Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

The proverb means that beauty is not a property of things but a judgement of the person who looks: what one finds lovely another may not. It is used to end arguments about taste and to defend an unusual choice of partner or picture.

English writers had stated the idea long before the proverb took its present shape. Shakespeare has “Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye” in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and the philosopher David Hume wrote in 1757 that beauty “is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them”. The exact wording is usually traced to a Victorian novel, Molly Bawn (1878) by Margaret Wolfe Hungerford.

Other languages prefer to say the same thing about taste in general: French “des goûts et des couleurs, on ne discute pas”, Spanish “sobre gustos no hay nada escrito”. The English proverb is gentler: it does not stop the discussion but moves beauty into the eye, where it can at least be shared.

English proverb