“Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet
Beauty
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)
Britannia Triumphans (1637; licensed Jan. 8, 1638; printed 1638), p. 15.
Compare:
"For angling rod he took a sturdy oak; / For line, a cable that in storm ne'er broke;... His hook was baited with a dragon's tail,— / And then on rock he stood to bob for whale."
From The Mock Romance, a rhapsody attached to The Loves of Hero and Leander, published in London in 1653 and 1677, republished in Chambers's Book of Days, vol. i. p. 173; Samuel Daniel, Rural Sports, Supplement, p. 57.
"His angle-rod made of a sturdy oak;
His line, a cable which in storms ne'er broke;
His hook he baited with a dragon’s tail,—
And sat upon a rock, and bobb'd for whale"
William King (1663–1712), Upon a Giant’s Angling (in Chalmers's British Poets, ascribed to King).
“Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet
Beauty
1860s, The Conduct of Life (1860)
“Do not bite at the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it.”
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America
Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher
Memoirs of Childhood and Youth (1924)
“The average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to infinity.”
Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998) Peruvian-American author
“He is as loving and tender as a child, but strong and sturdy as a rock.”
Juan Ramón Jimenéz book Platero
Source: Platero and I (1917), Ch. 1 : Platero, as translated by Eloïse Roach (1957).
Context: He is as loving and tender as a child, but strong and sturdy as a rock. When on Sundays I ride him through the lanes in the outskirts of the town, slow-moving countrymen, dressed in their Sunday clean, watch him a while, speculatively:
"He is like steel," they say.
Steel, yes. Steel and moon silver at the same time.
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist
Introduction to S. Kip Farrington Jr., Atlantic Game Fishing (1937)
Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician
30,000 Pounds of Bananas
Song lyrics, Verities & Balderdash (1974)