Elaine Scarry Quotes

• When we come upon beautiful things they act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space.

  Elaine Scarry

  Beautiful, Space, Tears

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• 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

  Teacher, Order, Sky

  Elaine Scarry (2013). “On Beauty and Being Just”, p.7, Princeton University Press

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• Beauty brings copies of itself into being.

  Elaine Scarry

  Copies

  Elaine Scarry (2013). “On Beauty and Being Just”, p.3, Princeton University Press

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• How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.

  Elaine Scarry

  Beautiful, Balance, World

  Elaine Scarry (2013). “On Beauty and Being Just”, p.15, Princeton University Press

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• Injury is the thing every exhausting piece of strategy and every single weapon is designed to bring into being: it is not something inadvertently produced on the way to producing something else but is the relentless object of all military activity.

  Elaine Scarry

  Military, War, Pieces

  Elaine Scarry (1985). “The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World”, p.85, Oxford University Press

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• Permitted to inhabit neither the realm of the ideal nor the realm of the real, to be neither aspiration nor companion, beauty comes to us like a fugitive bird unable to fly, unable to land.

  Elaine Scarry

  Real, Land, Bird

  Elaine Scarry (2013). “On Beauty and Being Just”, p.86, Princeton University Press

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• Beauty always takes place in the particular.

  Elaine Scarry

  Particular

  Elaine Scarry (2013). “On Beauty and Being Just”, p.18, Princeton University Press

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• Beauty always takes place in the particular, and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down

  Elaine Scarry

  Chance, Particular, Seeing

  Elaine Scarry (2013). “On Beauty and Being Just”, p.18, Princeton University Press

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• To misstate, or even merely understate, the relation of the universities to beauty is one kind of error that can be made. A university is among the precious things that can be destroyed.

  Elaine Scarry

  Errors, Kind, Made

  Elaine Scarry (2013). “On Beauty and Being Just”, p.8, Princeton University Press

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• 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

  Beautiful, Children, Plato

  Elaine Scarry (2013). “On Beauty and Being Just”, p.4, Princeton University Press

  4 Copy quote

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