Sourced and curated.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

Molly Bawn · 1878

★ 7.0

Beauty can pierce one like a pain.

Thomas Mann

Buddenbrooks · 1901

★ 6.9

Film · Black comedy (film) · Comedy drama (film) · Black comedy · Comedy drama

Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can't take it, and my heart is just going to cave in.

Ricky Fitts

American Beauty · 1999

★ 6.9

Beauty will save the world.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Idiot · 1869

★ 5.6

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Brothers Karamazov · 1880

★ 5.6

The curves of your lips rewrite history.

Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray · 1891

★ 5.5

Sociology

"Beauty" is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.

Naomi Wolf

The Beauty Myth · 1990

★ 5.2

Philosophical literature

Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.

Roger Scruton

Beauty: A Very Short Introduction · 2011

★ 5.2

Tragedy (play)

Was ever book containing such vile matter So fairly bound? O, that deceit should dwell In such a gorgeous palace!

William Shakespeare

1597

★ 4.8

Novel · Magazine

Genius lasts longer than Beauty.

Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray · 1890

★ 3.9

TV program · Comedy (TV) · Comedy

There’s a lot of beauty in ordinary things. Isn’t that kind of the point?

Pam Beesly

The Office · 2013

★ 3.9

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.

David Hume

1758

★ 3.8

Poem · Philosophical literature

Exuberance is beauty.

William Blake

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell · 1793

★ 3.8

Pretty girls make graves.

Jack Kerouac

The Dharma Bums · 1958

★ 3.8

Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.

John Donne

1631

★ 3.7

Song

Beauty's of a fading nature, Has a season, and is gone!

Robert Burns

1764

★ 3.7

Film · Comedy (film) · Comedy

You’re rather...attractive, for a beautiful girl with a great body.

Ty Webb

Caddyshack · 1980

★ 3.7

Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.

Khaled Hosseini

And the Mountains Echoed · 2013

★ 3.7

No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace As I have seen in one autumnal face.

John Donne

1631

★ 3.6

Autobiography and memoir

I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied.

Julia Margaret Cameron

1874

★ 3.6

Letter

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing!

Camille Pissarro

1893

★ 3.6

Song · Great American songbook

A pretty girl is like a melody That haunts you night and day.

Irving Berlin

A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody · 1919

★ 3.6

Novel · Science fiction

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

★ 3.6

Film · Black comedy (film) · Comedy drama (film) · Black comedy · Comedy drama

And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.

Lester Burnham

American Beauty · 1999

★ 3.6

Interview · Magazine

For the sublime and the beautiful and interesting, you don't have to look far away.

Hedda Sterne

2007

★ 3.6

Treatise

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

John Ruskin

1851

★ 3.5

Beauty for some provides escape, Who gain a happiness in eyeing The gorgeous buttocks of the ape Or autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.

Aldous Huxley

1917

★ 3.5

Lecture

It is the very same taste which relishes a demonstration in geometry, that is pleased with the resemblance of a picture to an original, and touched with the harmony of music.

Joshua Reynolds

1776

★ 3.5

Novel · Children's literature

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

Roald Dahl

The Twits · 1980

★ 3.5

If it be true that any beautiful thing raises the pure and just desire of man from earth to God, the eternal fount of all, such I believe my love.

Michelangelo

1525

★ 3.0

Historical literature

Beauty is a gift of God.

Aristotle

Diogenes Laertius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers · 240

★ 2.4

Don't bank too much on your complexion, lovely boy.

Virgil

37 BC

★ 2.2

Poem · Narrative poem

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade The eyes of men without an orator.

William Shakespeare

The Rape of Lucrece · 1594

★ 2.1

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty · 1860

★ 2.1

Film · Comedy (film) · Comedy

Moisture is the essence of wetness, and wetness is the essence of beauty.

Derek Zoolander

Zoolander · 2001

★ 2.1

Beauty and wisdom are rarely conjoined.

Gaius Petronius

Satyricon · 66

★ 2.0

Tragedy (play) · Tragedy

Yet beauty, though injurious, hath strange power, After offence returning, to regain Love once possessed.

John Milton

1671

★ 2.0

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

John Keats

1818

★ 2.0

Beauty is truth, truth beauty.

John Keats

Annals of the Fine Arts for 1819 · 1820

★ 2.0

Letter

I think the peasant girl is more beautiful than a lady, in her dusty, patched blue skirt and bodice, which get the most delicate hues from weather, wind, and sun. But if she puts on a lady's dress, she loses her peculiar charm.

Vincent van Gogh

1885

★ 2.0

Novel · Magazine

Beauty is a form of genius,—is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell, we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.

Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray · 1890

★ 2.0

Beauty's but skin deep.

John Davies of Hereford

1616

★ 1.9

There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.

Charles Baudelaire

1846

★ 1.9

I was half mad with beauty on that day.

William Morris

1858

★ 1.9

Personal journal

I believe that humor is a part of beauty.

Max Beckmann

1903

★ 1.9

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

Susan Sontag

On Photography · 1977

★ 1.9

Film · Animation (film) · Musical (film) · Animation · Musical

She warned him not to be deceived by appearances, for beauty is found within.

Beauty and the Beast

1991

★ 1.9

The Good consists in the congruity of a thing with the laws of the reason and the nature of the will, and in its fitness to determine the latter to actualize the former: and it is always discursive. The Beautiful arises from the perceived harmony of an object, whether sight or sound, with the inborn and constitutive rules of the judgment and imagination: and it is always intuitive.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1814

★ 1.9

Personal journal

The beautiful implies a combination of many different qualities. Strength alone, without elegance, etc., is not beauty. In a single word, the broadest definition would be harmony.

Eugene Delacroix

1854

★ 1.9

Interview · Magazine

I lean toward the enchantment, the visual power, of the aesthetically rejected subject.

Walker Evans

1974

★ 1.9