Beauty

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.

A noble metaphor, when it is placed to an advantage, casts a kind of glory around it, and darts a luster through a whole sentence.

There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.

In my childhood I demurred to the description of a certain young lady as "the pretty Miss So and So." My aunt rebuked me by saying "Remember always that the least plain sister is the family beauty."

He who desires a lifetime of happiness with a beautiful woman desires to enjoy the taste of wine by keeping his mouth always full of it.

Riches and Art are spurious receipts for the production of Happiness and Beauty.

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first.

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

Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.

Many individuals have, like uncut diamonds, shining qualities beneath a rough exterior.

To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.

In every true searcher of Nature there is a kind of religious reverence, for he finds it impossible to imagine that he is the first to have thought out the exceedingly delicate threads that connect his perceptions.

Our meddling intellect

A perfect woman; nobly planned,

She was a phantom of delight.

A violet by a mossy stone

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

And by the vision splendid

The rainbow comes and goes,

My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky:

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.

Earth has not anything to show more fair: