“To regard beauty as a luxury, adornment, or a social signifier is to miss the true potential of the experience.”

-John Armstrong

 

John Armstrong’s quote reflects his views on the nature of beauty. This quote means that beauty is cheapened when it is held as something to be enjoyed only as a status symbol or class- based luxury. In essence, if we only treat beauty as something for high-end people to enjoy and not as a universal truth to be seen by everyone, we miss out on the point of it. Beauty is everywhere in the world, from the biggest buildings and mountains to the smallest insects, cells, and molecules. Society tends to put beauty in a box, emphasizing standards and ideals that don’t really reflect all the potential that beauty holds. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, so depending on who the beholder is, different things will be beautiful. Everyone can find beauty in something, and anything at all may hold beauty for someone. To one person, nature may be beautiful in all its grandiose splendor, while another finds nature buggy and dirty and gross. That same person may love the soaring architecture of a city, or delicate strokes of a painted picture.