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

- Elaine Scarry

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

Beauty always takes place in the particular.

- Elaine Scarry

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 p…

- Elaine Scarry

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 fugi…

- Elaine Scarry

The generation is unceasing. Beauty, as both Plato’s Symposium and everyday life confirm, prompts the begetting of children: when the eye sees someon…

- Elaine Scarry

Injury is the thing every exhausting piece of strategy and every single weapon is designed to bring into being: it is not something inadvertently pro…

- Elaine Scarry

Beauty brings copies of itself into being.

- Elaine Scarry

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