A Quote by Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury

The most natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral truth. For all beauty is truth.

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury

Quote Topics

Beauty Honesty Moral Most Natural Natural Beauty Truth World

Quote Author

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury
British - Celebrity
April 28, 1801 - October 1, 1885

The most natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral truth. For all beauty is truth. True features make the beauty of the face; true proportions, the beauty of architecture; true measures, the beauty of harmony and music.

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury

The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty... The type of Truth required for the final stretch of Beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation... Apart from Beauty, Truth is neither good, nor bad... Truth matters because of beauty.

Alfred North Whitehead

In the most general terms, the Enlightenment goes back to Plato's belief that truth and beauty and goodness are connected; that truth and beauty, disseminated widely, will sooner or later lead to goodness. (While we're making at effort at truth and goodness, beauty reminds us what we're hold out for.)

Susan Neiman

Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life.

James Joyce

God who is goodness and truth is also beauty. It is this innate human and divine longing, found in the company of goodness and truth, that is able to recognize and leap up at beauty and rejoice and know that all is beautiful, that there is not one speck of beauty under the sun that does not mirror back the beauty of God.

Roberta Bondi

Love is beauty and beauty is truth, and that is why in the beauty of a flower we can see the truth of the universe.

Gautama Buddha

Truth is congenial to man. Moral truth is then most consummate when, like beauty, it commends itself without argument. The righteous not only does right, but loves to do right.

Francis William Newman

Art, if it can be ascribed value, is most valuable when its beauty (and the beauty of the truth it tells) bewilders, confounds, defies evil itself; it does so by making what has been unmade; it subverts the spirit of the age; it mends the heart by whispering mysteries the mind alone can’t fathom; it fulfills its highest calling when into all the clamor of Hell it tells the unbearable, beautiful, truth that Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again. None of these songs and stories matter if the beauty they’re adding to isn’t the kind of beauty that redeems and reclaims.

Andrew Peterson

Beauty breeds beauty, truth triggers truth. The cure for writer's block is therefore to read.

Matt Haig

Beauty breeds beauty; truth triggers truth. The cure for writer's block is therefore to read.

Matt Haig

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

Susan Sontag

Goodness is a special kind of truth and beauty. It is truth and beauty in human behavior.

Harry Allen Overstreet

I believe that in a certain way this is proof of the truth of Christianity: Heart and reason encounter one another, beauty and truth converge, and the more that we ourselves succeed in living in the beauty of truth, the more that faith will be able to return to being creative in our time too, and to express itself in a convincing form of art.