Beauty is a promise of happiness  

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Kant's famous definition of the beautiful. "That is beautiful," says Kant, "which pleases without interesting." Without interesting! Compare this definition with this other one [...] by Stendhal, who once called the beautiful une promesse de bonheur. Here, at any rate, the one point which Kant makes prominent in the aesthetic position is repudiated and eliminated—le désinteressement. Who is right, Kant or Stendhal? --Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality
Stendhal's depiction of the process of falling in love, from On Love, 1822
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Stendhal's depiction of the process of falling in love, from On Love, 1822

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"La beauté est une promesse de bonheur" (English: Beauty is a promise of happiness) is a dictum by Stendhal. It was first published as a footnote in his treatise On Love (1822).

It is often misattributed to Edmund Burke.

The title of Only A Promise of Happiness (2008) references the dictum.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Beauty is a promise of happiness" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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