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Beauty

  1. (He was) all beauty, as the sun is all light – Phyllis Bottome
  2. Beautiful and faded like an old opera tune played upon a harpsichord – Amy Lowell
  3. Beautiful and freckled as a tiger lily – O. Henry
  4. Beautiful as a feather in one’s cap – Thomas Carlyle
  5. (He is) beautiful as a law of chemistry – Robert Penn Warren
  6. Beautiful as a motherless fawn – Bruce De Silva
  7. Beautiful as an angel – William Paterson
  8. Beautiful as an icon – Rachel Ingalls
  9. Beautiful as an illusion – Angela Carter
  10. Beautiful as a prince in a fairy story – Mary Lee Settle
  11. Beautiful as a rainbow – John Dryden
  12. Beautiful as a well-handled tool – Stephen Vincent Benét
  13. Beautiful as a woman’s blush and as evanescent too – Letitia Landon
  14. (For he was) beautiful as day – Lord Byron
  15. Beautiful as fire – Ambrose Bierce
  16. Beautiful as honey poured from a jar – People book review
  17. (There was a woman) beautiful as morning – Percy Bysshe Shelley
  18. Beautiful as nature in the spring – O. S. Wondersford
  19. Beautiful as sky and earth – John Greenleaf Whittier
  20. (She was as) beautiful as the devil, and twice as dangerous – Dashiell Hammett
  21. Beautiful as youth – Dollie Radford
  22. Beautiful … like a dream of youth – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
  23. Beauty … extraordinary, as if it were painted – Anita Brookner
  24. Beauty in a woman’s face, like sweetness in a woman’s lips, is a matter of taste – M. W. Little
  25. Beauty is as good as ready money – German proverb
  26. Beauty is striking as deformity is striking – Edmund Burke
  27. Beauty, like a lantern’s light, will shine outward from within him – George Garrett
  28. Beauty … like fine cutlery – John Gardner
  29. Donned beauty like a robe – Iris Murdoch
  30. Exquisite as the jam of the gods – Tennessee Williams
  31. Fair as a lily – Diaphenia

Flower/beauty comparisons.

  1. Fair as any rose – Christina Rossetti
  2. Fair as a star – William Wordsworth
  3. Fair as heaven or freedom won – Algernon Charles Swinburne
  4. Fair as is the rose in May – Geoffrey Chaucer
  5. Fair as marble – Percy Bysshe Shelley
  6. Fairer than the morning star – Oscar Wilde
  7. A fair face without a fair soul is like a glass eye that shines and sees nothing – John Stuart Blackie
  8. Gorgeous as Aladdin’s cave – Eleanor Mercein Kelly
  9. (In the dingy park) her beauty fled as swiftly as the marmalade kitten had leapt from her grasp – William Trevor
  10. Her beauty was as cool as this damp breeze, as the moist softness of her own lips – F. Scott Fitzgerald
  11. He’s as pretty as those long-defunct lover-gods – Charles Simic
  12. (A novel that would be as) lovely as a Persian carpet, and as unreal – Oscar Wilde
  13. Lovely as Spring’s first rose – William Wordsworth
  14. Lovely as the evening moon – Amy Lowell
  15. Outstanding beauty, like outstanding gifts of any kind, tends to get in the way of normal emotional development, and thus of that particular success in life which we call happiness – Milton R. Sapirstein
  16. Pretty as a diamond flush – Alfred Henry Lewis
  17. (Face …) pretty as a greeting card – Donald E. Westlake
  18. Pretty as a new-laid egg – American colloquialism, attributed to Midwest
  19. (There sat Mary) pretty as a rose – Jump Rope Rhyme
  20. Pretty as a spotted pony – American colloquialism, attributed to Southeast
  21. Pretty as a spotted pup – Mary Hood
  22. Pretty as a wax doll – Katherine Mansfield
  23. Pretty as the carved face on a … cameo – Davis Grubb
  24. Pretty like children on their birthdays – Truman Capote
  25. Shed beauty like winter trees – George Garrett
  26. She walks in beauty like the night – Lord Byron
  27. A timeless and much quoted Byron line. It continues with “Of cloudless nights and starry skies.”
  28. She was lovely as a flower, and, like a flower, she passed away – Richard Le Gallienne
  29. There is in true beauty, as in courage, something which narrow souls cannot dare to admire – William Congreve
  30. In the original manuscript of The Old Bachelor the word ‘something’ was ‘somewhat.’
  31. A thing of beauty is a joy forever – John Keats A Keats classic that embodies the rule that when it comes to including or implying ‘like’ or ‘as,’ discretion is best.

Similes Dictionary, 1st Edition. © 1988 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.