“Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language. “English,” writes Virginia Woolf, “which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear has no words for… — Elaine Scarry Copy Share Image
“When one goes on to find "better", or "higher", or "truer", or "more enduring", or "more widely agreed upon" forms of beauty, what happens… — Elaine Scarry Copy Share Image
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,… — Elaine Scarry Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“Matisse never hoped to save lives. But he repeatedly said that he wanted to make paintings so serenely beautiful that when one came upon… — Elaine Scarry Copy Share Image
Beauty always takes place in the particular, and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down — Elaine Scarry Copy Share Image
“The material world constrain us, often with gret beneficence, to see each person and thing in its time and place, its historical context. But… — Elaine Scarry Copy Share Image
Permitted to inhabit neither the realm of the ideal nor the realm of the real, to be neither aspiration nor companion, beauty comes to… — Elaine Scarry Copy Share Image
How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things. — Elaine Scarry Copy Share Image
“Our desire for beauty is likely to outlast its object because, as Kant once observed, unlike all other pleasures, the pleasure we take in… — Elaine Scarry Copy Share Image
“Beauty as a “greeting”. At the moment one comes into the presence of something beautiful, it greets you. It lifts away from the neutral… — Elaine Scarry Copy Share Image
