On Beauty and Being Just Quotes

“This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“Beauty brings copies of itself into being.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“Something beautiful fills the mind yet invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger or something of the same scale with which it needs to be brought into relation. Beauty, according to its critics, causes us to gape and suspend all thought.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“Beauty as lifesaving.

Beauty quickens. It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid, animated, living worth living.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“Our desire for beauty is likely to outlast its object because, as Kant once observed, unlike all other pleasures, the pleasure we take in beauty is inexhaustible. No matter how long beautiful things endure, they cannot out-endure our longing for them.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“Matisse never hoped to save lives. But he repeatedly said that he wanted to make paintings so serenely beautiful that when one came upon them suddenly all problems would subside.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“The generation is unceasing. Beauty, as both Plato’s Symposium and everyday life confirm, prompts the begetting of children: when the eye sees someone beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce the person.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“The material world constrain us, often with gret beneficence, to see each person and thing in its time and place, its historical context. But mental life doesn't so constrain us. It is porous, open to air and light, swings forward while swaying back, scatters its stripes in all directions, and delights to find itself beached beside something invented only that morning or instead standing beside an altar from three millennia ago.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“Beauty as a “greeting”. At the moment one comes into the presence of something beautiful, it greets you. It lifts away from the neutral background as though coming forward to welcome you – as thought the object were designated to “fit” your perception.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“Folded into the uneven aesthetic surfaces of the world is a pressure toward social equality.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“One day I ran into a friend, and when he asked me what I was doing, I said I was trying to explain how beauty leads us to justice... he remembered being a child in India and coming upon Aristotle’s statement that justice was a perfect cube: he had been completely baffled by the statement, except he knew it had something to do with equality in all directions.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“When one goes on to find "better", or "higher", or "truer", or "more enduring", or "more widely agreed upon" forms of beauty, what happens to our regard for the less good, less high, less true, less universal instances? Simone Weil says, "He who has gone farther, to the very beauty of the world itself, does not love them any less but much more deeply than before".”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just