Beauty is in the eye of the beholder...

I googled the words "rose" and "thorn" to see if I could come up with anything interesting for this one. The usual culprits appeared - Burns with his red, red one and the White Rose, an anti-Nazi, German student movement of the early 1940's - but most interesting of all was this one!

Ultimately I decided to go with this:-

Beauty, like supreme dominion
Is but supported by opinion

Benjamin Franklin,Poor Richard's Almanack, 1741.