Sayings about Beauty
What worth has beauty if it is not seen? ~ Italian Proverb
Beauty doesn’t exist, men only dream it. ~ Arabian Proverb
A heart in love with beauty never grows old. ~ Turkish Proverb
Whoever I love is the most beautiful. ~ Georgian Proverb
If there is light in the soul, there will be beauty in the person. If there is beauty in the person, there will be harmony in the house. ~ Chinese Proverb
Beauty, unaccompanied by virtue, is as a flower without perfume. ~ French Proverb
A poor beauty finds more lovers than husbands. ~ English Proverb
A good character is real beauty that never fades. ~ Burmese Proverb
Beauty is a good letter of introduction. ~ Portuguese Proverb
Beauty is power. ~ Arabian Proverb
Without grace beauty is an unabated hook. ~ French Proverb
Beauty never travels in a group. ~ Arabian Proverb
Beauty is ten, nine of which is dressing. ~ Azerbaijani Proverb
Beauty is the wisdom of women. Wisdom is the beauty of men. ~ Chinese Proverb
A beautiful person might not have a beautiful life. ~ Taiwanese Proverb
If you want to take revenge on a man, send him a really beautiful woman. ~ Arabian Proverb
A beautiful thing is never perfect. ~ Egyptian Proverb
A beautiful woman belongs to everyone; an ugly one is yours alone. ~ Indian Proverbs
Beautiful roads never go far. ~ Chinese Proverb
Beauty is the eye’s food but the soul’s sorrow. ~ German Proverb
Beauty without honesty is like a rose without perfume. ~ Danish Proverb
Old canoes can be restored, but youth and beauty cannot. ~ New Zealander Proverb
Beautiful girls are seldom happy, intelligent boys are seldom beautiful. ~ Chinese Proverb
He who marries a beauty marries trouble. ~ Nigerien Proverb
Your best mirror is someone more beautiful than you. ~ Chinese Proverb
Even the most beautiful morning cannot bring back the evening. ~ Chinese Proverb
Good health is the sister of beauty. ~ Maltese Proverb
A woman gets thirty percent of her beauty from nature and seventy percent from makeup. ~ Chinese Proverb
If God didn’t like beautiful women, he wouldn’t have made them. ~ Kurdish Proverb
The beauty of a woman does not make a man richer. ~ French Proverb
Beauty is silent eloquence. ~ French Proverb
Your beauty is in what you have. ~ Chadian Proverbs
The beautiful is less what one sees than what one dreams. ~ Belgian Proverbs
Time has no respect for beauty. ~ Polish Proverbs
She who is born a beauty is born betrothed.~ Italian Proverbs
Beauty is the sister of idleness and the mother of luxury. ~ Russian Proverbs
What is good is not necessarily beautiful. ~ Japanese Proverb
What you love is always beautiful. ~ French Proverb
A beautiful face is admired even when its owner doesn’t say anything. ~ Danish Proverbs
Charm is stronger than beauty. ~ Maltese Proverb
Tell a woman once she is beautiful and the devil will repeat it ten times. ~ French Proverb
Rare is agreement between beauty and modesty. ~ Latin Proverbs
Beauty is only skin deep. ~ English Proverbs
Women are as beautiful as flowers when they are forty years old. ~ Chinese Proverb
A beautiful wife without money is like a fine house without furniture. ~ Spanish Proverbs
Beautiful woman, beautiful trouble. ~ Jamaican Proverb
A beetle is a beauty in the eyes of his mother. ~ Traditional Proverb
Thousands of men were murdered because of their beautiful wives. ~ Georgian Proverb
Where the hostess is beautiful the wine is tasty. ~ French Proverb
When a beautiful woman does not steal, she takes you. ~ Burkinabe Proverb
Anyone who sees beauty and does not look at it will soon be poor. ~ Beninese Proverb
If you fall in love let her be a beauty; if you should steal, let it be a camel. ~ Lebanese Proverb
To have beautiful servant girls is a threat to good marriages. ~ Chinese Proverb
Even the devil is beautiful when he is young. ~ German Proverbs
Quotations about Beauty
Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning
There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness. ~ Charles Baudelaire
A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful. ~ Karl Kraus
All kinds of beauty don’t inspire love; there is a kind that pleases only the sight, but does not captivate the affections. ~ Miguel De Cervantes
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. ~ Francis Bacon
As we grow old, the beauty steals inward. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty – in projection and perceiving – is 99.9% attitude. ~Grey Livingston
In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves. ~ Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
I think that there is something truly beautiful in everybody you meet. ~ Katie Lowes
Beauty is a form of genius, is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight or springtime or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.~ Oscar Wilde
Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart. ~ Kahlil Gibran Quotes
Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled, not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it. ~ Georges Bataille
Beauty is in the heart of the beholder. ~ Al Bernstein
An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.~ Eduard Hanslick
Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true. ~ William Ralph Inge
It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the “dear deceit” of beauty. ~ George Eliot
What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for Beauty, and never see the Dawn! ~ Logan Pearsall Smith
Beauty: the power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband. ~ Ambrose Bierce
Heat cannot be separated from fire, or beauty from the eternal. ~ Dante, Alighieri
The ideal has many names, and beauty is but one of them.~ W. Somerset Maugham
As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
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 Quotes
Beauty is not caused. It is. ~ Emily Dickinson
Do I love you because you’re beautiful, Or are you beautiful because I love you? ~ Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II
By plucking her petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower. ~ Rabindrath Tagore
A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness. ~ Marguerite Gardiner
Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue: every natural action is graceful, every heroic act is also decent and causes the place and the bystanders to shine. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
I don’t want something special. I want something beautifully plain. ~ Anne Lamott
The beauty seen, is partly in him who sees it. ~ John Christian Bovee
There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance. ~ John Ruskin
I’m not ugly, but my beauty is a total creation. ~ Tyra Banks
Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all. ~ Andre Breton
Our hearts are drunk with a beauty our eyes could never see. ~ George W. Russell
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul. ~ John Muir
Strange that the vanity which accompanies beauty — excusable, perhaps, when there is such great beauty, or at any rate understandable — should persist after the beauty was gone. ~ Mary Arnim
If I think something is beautiful, there must be somebody out there who will agree with me. ~ William Kraft
Exuberance is beauty. ~ William Blake
Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God. ~ Jean Anouilh
Beauty… when you look into a woman’s eyes and see what is in her heart. ~Nate Dircks
Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference. ~ Aristotle Quotes
Plainness has its peculiar temptations quite as much as beauty. ~ George Eliot
Always have something beautiful in sight, even if it’s just a daisy in a jelly glass. ~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
Beauty?… To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to. ~ Pablo Picasso Quotes
The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
There is nothing that makes its way more directly to the soul than beauty. ~ Joseph Addison
The most beautiful view is the one I share with you. ~ Author Unknown
Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the infinite. ~ George Bancroft
Beauty in the flesh will continue to rule the world. ~ Florenz Ziegfeld
Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost. ~ Helen Keller Quotes
Beauty and folly are generally companions. ~ Baltasar Gracian
I don’t like standard beauty – there is no beauty without strangeness. ~ Karl Lagerfeld
Beauty is but the sensible image of the infinite. Like truth and justice, it lives within us; like virtue and the moral law, it is a companion of the soul. ~ George Bancroft
In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty. ~ Christopher Morley
Beauty always promises, but never gives anything. ~ Simone Weil
Things are beautiful if you love them. ~ Jean Anouilh
Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover, fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense. ~ Joseph Addison Quotes
Beauty… is the shadow of God on the universe. ~ Gabriela Mistral
Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it. ~ Confucius Quotes
I’ve never seen a smiling face that was not beautiful. ~ Author Unknown
Beauty is the promise of happiness. ~ Stendhal
Beauty comes as much from the mind as from the eye. ~ Grey Livingston
Some people, no matter how old they get, never lose their beauty – they merely move it from their faces into their hearts. ~ Martin Buxbaum
The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing. ~ Walter Benjamin
The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.~ Francis Bacon
Beauty Proverbs and Their Meanings
Gather proverbs about beauty from around the world and a pattern appears: almost every culture wrestles with the same question — is beauty something we see, or something we feel? Many of the sayings above treat beauty as a matter of perception rather than fact, shaped by love, character, and the eye of the one who looks. Here are some of the best-known beauty proverbs explained, so you can see what each one really means.
- “Beauty is only skin deep” (English) — outward good looks are shallow and temporary; a person’s real worth lies in their character, not their face.
- “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” — there is no fixed standard of beauty; what one person finds lovely, another may not, because beauty depends on who is looking.
- “Whoever I love is the most beautiful” (Georgian) — love shapes perception; affection makes the beloved appear more beautiful than anyone else.
- “A beetle is a beauty in the eyes of his mother” — love and bias colour how we see; to those who care for us, we are always beautiful.
- “A good character is real beauty that never fades” (Burmese) — physical beauty fades with age, but goodness of character stays beautiful for life.
- “Beauty, unaccompanied by virtue, is as a flower without perfume” (French) — looks without goodness are hollow; beauty needs virtue to have real value.
- “If there is light in the soul, there will be beauty in the person” (Chinese) — inner goodness radiates outward and makes a person genuinely beautiful.
- “Charm is stronger than beauty” (Maltese) — a warm, charming personality wins people over more lastingly than good looks alone.
- “Beauty is the eye’s food but the soul’s sorrow” (German) — beauty delights the sight, yet longing for it can torment the heart.
- “Beauty is power” (Arabian) — physical attractiveness gives a person real influence over others.
- “Time has no respect for beauty” (Polish) — no one’s beauty lasts; age comes to everyone regardless of how lovely they once were.
- “A heart in love with beauty never grows old” (Turkish) — keeping an eye for beauty and wonder keeps the spirit young, whatever your age.
- “Good health is the sister of beauty” (Maltese) — true beauty grows from good health; the two go hand in hand.
- “Your best mirror is someone more beautiful than you” (Chinese) — we measure and understand ourselves by comparison with others.
- “Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it” (Confucius) — beauty is everywhere; whether we notice it depends on us, not on the world.
For more on how looks can mislead, see our appearance proverbs; for sayings on love and character, browse love proverbs, or explore the full library of proverbs and their meanings.
Beauty Proverbs — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the most famous proverb about beauty?
The best-known are “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” — meaning beauty is subjective — and “beauty is only skin deep,” meaning outward looks matter less than character.
What do proverbs say about beauty across different cultures?
Cultures worldwide agree that beauty is largely a matter of perception. Georgian, Chinese, and French proverbs alike stress that love, character, and the eye of the beholder shape what we find beautiful, more than appearance itself.
What is a good proverb about inner beauty?
“A good character is real beauty that never fades” (Burmese) and “If there is light in the soul, there will be beauty in the person” (Chinese) both teach that true beauty comes from within.
What does “beauty is only skin deep” mean?
It means physical attractiveness is superficial and fleeting — a person’s true value lies in their character and conduct, not their looks.