“Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.”
Stendhal (1783–1842) French writer
La beauté n'est que la promesse du bonheur.
Source: De L'Amour (On Love) (1822), Ch. 17, footnote
“Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real.”
Source: Red Mars (1992), Chapter 2, “The Voyage Out” (p. 85)
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Kim Stanley Robinson98
American science fiction writer 1952Related quotes
“Beauty is the promise of happiness.”
Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman
Actually by Stendhal: "La beauté n'est que la promesse du bonheur" (Beauty is no more than the promise of happiness), in De L'Amour (1822), chapter 17
Misattributed
Alexander Nehamas (1946) Professor of philosophy
Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (2010), p. 138.
“Riches and Art are spurious receipts for the production of Happiness and Beauty.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright
#104
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
“If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.”
Toni Morrison book The Bluest Eye
Source: The Bluest Eye
“Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords”
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer
Letter, June 8, 1762 [to an unnamed recipient], p. 103
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I
Context: Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged must end in disappointment. If it be asked, what is the improper expectation which it is dangerous to indulge, experience will quickly answer, that it is such expectation as is dictated not by reason, but by desire; expectation raised, not by the common occurrences of life, but by the wants of the expectant; an expectation that requires the common course of things to be changed, and the general rules of action to be broken.
