Ralph Waldo Emerson Beauty Quotations

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting - a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man.

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has not superfluous parts; which exactly answers its ends.

Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.

It is true that genius takes its rise out of the mountains of rectitude; that all beauty and power which men covet are somehow born out of that Alpine district; that any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm.

We call the beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean, escaping the dowdiness of the good and the heartlessness of the true.

For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe.

Thy dangerous glances make women of men; new-born, we are melting into nature again.

Go out of the house to see the moon, and 't is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who could ever clutch it? Go forth to find it, and it is gone: 't is only a mirage as you look from the windows of diligence.

Personal beauty is then first charming and itself, when it dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story without an end; when it suggests gleams and visions, and not earthly satisfactions; when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel his right to it, though he were Caesar; he cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset.

That you are fair or wise is vain, Or strong, or rich, or generous; You must have also the untaught strain That sheds beauty on the rose.

Beauty through my senses stole; I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

Without the great arts which speak to the sense of beauty, a man seems to me a poor, naked, shivering creature. These are his becoming draperies, which warm and adorn him.

The most useful man in the most useful world, so long as only commodity was served, would remain unsatisfied. But, as fast as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value.

A beautiful person among the Greeks, was thought to betray by this sign some secret favor of the immortal gods; and we can pardonpride, when a woman possesses such a figure that wherever she stands, or moves, or leaves a shadow on the wall, or sits for a portrait to the artist, she confers a favor on the world.

And yet--it is not beauty that inspires the deepest passion. Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. Beauty, without expression, tires.

It does not hurt weak eyes to look into beautiful eyes never so long.

Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms.

In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is thereforeuseful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.

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?

The beautiful is never plentiful.

Nothing is arbitrary, nothing is insulated in beauty. It depends forever on the necessary and the useful. The plumage of the bird, the mimic plumage of the insect, has a reason for its rich colors in the constitution of the animal. Fitness is so inseparable an accompaniment of beauty, that it, has been taken for it.

Accuracy is essential to beauty.

In the true mythology, Love is an immortal child, and Beauty leads him as a guide; nor can we express a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue.

Beauty brings its own fancy price, for all that a man hath will he give for his love.

Tell them dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then beauty is its own excuse for being: Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose! I never sought to ask, I never knew: But, in my simple ignorance suppose The selfsame power that brought me there brought you.

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.

If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.

To a dull mind all of nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

All high beauty has a moral element in it.

The highest Beauty should be plain set.

Rhodora! If the sages ask thee why This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.

I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore, With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.

The hand that rounded Peter's dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity; Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew: The conscious stone to beauty grew.

Never lose an opportunity to see anything that is beautiful. It is God's handwriting a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, every fair sky, every fair flower.

Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

Beauty rests on necessities.

He thought it happier to be dead, To die for Beauty, than live for bread

Any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm.

A beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of fine arts.

A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad.

Let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.

Culture opens the sense of beauty.

It has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision.

The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary.

Don't be a cynic, and bewail and bemoan. Omit the negative propositions. Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good. Set down nothing that will help somebody.

Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul

Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

The line of beauty is the line of perfect economy.

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.