Famously Said Random quote

Quotes about beauty

144 quotes from 110 people

Most readBy personPage 4 of 10

Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!
Christopher Marlowe1564–1593Doctor Faustus (c. 1603), Act V, scene i, lines 91–93In context
- Women
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.
Matthew Arnold1822–1888Thyrsis (1866), St. 2
Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.
William Shakespeare1564–1616The Rape of Lucrece (1594).
Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.
Democritus460–360 BCFreeman (1948), p. 161
Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.
Nassim Nicholas Talebborn 1960The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 24
- Age
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 Wollstonecraft1759–1797A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Ch. 3
- Women
In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness.
Colette1873–1954Gigi (1945)
We think of Marilyn who was every man’s love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.
Norman Mailer1923–2007Marilyn (1973), Ch. 1
- America
Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882Nature (1836), Beauty
- Virtue
Grace in women has more effect than beauty.
William Hazlitt1778–1830The Round Table (1815-1817), “On Manner”
- Women
Beauty is everlasting
and dust is for a time.
Marianne Moore1887–1972“In Distrust of Merits” (1944)
The body is meant to be seen, not all covered up.
Marilyn Monroe1926–1962Handwritten note responding to a question about posing nude, as quoted in International Herald Tribune (5 October 1984)
Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.
Stendhal1783–1842De L’Amour (On Love) (1822), Ch. 17, footnote
- Happiness
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Percy Bysshe Shelley1792–1822A Defence of Poetry (1821)
- Poetry
The saying that beauty is but skin deep is but a skin-deep saying.
Herbert Spencer1820–1903Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (1891), Vol. 2, Ch. XIV, Personal Beauty