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Top 15 Elaine Scarry Quotes (2025 Update)

Elaine Scarry Quote: “How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.”

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

— Elaine Scarry

Elaine Scarry Quote: “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.”

2. “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

Elaine Scarry Quote: “It is the intense pain that destroys a person’s self and world, a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe.”

3. “It is the intense pain that destroys a person’s self and world, a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe.”

— Elaine Scarry

Elaine Scarry Quote: “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.”

4. “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

Elaine Scarry Quote: “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.”

5. “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

Elaine Scarry Quote: “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.”

6. “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

Elaine Scarry Quote: “Our desire for beauty is likely to outlast its object because, as Kant once observed, unlike all other pleasures, the pleasure we take in beauty is inexhaustible. No matter how long beautiful things endure, they cannot out-endure our longing for them.”

7. “Our desire for beauty is likely to outlast its object because, as Kant once observed, unlike all other pleasures, the pleasure we take in beauty is inexhaustible. No matter how long beautiful things endure, they cannot out-endure our longing for them.”

— Elaine Scarry

Elaine Scarry Quote: “Beauty always takes place in the particular, and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down.”

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

— Elaine Scarry

Elaine Scarry Quote: “Beauty always takes place in the particular.”

9. “Beauty always takes place in the particular.”

— Elaine Scarry

Elaine Scarry Quote: “Physical pain always mimes death and the infliction of physical pain is always a mock execution.”

10. “Physical pain always mimes death and the infliction of physical pain is always a mock execution.”

— Elaine Scarry

Elaine Scarry Quote: “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. Beauty, according to its critics, causes us to gape and suspend all thought.”

11. “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. Beauty, according to its critics, causes us to gape and suspend all thought.”

— Elaine Scarry

Elaine Scarry Quote: “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.”

12. “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

Elaine Scarry Quote: “Beauty brings copies of itself into being.”

13. “Beauty brings copies of itself into being.”

— Elaine Scarry

Elaine Scarry Quote: “The goal of the torturer is to make the one, the body, emphatically and crushingly present by destroying it, and to make the other, the voice, absent by destroying it.”

14. “The goal of the torturer is to make the one, the body, emphatically and crushingly present by destroying it, and to make the other, the voice, absent by destroying it.”

— Elaine Scarry

Elaine Scarry Quote: “Beauty as a “greeting”. At the moment one comes into the presence of something beautiful, it greets you. It lifts away from the neutral background as though coming forward to welcome you – as thought the object were designated to “fit” your perception.”

15. “Beauty as a “greeting”. At the moment one comes into the presence of something beautiful, it greets you. It lifts away from the neutral background as though coming forward to welcome you – as thought the object were designated to “fit” your perception.”

— Elaine Scarry

Elaine Scarry Quote: “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.”

16. “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

Elaine Scarry Quote: “What is imagining like? Like being a plant. What is imagining? It is not-perception: it is instead the quasi-percipient, slightly percipient, almost percipient, not yet percipient, after-percipient of perceptual mimesis. Like the rolled-back pale peach of the daylily Oakleigh, it is not sentience but sentience rolled back.”

17. “What is imagining like? Like being a plant. What is imagining? It is not-perception: it is instead the quasi-percipient, slightly percipient, almost percipient, not yet percipient, after-percipient of perceptual mimesis. Like the rolled-back pale peach of the daylily Oakleigh, it is not sentience but sentience rolled back.”

— Elaine Scarry

Elaine Scarry Quote: “The material world constrain us, often with gret beneficence, to see each person and thing in its time and place, its historical context. But mental life doesn’t so constrain us. It is porous, open to air and light, swings forward while swaying back, scatters its stripes in all directions, and delights to find itself beached beside something invented only that morning or instead standing beside an altar from three millennia ago.”

18. “The material world constrain us, often with gret beneficence, to see each person and thing in its time and place, its historical context. But mental life doesn’t so constrain us. It is porous, open to air and light, swings forward while swaying back, scatters its stripes in all directions, and delights to find itself beached beside something invented only that morning or instead standing beside an altar from three millennia ago.”

— Elaine Scarry

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