"Beauty attracts us men; but if, like an armed magnet it is pointed, beside, with gold and silver, it attracts with tenfold power"
About this Quote
Jean Paul takes the old romantic alibi - that men are helpless before beauty - and exposes the mechanism underneath it: desire is rarely pure, and almost never isolated. The line is built like a physics demo. Beauty is a magnet, sure, but not the gentle, sentimental kind; it is "armed", weaponized, capable of pulling people across the room and across their own better judgment. Then he slides in the real accelerant: money, the glittering metal that turns attraction into a force multiplier. Gold and silver do not replace beauty; they aim it, sharpen it, give it leverage. That is the subtext: social power is erotic power, and the two collude.
The specific intent feels less like moralizing than like a sly unmasking. Jean Paul is writing in a Europe where the bourgeoisie is consolidating wealth and status, and marriage is still a primary market for both. His metaphor catches the era's double accounting: one ledger for love, another for assets, with most men pretending they only consult the first. By calling the magnet "pointed", he suggests direction and strategy; attraction is not just spontaneous, it's managed by display, dowry, inheritance, consumption.
It also lands as a critique of male self-image. Men like to imagine themselves as connoisseurs of beauty, autonomous and refined. Jean Paul needles that vanity: what you call taste may just be susceptibility to a well-funded signal. The wit is that he makes greed sound like natural law, then lets the reader notice how convenient that law is for society's winners.
The specific intent feels less like moralizing than like a sly unmasking. Jean Paul is writing in a Europe where the bourgeoisie is consolidating wealth and status, and marriage is still a primary market for both. His metaphor catches the era's double accounting: one ledger for love, another for assets, with most men pretending they only consult the first. By calling the magnet "pointed", he suggests direction and strategy; attraction is not just spontaneous, it's managed by display, dowry, inheritance, consumption.
It also lands as a critique of male self-image. Men like to imagine themselves as connoisseurs of beauty, autonomous and refined. Jean Paul needles that vanity: what you call taste may just be susceptibility to a well-funded signal. The wit is that he makes greed sound like natural law, then lets the reader notice how convenient that law is for society's winners.
Quote Details
| Topic | Romantic |
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