“The moment of perceiving something beautiful confers on the perceiver the gift of life.”— Elaine Scarry, amazon.comTagged: Aesthetics, beauty, Perfection, The Energy of The Beautiful, 107 Of The Greatest Single Sentences In Literature
“Perhaps only if one spins momentarily out of control, or grows feathers, or begins to write a sonnet can one be said to have seen the beauty of another person.”— Elaine Scarry, amazon.comTagged: Understanding Beauty, Feeling
“Matisse never hoped to save lives. But he repeatedly said that he wanted to make paintings so serenely beautiful that when one came upon them, suddenly all problems would subside.”— Elaine Scarry, amazon.comTagged: The Artidote, Power of Beauty, Beauty as Change
“The beautiful person or thing incites in us the longing for truth because it provides by its compelling an introduction to the state of certainty yet does not itself satiate our desire for certainty since beauty, sooner or later, brings us into contact with our own capacity for making errors.”— Elaine Scarry, amazon.comTagged: The Experience of the Sublime
“It is not that a poem or a painting or a palm tree or a person is ‘true,’ but rather that it ignites the desire for truth in us. It gives us an electric brightness, which leaves us prepared to undergo a giant labor.”— Elaine Scarry, amazon.comTagged: beauty, Truth, ignite, Desire, electric
“Something beautiful fills the mind yet invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger or something of the same scale with which it needs to be brought into relation.”— Elaine Scarry, amazon.comTagged: Aesthetics, Being Filled With Transparency
“Leonardo drew a cartoon of St. Anne and for 'two days a crowd of people of all qualities passed in naive excitement through the chamber where it hung.'”— Elaine Scarry, amazon.comTagged: Things Have Always Gone Viral, Viral Media
“Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable.”— Elaine Scarry, amazon.comTagged: Where The Words Come From, Aesthetics