How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.
Elaine ScarryRead
Beauty always takes place in the particular, and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down
Interpretation
What this quote means
Beauty is found in specific details, and without them, its perception diminishes.
Elaine Scarry's quote emphasizes that beauty is not an abstract concept but rather something that emerges from specific, tangible details in the world around us. When we focus on the particulars of our experiences, we enhance our ability to recognize and appreciate beauty; without those details, our opportunities to perceive beauty diminish significantly.
Themes
BeautyParticularsPerceptionDetailsAppreciation
In practice
Example use cases
In a presentation about art, you could quote this to emphasize the importance of details in aesthetic appreciation.
More from Elaine Scarry
All quotes βWhen 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 ScarryRead
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 ScarryRead
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 ScarryRead
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