 1305.

• I had hardly ever seen a handsome youth; never in my life spoken to one. I had a theoretical reverence and homage for beauty, elegance, gallantry, fascination; but had I met those qualities incarnate in masculine shape, I should have known instinctively that they neither had nor could have sympathy with anything in me, and should have shunned them as one would fire, lightning, or anything else that is bright but antipathetic.
  • Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre.

• The beautiful seems right
  By force of beauty, and the feeble wrong
  Because of weakness.
  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856), Book I.

• O world, as God has made it! All is beauty.
  • Robert Browning, "The Guardian-Angel: A Picture at Fano", line 33, in Men and Women (1855).

• Beauty, thou art twice blessed! thou blessest the gazer and the possessor; often at once the effect and the cause of goodness! A sweet disposition—a lovely soul—an affectionate nature—will speak in the eyes—the lips—the brows—and become the cause of beauty. On the other hand, they who have a gift that commands love, a key that opens all hearts, are ordinarily inclined to look with happy eyes upon the world—to be cheerful and serene—to hope and to confide. There is more wisdom than the vulgar dream of in our admiration of a fair face.
  • Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Alice, or The Mysteries (1838), Book II, chapter I.

• Rank is a great beautifier.
  • Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Lady of Lyons (1838), Act II, scene I.

• Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried. Is not this a demonstration of that change of surface continual and yet hardly perceptible at any point which forms one of the great constituents of beauty?
  • Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Part III, Section XV.

• Beauty's of a fading nature—
  Has a season and is gone!
  • Robert Burns, Will Ye Go and Marry Katie? (1764).

• Nothing gives life a finer touch of grace, than the presence in the family circle of a lovely girl of seventeen.
  • Charles Buxton, Notes of Thought. London: John Murray, 1883, p. 170.

• A lovely girl is above all rank. Men, however high, must feel her higher, however low.
  • Charles Buxton, Notes of Thought. London: John Murray, 1883, p. 171.

• Thou who hast
  The fatal gift of beauty.
  • Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto IV (1818), Stanza 42.

• Her glossy hair was cluster'd o'er a brow
  Bright with intelligence, and fair and smooth;
  Her eyebrow's shape was like the aerial bow,
  Her cheek all purple with the beam of youth,
  Mounting, at times, to a transparent glow,
  As if her veins ran lightning.
  • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1818-24), Canto I, Stanza 61.

• A lovely being, scarcely formed or moulded,
  A rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded.
  • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1818-24), Canto XV, Stanza 43.

C

• Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
  • Albert Camus, Notebooks.

• Beauty is pain and there's beauty in everything.
  • Alessia Cara, "Scars to your Beautiful" (2015), Know-It-All

• There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of birds, in the ebb and flow of the tides; in the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in these repeated refrains of nature-the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.
  • Rachel Carson Speech (1954) In Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1998)

• I am not afraid of being thought a sentimentalist when I stand here tonight and tell you that I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man's spiritual growth.
  • Rachel Carson Speech (1954) In Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1998)

• Is it the right of this, our generation, in its selfish materialism, to destroy these things because we are blinded by the dollar sign? Beauty-and all the values the derive from beauty-are not measured and evaluated in terms of the dollar.
  • Rachel Carson Speech (1954) In Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1998)

• The reason for the unreason with which you treat reason, so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of your beauty.
  • Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605–1615), Book I, Chapter 1.

• No todas hermosuras enamoran, que algunas alegran la vista, y no rinden la voluntad.
  • All kinds of beauty do not inspire love; there is a kind which only pleases the sight, but does not captivate the affections.
  • Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605–1615), Book II, Chapter 6.

• Beauty has this power, that in an instant, a moment, it brings with it the desire of whoever sees and knows it, and when it reveals or promises some way of reaching and enjoying it, with powerful fervor it sets fire to the soul of whoever contemplates it, just like the means whereby dry prepared gunpowder is easily lit by any spark that touches it.
  • Miguel de Cervantes, "The Two Maidens", in Exemplary Novels (1613), trans. Edith Grossman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), p. 308.

• It is a prerogative of beauty to always be respected.
  • Miguel de Cervantes, "The Colloquy of the Dogs", in Exemplary Novels (1613), trans. Edith Grossman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), p. 371.

• There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.
  • G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant (1901), "A Defence of Heraldry".

• Everything changes, but beauty remains.
  • Kelly Clarkson, "A Moment Like This" (2002).

• Her gentle limbs did she undress,
  And lay down in her loveliness.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel (c. 1797-1801, published 1816), Part I, Stanza 24.

• There is in true beauty, as in courage, somewhat which narrow souls cannot dare to admire.
  • William Congreve, The Old Bachelor (1693), Act III, Scene 4.

• I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may-light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.
  • John Constable Art Is the Highest Form of Hope & Other Quotes by Artists by Phaidon (2016)

• I think that the most important thing a woman can have - next to talent, of course - is her hairdresser.
  • Joan Crawford interview, Hollywood Reporter (1942)

• The giant female bodybuilder proves unthinking people wrong who believe feminine beauty can never be harmonious with well developed musculature.
  • Robert Crumb as quoted in the Picturing The Modern Amazon exhibition

D

• “You are not traditionally beautiful; and you know it. We women do. But what most people mean by beauty is really a kind of aesthetic acceptability, not so much character as a lack of it, a set of features and lineaments that hide their history, that suggest history itself does not exist. But the template by which we recognize the features and forms in the human body that cause the heart to halt, threatening to spill us over into the silence of death—that is drawn on another part of the soul entirely...But all sing, chant, hymn the history of the body, if only because we all know how people regard bodies that deviate from the lauded and totally abnormal norm named beauty. Most of us would rather not recognize such desires in ourselves and thus avoid all contemplation of what the possession of such features means about the lives, the bodies, the histories of others, preferring instead to go on merely accepting the acceptable. But that is not who I am.”
  • Samuel R. Delany, Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 5 (ellipsis represents a minor elision of description)

• Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.
  • Democritus (ca. 4^th century BCE). Tr. Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1948)

• She had gained a reputation for beauty, and (which is often another thing) was beautiful.
  • Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit.

• God help you if you are an ugly girl because too pretty is also your doom: everyone harbours a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room.
  • Ani DiFranco, "32 Flavors".

• It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress.
  • Paul Dirac, in "The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature" in Scientific American (May 1963).

• Beautiful was not the opposite of terrible. The two could easily co-exist.
  • Cory Doctorow, Petard: A Tale of Just Deserts (2014), reprinted in Rich Horton (ed.), The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 (p. 332)

• Beauty would save the world.
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (1868), Part 3, Chapter 5.

• Old as I am, for ladies' love unfit,
  The power of beauty I remember yet,
  Which once inflam'd my soul, and still inspires my wit.
  • John Dryden, Cymon and Iphigenia (1700), line 1.

• When beauty fires the blood, how love exalts the mind!
  • John Dryden, Cymon and Iphigenia (1700), line 41.

• I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty for Beauty to set the world right.
  • W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois (2003), p. xi.

• The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised.
  • W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), p. 9.

• Heaven forbid if beauty were to have substance. Genuine beauty is always meaningless, without virtue.
  • Osamu Dazai, Schoolgirl (1939)

E

• The desire for truth so prominent in the quest of science, a reaching out of the spirit from its isolation to something beyond, a response to beauty in nature and art, an Inner Light of conviction and guidance—are these as much a part of our being as our sensitivity to sense impressions?
  • Arthur Eddington, Science and the Unseen World (1929)

• Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated.
  • Albert Einstein, in "My Credo", a speech to the German League of Human Rights, Berlin (Autumn 1932), as published in Einstein: A Life in Science (1994) by Michael White and John Gribbin, p. 262.

• Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, journal entry for 16 May 1834; Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1820–1872, Vol. III (1910), p. 298.

• Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836), Chapter 3: "Beauty".

• If eyes were made for seeing,
  Then beauty is its own excuse for Being.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Poems (1847), "The Rhodora".

• We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet.

• Beauty without expression tires.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life.

• Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life.

F

• Beauty is beautiful because it is doomed to perish!
  • Philip José Farmer, The Dark Design (1977), Chapter 70

• I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It's difficult to describe because it's an emotion. It's analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the whole universe: there's a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run "behind the scenes" by the same organization, the same physical laws. It's an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It's a feeling of awe — of scientific awe — which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had this emotion. It could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.
  • Richard Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985), Part 5 : The World of One Physicist, "But Is It Art?"

• The most economical way of obtaining good results is to apply the great, fundamental principles of art; and depend on them for beauty, rather than upon the use of either applied ornament or more expensive materials.
  • Ernest Flagg, Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)

• There's nothing that allays an angry mind
  So soon as a sweet beauty.
  • John Fletcher, The Elder Brother (c. 1625; published 1637), Act III, scene 5.

• Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. [...] The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due—she reminds us to much of a prima donna.
  • E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927), Chapter 5.

• The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a greater temptation to the ego.
  • Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), "Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype".

G

• Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!
  • Original: Облетев Землю в корабле-спутнике, я увидел, как прекрасна наша планета. Люди, будем хранить и приумножать эту красоту, а не разрушать её!
  • Yuri Gagarin; Russian phrase, handwritten and signed after his historic spaceflight, photo of facsimile published in Syny goluboi planety 3rd. edition (1981) by L. Lebedev, A. Romanov, and B/ Luk'ianov; the first edition was translated into English as Sons of the Blue Planet (1973) by L. A. Lebedev.

• There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That is precisely what makes its pursuit so interesting.
  • John Kenneth Galbraith, quoted in New York Times Magazine, 9 October 1960.

• Il n'y a de vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir à rien; tout ce qui est utile est laid.
  • There is nothing truly beautiful but that which can never be of any use whatsoever; everything useful is ugly.
  • Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835; Paris: Charpentier, 1866).

• Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
  • Khalil Gibran, The Prophet (1923).

• The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they’re seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?
  • André Gide, The Immoralist, p. 159

• What happens when everyone in a society is finally beautiful (and healthy)? When the final aesthetic surgery is developed that will make all visages and bodies "perfect"? Will everyone in that society be happy? In examining the discourses of the late nineteenth century on this question, we are confronted with the paradox of François Xavier Bichat, as paraphrased by Charles Darwin: "If everyone were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty. If all our women were to become as beautiful as the Venus de’ Medici (de Milo), we should for a time be charmed; but we should soon wish for variety; and as soon as we had obtained variety, we should wish to see certain characters a little exaggerated beyond the then existing common standard.” The very search for the improvement of the body (and the concomitant “happiness” of the psyche) must lead to further discontent.
  • Sander Gilman, Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul, page 39.

• Do not allow yourself to be thrashed by the provoking whip of a beautiful face. How can sense slaves enjoy the world? Its subtle flavours escape them while they grovel in primal mud. All nice discriminations are lost to the man of elemental lusts.
• Good manners without sincerity are like a beautiful dead lady.
  • Yukteswar Giri Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

• Beauty is not so much performance as promise.
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Campagne in Frankreich (Münster, December 1792).
  • Translation from Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love (1986). San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997, p. 251.

• Handsome is that handsome does.
  • Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1768), Chapter I. Used by Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones (1749), Book IV, Chapter XII.

• Monstruosidad del ánimo es más deforme que la del cuerpo, porque desdice de la belleza superior.
  • Spiritual deformity is worse than bodily deformity, for it contradicts a superior beauty.
  • Baltasar Gracián, Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia, § 168.

• Beauty by no complexion is defin'd,
  Is of all colours, and to none confin'd.
  • George Granville, "The Progress of Beauty", line 50, in Poems upon Several Occasions (London: J. Tonson, 1712), p. 27.

• 'Tis impious pleasure to delight in harm,
  And beauty shou'd be kind, as well as charm.
  • George Granville, "To Myra", line 21, in Poems upon Several Occasions (London: J. Tonson, 1712), p. 65.

• The man of half-grown intelligence, when he observes an object which is bathed in the glow of a seeming beauty, thinks that that object is in its essence beautiful, no matter what it is that so prepossesses him with the pleasure of the eye. He will not go deeper into the subject. But the other, whose mind's eye is clear, and who can inspect such appearances, will neglect those elements which are the material only upon which the Form of Beauty works; to him they will be but the ladder by which he climbs to the prospect of that Intellectual Beauty, in accordance with their share in which all other beauties get their existence and their name.
  • Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity, Chapter 11.

• The elegance of rich, complex, and diverse phenomena emerging from a simple set of universal laws is at least part of what physicists mean when they invoke the term "beautiful."
  • Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe (1999) Ch. 7 The "Super" in Superstrings.

• Magic mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?
  • Queen in "Snow White", Grimms' Fairy Tales.

H

• There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist, except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.
  • Edith Hamilton, Three Greek Plays (1937), Introduction.

• There is certainly a religion which belongs to the physical form, and which should be regarded in degree as much as that which belongs to the soul. It is as much a duty for every man and woman to perfect fully their physical form as for them to continually search for immortality.
  • Cora Hatch, “The Religion of Life,” Discourses on Religion, Morals, Philosophy and Metaphysics (1858).

• Care about the beings you care about in gorgeous and surprising ways. Color outside the lines. Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty. This is your last chance.
  • Anne Herbert in "Handy tips on how to behave at the death of the world" in Whole Earth Review (Spring 1995).

• If you need something to worship, then worship life — all life, every last crawling bit of it! We're all in this beauty together!
  • Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah (1969).

• Beauty draws more than oxen.
  • George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum (1651).

• Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.
  • David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, Literary (1748), Essay 23: "Of The Standard of Taste".

• Beauty, whether moral or natural, is felt, more properly than perceived. Or if we reason concerning it, and endeavor to fix its standard, we regard a new fact, to wit, the general tastes of mankind, or some such fact, which may be the object of reasoning and enquiry.
  • David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) Ch. XII, Part III.

• Where beauty is worshiped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.
  • Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies (1927), "The Substitutes for Religion".

I

• ¿En perseguirme, mundo, qué interesas?
  ¿En qué te ofendo, cuando sólo intento
  poner bellezas en mi entendimiento
  y no mi entendimiento en las bellezas?
  • O World, why do you wish to persecute me?
    How do I offend you, when I intend
    only to fix beauty in my intellect,
    and never my intellect fix on beauty?
  • Juana Inés de la Cruz Sonnet 146, as translated by Edith Grossman in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Works (2014)

J

• When you get to the point where you cheat for the sake of beauty, you're an artist.
  • Max Jacob, Art poétique (1922).

• Once a centenarian teacher who had the body of an adolescent told me he had studied martial arts. "Me, too," I answered. We were in Notre Dame, and he said, "Attack me." I put myself in a combat position, and he moved his left hand in such an incredibly beautiful way that while I looked at it, fascinated, he gave me a big slap. "Beauty is the most dangerous weapon," he warned. It took me a long time to understand. He used a secret Chinese practice, which consists of drawing a snake in the air with your hand to distract the enemy. And that is how beauty is: the most awful weapon.

• Alejandro Jodorowsky, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy (2010).

• πᾶν τὸ ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ, ἡ ἐπιθυμία τῆς σαρκὸς καὶ ἡ ἐπιθυμία τῶν ὀφθαλμῶν καὶ ἡ ἀλαζονία τοῦ βίου, οὐκ ἔστιν ἐκ τοῦ πατρός, ἀλλὰ ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου ἐστίν.
  • For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world.
    • John the Evangelist, First Epistle of John 2:16 NIV

• Zuleika: "How beautiful are thine eyes, with which thou hast charmed all Egyptians, both men and women!"
  Joseph: "Beautiful as they may be while I am alive, so ghastly they will be to look upon in the grave!"
  • Joseph, to Zuleika, Legends of the Jews: Joseph and Zuleikha

• Eyes raised toward heaven are always beautiful, whatever they be.
  • Joseph Joubert, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 22.

• The divine right of beauty is the only one an Englishman ought to acknowledge, and a pretty woman the only tyrant he is not authorized to resist.
  • Junius, letter (September 7, 1769), in Letters, Vol. II (London: Bell & Daldy, 1865), p. 275.

K

• We must remember: what is beautiful is the resistance, and that people can-and must-resist from their own authentic place in the world…It is from this solid, self-knowing place that we can work towards peace and justice
  • Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz To Be a Radical Jew in the Late 20th Century in The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology (1986)

• Beauty is merciless. You do not look at it, it looks at you and does not forgive.
  • Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco (1965).

• A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
  Its loveliness increases; it will never
  pass into nothingness.
  • John Keats, Endymion (1818), Book I, line 1.

• Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all
  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
  • John Keats, Poems (1820), "Ode on a Grecian Urn", last lines.

• I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want—an adorable pancreas?
  • Jean Kerr, "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, I Don't Want to Hear One Word Out Of You", The Snake Has All the Lines (1960).

• Nieuwerkerke's replacement did not give Manet and the painters of the Café Guerbois any... cause for cheer. Under the Third Republic... in November 1870 Charles Blanc... became Director of Fine Arts. ...Blanc had published a biography of Ingres, whom he idealized... and for several decades [Blanc] had been the most prolific and articulate exponent of the sort of Neoclassicism celebrated at the École des Beaux-Arts. In his lofty conception of art, Eve was the original representative of beauty, but by plucking the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge she had plunged the world into a... sort of Platonic world of appearances in which the ideal was obscured by the humdrum and ugly material world. ...[T]he ability to see through the veil of appearances... was "obscure, latent, and sleeping" among the majority of men. However, great artists— ...especially Ingres and the painters of the Italian Renaissance—"carry within themselves this idea of the beautiful in a state of light." The true mission of art was... to show the "idea of the beautiful" that concealed itself behind the flickering shadows of the fallen world. ...[A]rt should not portray nature... but should idealize it... [H]e was vehemently opposed to Realism and paintings of la vie moderne, believing that artists who imitated nature and everyday life were slaves to appearance.
  • Ross King, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism (2006) p. 315; citing Charles Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin (1867), Misook Song, The Arts Theories of Charles Blanc (1984), and Jennifer L. Shaw, "The Figure of Venus: Rhetoric of the Ideal and the Salon of 1863," Art History 14 (December, 1991) pp. 549-53.

• In this job an illusion of beauty is sold which doesn’t really exist like that. It’s like a work of art, an act. I cry in front of the camera but am not really sad. I’ve just come from a job, am made-up and made to look beautiful with fantastic clothes and hair and nails all done.
  • Heidi Klum, interview in Der Spiegel (10 February 2006).

• Half of all the women in the world are beautiful to men, nearly all are beautiful when they smile, and all are beautiful all the time to God.
  • Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), p. 69.

L

• The first step towards establishing pretensions of any kind, is to believe firmly in them yourself: faith is very catching, and half the beauty-reputations of which I hear have originated with the possessors.
  • Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Ethel Churchill (or The Two Brides) (1837), Vol. I Chapter 6
• (Five-year-old Max, to his fatherː) "My teacher tells me real beauty's on the inside."
  (Father, in replyː) "That's just something ugly people say."
  • Movie, Liar Liar, 1997. (Clip on Youtube here.)
• Nothing makes a woman more beautiful than the belief that she is beautiful.
  • Sophia Loren Arneson, Krystin; Gustashaw, Megan (2011). "25 of the Best Fashion Quotes of All Time". Glamour. Retrieved January 22, 2013.

M

• Ghritachi and Menaka and Rambha and Purvachitti and Swayamprabha and Urvashi and Misrakeshi and Dandagauri and Varuthini and Gopali and Sahajanya and Kumbhayoni and Prajagara and Chitrasena and Chitralekha and Saha and Madhuraswana, these and others by thousands, possessed of eyes like lotus leaves, who were employed in enticing the hearts of persons practising rigid austerities, danced there. And possessing slim waists and fair large hips, they began to perform various evolutions, shaking their deep bosoms, and casting their glances around, and exhibiting other attractive attitudes capable of stealing the hearts and resolutions and minds of the spectators.
  • Mahabharata, Book III: Vana Parva, Section 43

• I remember that in a widely distributed French newspaper they asked the famous author of the Génie du Christianisme, if a nymph was not a bit more beautiful than a nun. In supposing them represented by the same talent or by equal talents (a condition without which the question would make no sense), there is no doubt that the nun would be more beautiful. The error best suited to extinguishing the true sentiment of beauty is that of confusing that which pleases with that which is beautiful, or in other words, that which pleases the senses with that which pleases the intelligence.

What spectator of our sex will not find himself more moved by Titian's Venus than by Raphael's most beautiful Virgin? And yet what a difference of merit and worth! The beautiful, in all imaginable genres, is that which pleases enlightened virtue. Any other definition is false or insufficient. So why would the nun be less beautiful than the nymph? Perhaps because she is clothed? By what immoral blindness would one want to judge the representation other than the reality? Who does not know that veiled beauty is more seductive than visible beauty? What man has not noticed, and ten thousand times, that the woman who decides to satisfy the eye more than the imagination lacks taste even more than wisdom?

• Joseph de Maistre, An Examination of the Philosophy of Francis Bacon (1836), p. 287

• Beauty … is the sole aspect of the spiritual which we can perceive through our senses.
  • Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, H. Lowe-Porter, trans. (1930), p. 45

• A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to a normal child as the breath of life. Suppose your child's ideal becomes a superman who uses his extraordinary power to help the weak. The most important ingredient in the human happiness recipe still is missing-love. It's smart to be strong. It's big to be generous. But it's sissified according to exclusively masculine rules, to be tender, loving affectionate, and alluring. "Aw, that;'s girls stuff!" snorts our young comics reader. "Who wants to be a girl?" And that's the point. Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.
  • William Moulton Marston, in Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, (2014)

• Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it.
  • W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale.

• Huey: Days like this, I look out at all the snow and think. Man, this is beautiful…
  Then I wonder – is it really beautiful, or have we just been conditioned to think of everything “white” as beautiful? Is my mind, perhaps, not as liberated from the slave mentality as I thought?
  Then I think, what if snow were brown? Would I find it as nice to look at, or would it look “dirty”? Is this indicative that somewhere within my subconscious lurks some heretofore undiscovered self-hate?
  • Aaron McGruder, The Boondocks, (12/10/2000).

• Through light and joy is the world opened up, revealed for what it is: ineffable beauty, unending creation.
  • Henry Miller, The Books In My Life (1952), Chapter 8: "The Days of My Life".

• The moment one give close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnified world in itself.
  • Henry Miller, Plexus (Book Two of The Rosy Crucifixion) (1953).
  • (often misquoted with "magnificent" for "magnified").

• Beauty is Nature's coin, must not be hoarded,
  But must be current, and the good thereof
  Consists in mutual and partaken bliss.
  • John Milton, Comus (1637), line 739.

• Beauty is nature's brag, and must be shown
  In courts, at feasts, and high solemnities,
  Where most may wonder at the workmanship.
  • John Milton, Comus (1637), line 745.

• Hung over her enamour'd, and beheld
  Beauty, which, whether waking or asleep,
  Shot forth peculiar graces.
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book V, line 13.

• She fair, divinely fair, fit love for gods.
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book IX, line 489.

• ...for beauty stands
  In the admiration only of weak minds
  Led captive. Cease to admire, and all her plumes
  Fall flat and shrink into a trivial toy,
  At every sudden slighting quite abash'd.
  • John Milton, Paradise Regained (1671), Book II, line 220.

• And ladies of the Hesperides, that seemed
  Fairer than feign'd of old.
  • John Milton, Paradise Regained (1671), Book II, line 357.

• Yet beauty, tho' injurious, hath strange power,
  After offence returning, to regain
  Love once possess'd.
  • John Milton, Samson Agonistes (1671), line 1003.

• Amarás la belleza, que es la sombra de Dios sobre el Universo.
  • Translation: Love beauty, which is God's shadow across the universe.
  • Gabriela Mistral, "Decálogo del artista" ("Decalogue of the Artist"), Desolación (1922).

• Beauty is as tangible as blood, in a way. It is a separate, distinct force that inhabits the bodies of men and women. You must have noticed the vacuity that accompanies perfect beauty in so many women...the force so strong that it drives out all other forces and lives vampirishly at the expense of intelligence and goodness and conscience and all else.
  • C. L. Moore, “Black Thirst” (1934) in her collection Northwest Smith (ellipsis in the original)

• Beauty has wings, and too hastily flies,
  And love, unrewarded, soon sickens and dies.
  • Edward Moore, Song XII (c. 1750s), St. 3.

• Beauty is everlasting,
  and dust is for a time.
  • Marianne Moore, Collected Poems (1951), "In Distrust of Merits".

• Beauty is perceived rhythm. Wave-rhythm through which everything outside us is mediated.
  Or: The beautiful is really everything one looks at with love. The more one loves the world, the more beautiful one will find it.
  • Christian Morgenstern, Steps (Stufen, 1918), "Art" 1895 ("Kunst" 1895).

• Since most people find mathematics somewhat forbidding, if not frightening, they find it difficult to understand how it can be regarded as beautiful. ...It is not the visual beauty of a painting or the audio beauty of a musical performance. Nor is it the literary beauty of a great poem; it is entirely intellectual and therefore, while more difficult to perceive, more satisfying when perceived.
  • Lloyd Motz & Jefferson Hane Weaver, Conquering Mathematics: From Arithmetic to Calculus (1991).

N

• Beauty is but a flower
  Which wrinkles will devour.
  • Thomas Nashe, Summer's Last Will and Testament (1600), lines 1588–1589.

• Beauty is ever to the lonely mind
  A shadow fleeting; she is never plain.
  She is a visitor who leaves behind
  The gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.
  • Robert Nathan, "Beauty Is Ever to the Lonely Mind".

• Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty—he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world—alas! only a very human, an all too human, beauty.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche,Twilight of the Idols (1888), "Expeditions of an Untimely Man", 19.

O

• Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.
  • Robert Oppenheimer's last published words With Oppenheimer on an Autumn Day, Look, Volume 30, Number 26, December 19th, 1966

• Aut formosa fores minus, aut minus improba, vellem.
  Non facit ad mores tam bona forma malos.
  • I would that you were either less beautiful, or less corrupt. Such perfect beauty does not suit such imperfect morals.
  • Ovid, Amorum (16 BC), Book III, 11, 41.

P

• One would think that the mere shortness of life would be a reminder that to destroy beauty is to destroy one’s own self too.
  • Edgar Pangborn, A Mirror for Observers (1954), Part One, Chapter 1

• Let your beauty be not just the outward adorning of braiding the hair, and of wearing jewels of gold, or of putting on fine clothing; but in the hidden person of the heart, in the incorruptible adornment of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God very precious.
  • Peter 3:3-4 (as quoted in World English Bible).

• Making something beautiful is difficult, but it is amazingly worthwhile. If you learn to make something in your life truly beautiful—even one thing—then you have established a relationship with beauty. From there you can begin to expand that relationship out into other elements of your life and the world. That is an invitation to the divine. That is the reconnection with the immortality of childhood, and the true beauty and majesty of the Being you can no longer see. You must be daring to try that.
  • Jordan Peterson, Beyond Order (2021), p. 202

• Beauty leads you back to what you have lost. Beauty reminds you of what remains forever immune to cynicism. Beauty beckons in a manner that straightens your aim. Beauty reminds you that there is lesser and greater value. Many things make life worth living: love, play, courage, gratitude, work, friendship, truth, grace, hope, virtue, and responsibility. But beauty is among the greatest of these.
  • Jordan Peterson, Beyond Order (2021), p. 226

• The flowers anew returning seasons bring!
  But beauty faded has no second spring.
  • Ambrose Philips, The First Pastoral' (1709).

• He had always suspected that beauty was the real feminine religion, from the willingness of its devotees to submit to martyrdom for it.
  • H. Beam Piper, Time Crime (1955), reprinted in The Complete Paratime, ISBN 0-441-00801-1, p. 178

• Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing!
  • Camille Pissarro Art Is the Highest Form of Hope & Other Quotes by Artists by Phaidon (2016)

• The vicious lover is the follower of earthly Love who desires the body rather than the soul; his heart is set on what is mutable and must therefore be inconstant. And as soon as the body he loves begins to pass the first flower of its beauty, he "spreads his wings and flies away," giving the lie to all his pretty speeches and dishonoring his vows, whereas the lover whose heart is touched by moral beauties is constant all his life, for he has become one with what will never fade.
  • Plato, Pausanius in Symposium, 183e, M. Joyce, trans, Collected Dialogues of Plato (1961), p. 537.

• But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty—the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities of human life—thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine?
  • Plato, Symposium.

• Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity—I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly.
  • Plato, The Republic, Book 3

• What we call objective reality is, in the last analysis, what is common to many thinking beings, and could be common to all; this common part, we shall see, can only be the harmony expressed by mathematical laws. It is this harmony then which is the sole objective reality, the only truth we can attain; and when I add that the universal harmony of the world is the source of all beauty, it will be understood what price we should attach to the slow and difficult progress which little by little enables us to know it better.
  • Henri Poincaré, The Value of Science (1905) Introduction, p. 14

• Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare,
  And beauty draws us with a single hair.
  • Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1717), Canto II, line 27.

• Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll;
  Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.
  • Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1712), Canto V, line 33.

R

• Looking at beauty in the world is the first step of purify the mind. A corrupted mind can't recognize the beauty of the world. A pure mind perceives it.
  • Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspiration. Inner Light Publishers. 2010. p. 39. ISBN 978-93-82123-31-6. 

• Beauty is the purest feeling of the soul. Beauty arises when soul is satisfied.
  • Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power (2013)

• the true / power of beauty: // not to attract but to repulse / those who would withhold / themselves from it
  • Paisley Rekdal, "Whistlejacket" (2024)

• Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.
  • Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies (1922), First Elegy (1912); tr. Stephen Mitchell.

• Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies, for instance.
  • John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice.

• Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.
  • Bertrand Russell, "The Study of Mathematics" (1902).

• I do not understand where the 'beauty' and 'harmony' of nature are supposed to be found. Throughout the animal kingdom, animals ruthlessly prey upon each other. Most of them are either cruelly killed by other animals or slowly die of hunger. For my part, I am unable to see any very great beauty or harmony in the tapeworm. Let it not be said that this creature is sent as a punishment for our sins, for it is more prevalent among animals than among humans. I suppose what is meant by this 'beauty' and 'harmony' are such things as the beauty of the starry heavens. But one should remember that the stars every now and again explode and reduce everything in their neighborhood to a vague mist. Beauty, in any case, is subjective and exists only in the eye of the beholder.
  • Bertrand Russell, "What is an Agnostic" (in Leo Rosten's Religions of America).

S

• The most beautiful makeup of a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy.
  • Yves Saint-Laurent. Gaille, Brandon (July 23, 2013). "List of 38 Famous Fashion Quotes and Sayings". BrandonGaille.com. Retrieved November 15, 2013.

• Some say a host of cavalry, some an army on foot,
  and some a fleet of ships, is the most beautiful thing
  on this dark earth, but I say it is whatever
  one passionately desires.
  • Sappho (c. 600 B.C.). Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, ed. Edgar Lobel and Denys Page. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955, no. 16.
  • The verb translated as "passionately desires" is eratai, cognate with erōs.

• Beauty endures only for as long as it can be seen;
  Goodness, beautiful today, will remain so tomorrow.
  • Sappho (c. 600 B.C.). Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, ed. Edgar Lobel and Denys Page. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955, no. 148.

• True beauty is in the mind; and the expression of the features depends more upon the moral nature than most people are aware of.
  • Frederick Saunders, Mosaics (New York: Charles Scribner, 1859), p. 203.

• Das Unendliche endlich dargestellt ist Schönheit.
  • Beauty is the infinite represented in the finite.
  • Friedrich Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (System des transzendentalen Idealismus, 1800).

• Beauty comes, we know not how, as an emanation from sources deeper than itself.
  • John Campbell Shairp, Studies in Poetry and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1868), "The Moral Dynamic", p. 434.

• Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
  The eyes of men without orator.
  • William Shakespeare,The Rape of Lucrece (1594) (prior).

• For her own person,
  It beggar'd all description.
  • William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1600s), Act II, scene 2, line 202.

• Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.
  • William Shakespeare, As You Like It (c.1599-1600), Act I, scene 3, line 112.

• Heaven bless thee!
  Thou hast the sweetest face I ever looked on;
  Sir, as I have a soul, she is an angel.
  • William Shakespeare, Henry VIII (c. 1613), Act IV, scene 1, line 43.

• Of Nature's gifts thou may'st with lilies boast
  And with the half-blown rose.
  • William Shakespeare, King John (1598), Act III, scene 1, line 53.

• Beauty is brought by judgment of the eye,
  Not utter'd by base sale of chapmen's tongues.
  • William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost (c. 1595-6), Act II, scene 1, line 15.

• Beauty doth varnish age.
  • William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost (c. 1595-6), Act IV, scene 3, line 244.

• Beauty is a witch,
  Against whose charms faith melteth into blood.
  • William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (1598-99), Act II, scene 1, line 186.

• Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good;
  A shining gloss, that fadeth suddenly;
  A flower that dies, when first it 'gins to bud;
  A brittle glass, that's broken presently:
       A doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower,
       Lost, faded, broken, dead within an hour.
  • William Shakespeare, The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), st. 13 (numbering varies). There is some doubt about the authorship.

• He hath a daily beauty in his life.
  • William Shakespeare, Othello (ca. 1603), Act V, Scene 1.

• I'll not shed her blood;
  Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
  And smooth as monumental alabaster.
  • William Shakespeare, Othello (c. 1603), Act V, scene 2, line 3.

• O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
  It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night,
  Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear:
  Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!
  • William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1597), Act I, scene 5, line 46. (Later editions read: "Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night.").

• Her beauty makes
  This vault a feasting presence full of light.
  • William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1597), Act V, scene 3, line 85.

• Say that she frown; I'll say she looks as clear
  As morning roses newly wash'd with dew.
  • William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew'' (c. 1593-94), Act II, scene 1, line 173.

• 'Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white
  Nature's own sweet and cunning hand laid on.
  • William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (c. 1601-02), Act I, scene 5, line 257.

• There's nothing ill can dwell in such a temple:
  If the ill spirit have so fair a house,
  Good things will strive to dwell with't.
  • William Shakespeare, The Tempest (c. 1610-12), Act I, scene 2, line 458.

• Beauty is a magnet: repels some, attracts many, leaves no one unmoved.
  • Robert Silverberg, Capricorn Games (1974); originally published in The Far Side of Time: Thirteen Original Stories, edited by Roger Elwood; reprinted in The Collected Stories Volume 4: Trips 1972-73, ISBN 978-1-596-06212-2, p. 161

• To me the most beautiful thing is vulnerability.
  • Alec Soth Art Is the Highest Form of Hope & Other Quotes by Artists by Phaidon (2016)

• Her face so faire, as flesh it seemed not,
  But heavenly pourtraict of bright angels' hew,
  Cleare as the skye withouten blame or blot,
  Through goodly mixture of complexion's dew.
  • Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1589-96), Canto III, Stanza 22.

• I've fought the good fight. And now it’s all over, there's an indescribable peace. ...I believe in Michelangelo, Velásquez and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by beauty everlasting and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.
  • George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor's Dilema (1906) Act IV, Spoken by the painter, Louis.

• The saying that beauty is but skin deep, is but a skin-deep saying.
  • Herbert Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (1891), Vol. 2, Chapter XIV, "Personal Beauty".

• Beauty, my dear Sir, is not so much a quality of the object beheld, as an effect in him who beholds it. If our sight were longer or shorter, or if our constitution were different, what now appears beautiful to us would seem misshapen, and what we now think misshapen we should regard as beautiful. The most beautiful hand seen through the microscope will appear horrible. Some things are beautiful at a distance, but ugly near; thus things regarded in themselves, and in relation to God, are neither ugly nor beautiful. Therefore, he who says that God has created the world, so that it might be beautiful, is bound to adopt one of the two alternatives, either that God created the world for the sake of men's pleasure and eyesight, or else that He created men's pleasure and eyesight for the sake of the world. ...Perfection and imperfection are names which do not differ much from the names beauty and ugliness. ...
  This I know, that between finite and infinite there is no comparison; so that the difference between God and the greatest and most excellent created thing is no less than the difference between God and the least created thing.
  • Baruch Spinoza, Letter to Hugo Boxel (Oct. 1674) The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza (1891) Tr. R. H. M. Elwes, Vol. 2.

• L'admiration pour le beau se rapporte toujours à la Divinité.
  • The admiration of the beautiful always has relation to the Divinity.
  • Anne Louise Germaine de Staël, Germany (De l'Allemagne, 1813), Part IV, Ch. I.

• Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.
  • Stendhal, On Love.

• For the sublime and the beautiful and the interesting, you don't have to look far away.
  • Hedda Sterne Art Is the Highest Form of Hope & Other Quotes by Artists by Phaidon (2016)

• Beauty, like truth, never is so glorious as when it goes the plainest.
  • Laurence Sterne, "Sermon XXIV: Pride" (1766), in The Sermons of Mr. Yorick (New York: J. F. Taylor & Company, 1904), Vol. II, p. 299.

• Formonsa facies muta commendatio est.
  • A beautiful face is a silent commendation.
  • Publilius Syrus Sentences Maxim 283

T

• Part of the beauty of me is that I am very rich.
  • Donald Trump. Interview with Ashleigh Banfield on ABC's Good Morning America (17 March 2011); also in Neil King Jr. (17 March 2011), "Trump on 2012: ‘Part of Beauty of Me Is I'm Very Rich’", Washington Wire (Wall Street Journal) 
• Beauty more than bitterness, makes the heart break
  • Sara Teasdale, Love Songs (1917), "Song at Capri".

• Forever
  Seek for Beauty, she only
  Fights with man against Death!
  • Sara Teasdale, Flame and Shadow (1920), "The Voice".

• Do not beautify your appearance, but be beautiful in your way of life.
  • Thales of Miletus, in Early Greek Philosophy: Beginnings and Ionian Thinkers Loeb Classical Library Volume 525 (2016), p. 143

• Thoughtless of beauty, she was Beauty's self.
  • James Thomson, The Seasons, Autumn (1730), line 209.

• Seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans, however briefly, to the beauty that is an essential part of their own innermost being, their true nature.
  • Eckhart Tolle, in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (2005)

• The first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant events in the evolution of human consciousness. The feelings of joy and love are intrinsically connected to that recognition. Without our fully realizing it, flowers would become for us an expression in form of that which is most high, most sacred, and ultimately formless within ourselves.
  • Eckhart Tolle, in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (2005)

• It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
  • Leo Tolstoy,The Kreutzer Sonata (1889).

• Bricks are considered to be the first material created by human intelligence from the four elements: earth, air, water, and fire. ...The great variety of designs and effects that artists of the past, especially the Arabs... were able to create in their brickwork, assembled with an element so monotonous... can be compared only with the beauty and attractiveness a romantic poet attained by adjusting his verses to the rigidity of a formal meter.
  • Eduardo Torroja, Philosophy of Structures (1958) p. 28, Tr. J. J. Polivka, Milos Polivka from Razón y ser de los tipos estructurales (1957)

• There is more or less of pathos in all true beauty. The delight it awakens has an undefinable and, as it were, luxurious sadness, which is perhaps one element of its might. It may be that this feeling springs from a sense of unattained good, of a perfection of being quite at variance with the present, which the beautiful never fails to suggest.
  • Henry Theodore Tuckerman, "Tennyson", in Thoughts on the Poets (New York: C. S. Francis & Co., 1846), p. 275.

• Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare.
  • Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (1899).

V

• All the beauty of the world, 'tis but skin deep.
  • Ralph Venning, Orthodoxe Paradoxes (Third Edition, 1650), The Triumph of Assurance, p. 41.

• Gratior ac pulchro veniens in corpore virtus.
  • Even virtue is fairer when it appears in a beautiful person.
  • Virgil, Æneid (29-19 BC), V. 344.

• Nimium ne crede colori.
  • Trust not too much to beauty.
  • Virgil, Eclogæ (c. 42-38 BC), II. 17.

• It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.
  • Voltaire,"Dictionnaire philosophique portatif" (1764), "Taste", §1.

• Ask a toad what is beauty....; he will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat head, a yellow belly and a brown back.
  • Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary.

W

• O let me meet my days with quiet grace
  So all who gaze on me may truly say:
  "Lo, there is one who walked in Beauty's way!"
  • Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff, "Serene", Quiet Waters (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1921), p. 114.

• Why is the world so beautiful? is a question that we all ought to be embracing.
  • Robin Wall Kimmerer Interview on On Being podcast (2022)

• That beautiful flower in that vase has not spoken a word tonight; it will never speak a word, but, nevertheless, through its beauty and magnificent silence it is lifting up, and making more Christlike every human being in this room.
  • Booker T. Washington, Collected Papers, Volume 8: 1904-6, p. 313

• I pray the prayer of Plato old:
  God make thee beautiful within.
  • John Greenleaf Whittier, "My Namesake".

• [S]ome scientists focus on ideal beauty, others on empirical truth. My own approach, following a great tradition going back to Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, has been to use beauty as a guide to truth.
  • Frank Wilczek, "Beautiful, Impractical Physics" (Oct. 29, 2020) The Wall Street Journal.

• These experiences are not 'religious' in the ordinary sense. They are natural, and can be studied naturally. They are not 'ineffable' in the sense the sense of incommunicable by language. Maslow also came to believe that they are far commoner than one might expect, that many people tend to suppress them, to ignore them, and certain people seem actually afraid of them, as if they were somehow feminine, illogical, dangerous. 'One sees such attitudes more often in engineers, in mathematicians, in analytic philosophers, in book keepers and accountants, and generally in obsessional people'. The peak experience tends to be a kind of bubbling-over of delight, a moment of pure happiness. 'For instance, a young mother scurrying around her kitchen and getting breakfast for her husband and young children. The sun was streaming in, the children clean and nicely dressed, were chattering as they ate. The husband was casually playing with the children: but as she looked at them she was suddenly so overwhelmed with their beauty and her great love for them, and her feeling of good fortune, that she went into a peak experience . . .
  • Colin Wilson in New Pathways In Psychology (1972), p. 17.

• [T]he man who falls in love with beauty is quite different from the man who loves a girl and feels she is beautiful and can see what is beautiful about her.
  • D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971), p. 113.

• The gospel allies itself with all that is beautiful in the universe, as truly as with all that is noble and pure.
  • Samuel Wolcott, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 22.

• Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
  • Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Chapter 3.

Y

• What's female beauty, but an air divine,
  Through which the mind's all-gentle graces shine!
  They, like the Sun, irradiate all between;
  The body charms, because the soul is seen.
  • Edward Young, Love of Fame (1725-28), Satire VI, line 151.

Z

• “Everything that’s miserable in the world,” Nick the dwarf once said to me, “is because of beauty.”
  “Not truth or goodness?” I’d asked.
  “Oh, they help. But beauty is the culprit, the real principle of evil.”
  “Not wealth?”
  “Money is beautiful.”
  • Roger Zelazny, Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 2

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 57-63.

• I must not say that she was true,
  Yet let me say that she was fair;
  And they, that lovely face who view,
  They should not ask if truth be there.
  • Matthew Arnold, Euphrosyne.

• Ye Gods! but she is wondrous fair!
  For me her constant flame appears;
  The garland she hath culled, I wear
  On brows bald since my thirty years.
  Ye veils that deck my loved one rare,
  Fall, for the crowning triumph's nigh.
  Ye Gods! but she is wondrous fair!
  And I, so plain a man am I!
  • Pierre-Jean de Béranger, Qu'elle est jolie. Translated by C. L. Betts.

• The essence of all beauty, I call love,
  The attribute, the evidence, and end,
  The consummation to the inward sense
  Of beauty apprehended from without,
  I still call love.
  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sword Glare.

• And behold there was a very stately palace before him, the name of which was Beautiful.
  • John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), Part I.

• Who doth not feel, until his failing sight
  Faints into dimness with its own delight,
  His changing cheek, his sinking heart confess,
  The might—the majesty of Loveliness?
  • Lord Byron, Bride of Abydos (1813), Canto I, Stanza 6.

• The light of love, the purity of grace,
  The mind, the Music breathing from her face,
  The heart whose softness harmonized the whole,
  And, oh! the eye was in itself a Soul!
  • Lord Byron, Bride of Abydos (1813), Canto I, Stanza 6.

• She walks in beauty like the night
  Of cloudless chimes and starry skies;
  And all that's best of dark and bright
  Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
  Thus mellowed to that tender light
  Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
  • Lord Byron, She Walks in Beauty.

• Exceeding fair she was not; and yet fair
  In that she never studied to be fairer
  Than Nature made her; beauty cost her nothing,
  Her virtues were so rare.
  • George Chapman, All Fools, Act I, scene 1.

• I pour into the world the eternal streams
  Wan prophets tent beside, and dream their dreams.
  • John Vance Cheney, Beauty.

• She is not fair to outward view
  As many maidens be;
  Her loveliness I never knew
  Until she smiled on me:
  Oh! then I saw her eye was bright,
  A well of love, a spring of light.
  • Hartley Coleridge, Song.

• Beauty is the lover's gift.
  • William Congreve, The Way of the World, Act II, scene 2.

• The ladies of St. James's!
  They're painted to the eyes;
  Their white it stays for ever,
  Their red it never dies;
  But Phyllida, my Phyllida!
  Her colour comes and goes;
  It trembles to a lily,—
  It wavers to a rose.
  • Austin Dobson, At the Sign of the Lyre.

• She, though in full-blown flower of glorious beauty,
  Grows cold, even in the summer of her age.
  • John Dryden, Œdipus, Act IV, scene 1.

• Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
  This charm is wasted on the marsh and sky,
  Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
  Then beauty is its own excuse for being.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Rhodora.

• The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essay, On the Poet.

• Who gave thee, O Beauty,
  The keys of this breast,—
  Too credulous lover
  Of blest and unblest?
  Say, when in lapsed ages
  Thee knew I of old?
  Or what was the service
  For which I was sold?
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ode to Beauty, Stanza 1.

• Each ornament about her seemly lies,
  By curious chance, or careless art composed.
  • Edward Fairfax, Godfrey of Bullogne.

• Any color, so long as it's red,
  Is the color that suits me best,
  Though I will allow there is much to be said
  For yellow and green and the rest.
  • Eugene Field, Red.

• In beauty, faults conspicuous grow;
  The smallest speck is seen on snow.
  • John Gay, Fable, The Peacock, Turkey and Goose, line 1.

• Schön war ich auch, und das war mein Verderben.

  I too was fair, and that was my undoing.

  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, I. 25. 30.

• 'Tis impious pleasure to delight in harm.
  And beauty should be kind, as well as charm.
  • George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne, To Myra, line 21.

• The dimple that thy chin contains has beauty in its round,
  That never has been fathomed yet by myriad thoughts profound.
  • Hafiz, Odes, CXLIII.

• There's beauty all around our paths, if but our watchful eyes
  Can trace it 'midst familiar things, and through their lowly guise.
  • Felicia Hemans, Our Daily Paths.

• Many a temptation comes to us in fine, gay colours that are but skin deep.
  • Matthew Henry, Commentaries, Genesis, Chapter III.

• Beauty is the index of a larger fact than wisdom.
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859), II.

• A heaven of charms divine Nausicaa lay.
  • Homer, The Odyssey, Book VI, line 22. Pope's translation.

• O matre pulchra filia pulchrior.
  O daughter, more beautiful than thy lovely mother.
  • Horace, Carmina, I. 16. 1.

• Nihil est ab omni
  Parte beatum.

  Nothing is beautiful from every point of view.

  • Horace, Carmina, II. 16. 27.

• Sith Nature thus gave her the praise,
  To be the chiefest work she wrought,
  In faith, methink, some better ways
  On your behalf might well be sought,
  Than to compare, as ye have done,
  To match the candle with the sun.
  • Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sonnet to the Fair Geraldine. "Hold their farthing candles to the sun".

• Tell me, shepherds, have you seen
  My Flora pass this way?
  In shape and feature Beauty's queen,
  In pastoral array.
  • The Wreath, from The Lyre, Volume III, p. 27. (Ed. 1824). First lines also in a song by Dr. Samuel Howard.

• A queen, devoid of beauty is not queen;
  She needs the royalty of beauty's mien.
  • Victor Hugo, Eviradnus, V.

• Rara est adeo concordia formæ
  Atque pudicitiæ.

  Rare is the union of beauty and purity.

  • Juvenal, Satires (early 2nd century), X. 297.

• A thing of beauty is a joy forever;
  Its loveliness increases; it will never
  Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
  A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
  Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
  • John Keats, Endymion (1818), Book I, line 1.

• L'air spirituel est dans les hommes ce que la régularité des traits est dans les femmes: c'est le genre de beauté où les plus vains puissent aspirer.

  A look of intelligence in men is what regularity of features is in women: it is a style of beauty to which the most vain may aspire.

  • Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères, XII.

• 'Tis beauty calls, and glory shows the way.
  • Nathaniel Lee, Alexander the Great; or, The Rival Queens, Act IV, scene 2. ("Leads the way" in stage ed.).

• Beautiful in form and feature,
  Lovely as the day,
  Can there be so fair a creature
  Formed of common clay?
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Masque of Pandora, The Workshop of Hephæstus, Chorus of the Graces.

• Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,
  Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
  And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
  That ope in the month of May.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Wreck of the Hesperus, Stanza 2.

• Oh, could you view the melodie
  Of ev'ry grace,
  And musick of her face,
  You'd drop a teare,
  Seeing more harmonie
  In her bright eye,
  Then now you heare.
  • Richard Lovelace, Orpheus to Beasts.

• You are beautiful and faded
  Like an old opera tune
  Played upon a harpsichord.
  • Amy Lowell, A Lady.

• Where none admire, 'tis useless to excel;
  Where none are beaux, 'tis vain to be a belle.
  • George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton, Soliloquy of a Beauty in the Country, line 11.

• Beauty, like wit, to judges should be shown;
  Both most are valued where they best are known.
  • George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton, Soliloquy of a Beauty in the Country, line 13.

• Beauty and sadness always go together.
  Nature thought beauty too rich to go forth
  Upon the earth without a meet alloy.
  • George MacDonald, Within and Without, Part IV, scene 3.

• O, thou art fairer than the evening air
  Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
  • Christopher Marlowe, Faustus.

• 'Tis evanescence that endures;
  The loveliness that dies the soonest has the longest life.
  The rainbow is a momentary thing,
  The afterglows are ashes while we gaze.
  • Don Marquis, The Paradox.

• Too fair to worship, too divine to love.
  • Henry Hart Milman, Belvidere Apollo.

• The maid who modestly conceals
  Her beauties, while she hides, reveals:
  Gives but a glimpse, and fancy draws
  Whate'er the Grecian Venus was.
  • Edward Moore, Spider and the Bee, Fable.

• Not more the rose, the queen of flowers,
  Outblushes all the bloom of bower,
  Than she unrivall'd grace discloses;
  The sweetest rose, where all are roses.
  • Thomas Moore, Odes of Anacreon, Ode LXVI.

• To weave a garland for the rose,
  And think thus crown'd 'twould lovelier be,
  Were far less vain than to suppose
  That silks and gems add grace to thee.
  • Thomas Moore, Songs from the Greek Anthology, To Weave a Garland.

• Die when you will, you need not wear
  At heaven's Court a form more fair
  Than Beauty here on Earth has given:
  Keep but the lovely looks we see
  The voice we hear, and you will be
  An angel ready-made for heaven.
  • Thomas Moore, Versification of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Life, p. 36.

• An' fair was her sweet bodie,
  Yet fairer was her mind:—
  Menie's the queen among the flowers,
  The wale o' womankind.
  • Robert Nicoll, Menie.

• Altho' your frailer part must yield to Fate,
  By every breach in that fair lodging made,
  Its blest inhabitant is more displayed.
  • John Oldham, To Madam L. E. on her Recovery, 106.

• And should you visit now the seats of bliss,
  You need not wear another form but this.
  • John Oldham, To Madam L. E. on her Recovery, 116.

• Hast thou left thy blue course in heaven, golden-haired son of the sky! The west has opened its gates; the bed of thy repose is there. The waves come, to behold thy beauty. They lift their trembling heads. They see thee lovely in thy sleep; they shrink away with fear. Rest, in thy shadowy cave, O sun! let thy return be in joy.
  • Ossian, Carric-Thura, Stanza 1.

• And all the carnal beauty of my wife
  Is but skin-deep.
  • Sir Thomas Overbury, A Wife. "Beauty is but skin deep" is found in The Female Rebellion, written about 1682.

• Auxilium non leve vultus habet.

  A pleasing countenance is no slight advantage.

  • Ovid, Epistolæ Ex Ponto, II, 8, 54.

• Raram facit misturam cum sapientia forma.

  Beauty and wisdom are rarely conjoined.

  • Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon, XCIV.

• O quanta species cerebrum non habet!

  O that such beauty should be so devoid of understanding!

  • Phaedrus, Fables, I, 7, 2.

• Nimia est miseria nimis pulchrum esse hominem.

  It is a great plague to be too handsome a man.

  • Plautus, Miles Gloriosus, I, 1, 68.

• When the candles are out all women are fair.
  • Plutarch, Conjugal Precepts.

• 'Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call,
  But the joint force and full result of all.
  • Alexander Pope, Essay, On Criticism, Part II, line 45.

• No longer shall the bodice aptly lac'd
  From thy full bosom to thy slender waist,
  That air and harmony of shape express,
  Fine by degrees, and beautifully less.
  • Matthew Prior, Henry and Emma, line 429.

• For, when with beauty we can virtue join,
  We paint the semblance of a form divine.
  • Matthew Prior, To the Countess of Oxford.

• Nimis in veritate, et similitudinis quam pulchritudinis amantior.

  Too exact, and studious of similitude rather than of beauty.

  • Quintilian, De Institutione Oratoria, XII, 10, 9.

• Fair are the flowers and the children, but their subtle suggestion is fairer;
  Rare is the roseburst of dawn, but the secret that clasps it is rarer;
  Sweet the exultance of song, but the strain that precedes it is sweeter
  And never was poem yet writ, but the meaning outmastered the meter.
  • Richard Realf, Indirection.

• Is she not more than painting can express,
  Or youthful poets fancy, when they love?
  • Nicholas Rowe, The Fair Penitent (1703), Act III, scene 1.

• Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for instance.
  • John Ruskin.

• The saying that beauty is but skin deep is but a skin deep saying.
  • John Ruskin, Personal Beauty.

• The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.
  • George Sand, Handsome Lawrence, Chapter I.

• All things of beauty are not theirs alone
  Who hold the fee; but unto him no less
  Who can enjoy, than unto them who own,
  Are sweetest uses given to possess.
  • John Godfrey Saxe, The Beautiful.

• Damals war nichts heilig, als das Schöne.

  In days of yore [in ancient Greece] nothing was sacred but the beautiful.

  • Friedrich Schiller, Die Götter Griechenlands, Stanza 6.

• Die Wahrheit ist vorhanden für den Weisen.
  Die Schönheit für ein fühlend Herz.

  Truth exists for the wise, beauty for the feeling heart.

  • Friedrich Schiller, Don Carlos, IV. 21. 186.

• Das ist das Loos des Schönen auf der Erde!

  That is the lot of the beautiful on earth.

  • Friedrich Schiller, Wallenstein's Tod, IV. 12. 26.

• And ne'er did Grecian chisel trace
  A Nymph, a Naiad, or a Grace,
  Of finer form, or lovelier face!
  • Walter Scott, Lady of the Lake (1810), Canto I, Stanza 18.

• There was a soft and pensive grace,
  A cast of thought upon her face,
  That suited well the forehead high,
  The eyelash dark, and downcast eve.
  • Walter Scott, Rokeby, Canto IV, Stanza 5.

• Spirit of Beauty, whose sweet impulses,
  Flung like the rose of dawn across the sea,
  Alone can flush the exalted consciousness
  With shafts of sensible divinity—
  Light of the world, essential loveliness.
  • Alan Seeger, Ode to Natural Beauty, Stanza 2.

• Why thus longing, thus forever sighing
  For the far-off, unattain'd, and dim,
  While the beautiful all round thee lying
  Offers up its low, perpetual hymn?
  • Harriet Winslow Sewall, Why Thus Longing.

• O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
  By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
  • William Shakespeare, Sonnet LIV.

• A lovely lady, garmented in light
  From her own beauty.
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Witch of Atlas, Stanza 5.

• She died in beauty—like a rose blown from its parent stem.
  • Charles Doyne Sillery, She Died in Beauty.

• O beloved Pan, and all ye other gods of this place, grant me to become beautiful in the inner man.
  • Socrates, in Plato's Phædrus, end.

• For all that faire is, is by nature good;
  That is a signe to know the gentle blood.
  • Edmund Spenser, An Hymne in Honour of Beauty, line 139.

• They seemed to whisper: "How handsome she is!
  What wavy tresses! what sweet perfume!
  Under her mantle she hides her wings;
  Her flower of a bonnet is just in bloom."
  • Edmund Clarence Stedman, translation of Jean Prouvaire's Song at the Barricade.

• She wears a rose in her hair,
  At the twilight's dreamy close:
  Her face is fair,—how fair
  Under the rose!
  • Richard Henry Stoddard, Under the Rose.

• Fortuna facies muta commendatio est.
  A pleasing countenance is a silent commendation.
  • Syrus, Maxims.

• A daughter of the gods, divinely tall,
  And most divinely fair.
  • Alfred Tennyson, Dream of Fair Women, Stanza 22.

• How should I gauge what beauty is her dole,
  Who cannot see her countenance for her soul,
  As birds see not the casement for the sky?
  And as 'tis check they prove its presence by,
  I know not of her body till I find
  My flight debarred the heaven of her mind.
  • Francis Thompson, Her Portrait, Stanza 9.

• Whose body other ladies well might bear
  As soul,—yea, which it profanation were
  For all but you to take as fleshy woof,
  Being spirit truest proof.
  • Francis Thompson, "Manus Animam Pinxit", St. 3.

• Whose form is as a grove
  Hushed with the cooing of an unseen dove.
  • Francis Thompson, "Manus Animam Pinxit", St. 3.

• And as pale sickness does invade
  Your frailer part, the breaches made
  In that fair lodging still more clear
  Make the bright guest, your soul, appear.
  • Edmund Waller, A la Malade.

• The yielding marble of her snowy breast.
  • Edmund Waller, On a Lady Passing through a Crowd of People.

• Beauty is its own excuse.
  • John Greenleaf Whittier, Dedication to Songs of Labor (copied from Emerson).

• Elysian beauty, melancholy grace,
  Brought from a pensive, though a happy place.
  • William Wordsworth, Laodamia.

• Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair,
  Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair,
  But all things else about her drawn
  From May-time and the cheerful Dawn.
  • William Wordsworth, She was a Phantom of Delight.

• Alas! how little can a moment show
  Of an eye where feeling plays
  In ten thousand dewy rays;
  A face o'er which a thousand shadows go!
  • William Wordsworth, Triad.

• And beauty born of murmuring sound.
  • William Wordsworth, Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower.

• True beauty dwells in deep retreats,
  Whose veil is unremoved
  Till heart with heart in concord beats,
  And the lover is beloved.
  • William Wordsworth, To———, Let Other Bards of Angels Sing.

See also

• Aesthetics

External links

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has an article about:

Beauty

• Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Theories of Beauty to the Mid-Nineteenth Century