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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.

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

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

Beauty brings copies of itself into being.

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

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

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

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

Beauty always takes place in the particular.

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

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

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

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

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