Zadie Smith

Every novel Zadie Smith's written deserves to be on this list, but On Beauty is one of Eleanor Oliphant best and funniest books to date.

St. Thomas Aquinas

St. Thomas Aquinas writes of beauty as a proportion of perfection that can be rested in, making beauty a prerequisite for rest, for leisure.

Shaftesbury Shaftesbury

Shaftesbury Shaftesbury is the first of the intuitional writers on beauty.

Rae Morris

One of the most influential make up artists in the world, Rae Morris has written the book on beauty (in fact, she’s written several of them…)

Famed Persian Philosopher , Avicenna

Famed Persian Philosopher, Avicenna (980-1037) wrote about beauty.

Plotinus

Plotinus, one of the sages of the Platonic tradition wrote two treatises that explored Beauty

Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas also wrote about beauty, which isn’t really surprising.

Curtis Sittenfeld

On Beauty, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica, and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.

Friedrich Schiller

In a letter to his friend Christian Gottfried Körner on December 21, 1792, Friedrich Schiller first indicated Friedrich Schiller's intention to advance Friedrich Schiller's own theory of beauty in a work to be entitled Kallias or, On the Beautiful.

Smith

Last year Smith published On Beauty, a novel set in the hothouse of American academia and scheduled to be made into a movie produced by Scott Rudin, who has adapted such provocative works as The Hours and Closer for the screen.

Plato and Schiller

Plato and Schiller are among the authors who have written on beauty.

Sir Thomas Overbury

In 1613, the English poet Sir Thomas Overbury wrote that beauty is only skin-deep.

C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis is the author of beauty, C.S. Lewis is the source of our instinct for beauty, C.S. Lewis is beauty itself, breathing and living, filling us and all creation with C.S. Lewis's Holy Breath.

Mahatma Gandhi

As Mahatma Gandhi wrote on Beauty, 'Why can’t you see the beauty of colours in vegetables?

John O'Donohue

On Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue invites us to remember and to awaken the Beautiful.

Zan Perrion

Zan Perrion has been talking and writing about beauty for decades.

Kant

Kant's (1790) theory of beauty is perhaps the singularly most influential treatise on beauty in history.

Ennead

Ennead's On Beauty is a copy of Plotinus' critique of beauty translated by Stephen MacKenna.

by two former high-school buddies—

beauty was written by two former high-school buddies—Ian Leighton, a sophomore at UC Berke­ley, and David Hodge, a sophomore at the University of Southern California.

Robin McKinley

Twenty years ago, Robin McKinley dazzled readers with the power of Robin McKinley's novel Beauty.