Life & Wisdom Quote by Tahar Ben Jelloun

Beauty, for Tahar Ben Jelloun, isn’t a decorative feature of the world; it’s an internal event. Calling beauty “first and foremost an emotion” quietly demotes the usual gatekeepers - taste-makers, canons, museums, even the language of “objective” aesthetics - and recenters the body: the sudden lift in the chest, the ache of recognition, the hush that arrives before you can name what you’re seeing. The line works because it refuses the comfort of measurement. Emotion is messy, biased, time-bound. So is beauty, he implies, no matter how often we pretend it’s a neutral verdict.

As a poet shaped by the postcolonial Francophone tradition, Ben Jelloun is also tugging at a political thread. If beauty is an emotion, then it can’t be monopolized by dominant cultures that present their standards as universal. It becomes portable, survivable: something a person carries through exile, through poverty, through the daily abrasions of being misread. The subtext is an ethics of perception. Beauty is not what wins the contest; it’s what breaks through numbness.

There’s a further intimacy in “first and foremost.” He isn’t denying that beauty can be crafted, analyzed, or taught; he’s ranking responses over rules. The sentence reads like a rebuttal to a world that keeps demanding definitions. Ben Jelloun offers a simpler, more radical claim: beauty begins where language is still catching up.