Beauty
- (He was) all beauty, as the sun is all light – Phyllis Bottome
- Beautiful and faded like an old opera tune played upon a harpsichord – Amy Lowell
- Beautiful and freckled as a tiger lily – O. Henry
- Beautiful as a feather in one’s cap – Thomas Carlyle
- (He is) beautiful as a law of chemistry – Robert Penn Warren
- Beautiful as a motherless fawn – Bruce De Silva
- Beautiful as an angel – William Paterson
- Beautiful as an icon – Rachel Ingalls
- Beautiful as an illusion – Angela Carter
- Beautiful as a prince in a fairy story – Mary Lee Settle
- Beautiful as a rainbow – John Dryden
- Beautiful as a well-handled tool – Stephen Vincent Benét
- Beautiful as a woman’s blush and as evanescent too – Letitia Landon
- (For he was) beautiful as day – Lord Byron
- Beautiful as fire – Ambrose Bierce
- Beautiful as honey poured from a jar – People book review
- (There was a woman) beautiful as morning – Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Beautiful as nature in the spring – O. S. Wondersford
- Beautiful as sky and earth – John Greenleaf Whittier
- (She was as) beautiful as the devil, and twice as dangerous – Dashiell Hammett
- Beautiful as youth – Dollie Radford
- Beautiful … like a dream of youth – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
- Beauty … extraordinary, as if it were painted – Anita Brookner
- Beauty in a woman’s face, like sweetness in a woman’s lips, is a matter of taste – M. W. Little
- Beauty is as good as ready money – German proverb
- Beauty is striking as deformity is striking – Edmund Burke
- Beauty, like a lantern’s light, will shine outward from within him – George Garrett
- Beauty … like fine cutlery – John Gardner
- Donned beauty like a robe – Iris Murdoch
- Exquisite as the jam of the gods – Tennessee Williams
- Fair as a lily – Diaphenia
Flower/beauty comparisons.
- Fair as any rose – Christina Rossetti
- Fair as a star – William Wordsworth
- Fair as heaven or freedom won – Algernon Charles Swinburne
- Fair as is the rose in May – Geoffrey Chaucer
- Fair as marble – Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Fairer than the morning star – Oscar Wilde
- A fair face without a fair soul is like a glass eye that shines and sees nothing – John Stuart Blackie
- Gorgeous as Aladdin’s cave – Eleanor Mercein Kelly
- (In the dingy park) her beauty fled as swiftly as the marmalade kitten had leapt from her grasp – William Trevor
- Her beauty was as cool as this damp breeze, as the moist softness of her own lips – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- He’s as pretty as those long-defunct lover-gods – Charles Simic
- (A novel that would be as) lovely as a Persian carpet, and as unreal – Oscar Wilde
- Lovely as Spring’s first rose – William Wordsworth
- Lovely as the evening moon – Amy Lowell
- 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
- Pretty as a diamond flush – Alfred Henry Lewis
- (Face …) pretty as a greeting card – Donald E. Westlake
- Pretty as a new-laid egg – American colloquialism, attributed to Midwest
- (There sat Mary) pretty as a rose – Jump Rope Rhyme
- Pretty as a spotted pony – American colloquialism, attributed to Southeast
- Pretty as a spotted pup – Mary Hood
- Pretty as a wax doll – Katherine Mansfield
- Pretty as the carved face on a … cameo – Davis Grubb
- Pretty like children on their birthdays – Truman Capote
- Shed beauty like winter trees – George Garrett
- She walks in beauty like the night – Lord Byron
- A timeless and much quoted Byron line. It continues with “Of cloudless nights and starry skies.”
- She was lovely as a flower, and, like a flower, she passed away – Richard Le Gallienne
- There is in true beauty, as in courage, something which narrow souls cannot dare to admire – William Congreve
- In the original manuscript of The Old Bachelor the word ‘something’ was ‘somewhat.’
- 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.