“No one hath seen beauty in its highest lustre who hath never seen it in distress.”

— Henry Fielding, book The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

Source: Tom Jones

Last update May 22, 2020. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "No one hath seen beauty in its highest lustre who hath never seen it in distress." by Henry Fielding?

Henry Fielding photo

Henry Fielding70

English novelist and dramatist 1707–1754

Related quotes

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

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

No. 9, The Autumnal, line 1
Elegies
Source: The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose

“The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

“Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.”

William Shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet

Variant: O my love, my wife!
Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.
Source: Romeo and Juliet

“Beauty seen is never lost.”

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery

Sunset on the Bearcamp, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“He who hath bent him o'er the dead
Ere the first day of death is fled,—
The first dark day of nothingness,
The last of danger and distress,
Before decay's effacing fingers
Have swept the lines where beauty lingers.”

George Gordon Byron The Giaour

Source: The Giaour (1813), Line 68.

“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Beauty
Essays (1625)

“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.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Source: Nature and Selected Essays

“The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they’re seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?”

André Gide book The Immoralist

Source: The Immoralist (1902), p. 159

“Whatever is in any way beautiful hath its source of beauty in itself, and is complete in itself; praise forms no part of it. So it is none the worse nor the better for being praised.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Variant: That which is really beautiful has no need of anything. (trans. George Long)
Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IV, 20

“I’ve never seen the moon look so lovely as the night I saw it with you.
It let me know I’d never seen the moon before. (Never seen the moon before)
So many speak of the moon as though it had no flaws.
But to compare it to a beauty like yours would give one pause.”

Prince (1958–2016) American pop, songwriter, musician and actor

Call My Name
Song lyrics, Musicology (2004)

Related topics

Beauty