“All the beauty of the world, 'tis but skin deep.”

From interview with Komal Nahta

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

"Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, I Don't Want to Hear One Word Out of You"
The Snake Has All the Lines (1960)

Source: Following the Equator (1897), Ch. XLI

The sad truth is that attractive people do better in school, where they receive more help, better grades, and less punishment; at work, where they are rewarded with higher pay, more prestigious jobs, and faster promotions; in finding mates, where they tend to be in control of the relationships and make most of the decisions; and among total strangers, who assume them to be interesting, honest, virtuous, and successful. After all, in fairy tales, the first stories most of us hear, the heroes are handsome, the heroines are beautiful, and the wicked sots are ugly. Children learn implicitly that good people are beautiful and bad people are ugly, and society restates that message in many subtle ways as they grow older. So perhaps it’s not surprising that handsome cadets at West Point achieve a higher rank by the time they graduate, or that a judge is more likely to give an attractive criminal a shorter sentence.
Source: A Natural History of the Senses (1990), Chapter 5 “Vision” (pp. 271-272)

Source: Ferret: The Reluctant King (2020), p. 139

Eve to Cain, in Pt. I, Act II
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)

Genesis 3.
Commentaries