Daily Inspiration Quote by Douglas Horton

A clergyman calling ugliness "constant" is less a surrender to pessimism than a backhanded sermon about the world’s crooked baseline. "Beauty is variable" concedes what anyone with eyes and a calendar knows: tastes shift, bodies age, styles mutate, and whole societies renegotiate what they worship. Horton’s line works because it yanks beauty off its pedestal and treats it like weather: persuasive, fleeting, and wildly dependent on where you’re standing.

Then comes the sting. "Ugliness is constant" sounds like an aesthetic claim, but it’s really moral shorthand. Horton is hinting that whatever fashions do, whatever cultures rebrand as attractive, there’s a steady human capacity for the same old degradations: cruelty, pettiness, humiliation, neglect. Beauty is fickle because it’s often a consensus; ugliness is reliable because it’s behavioral. You don’t need a gallery or a trend cycle to recognize someone being mean, or a community turning cold.

The aphorism’s subtext is also pastoral: if you build your life on beauty, you’re building on volatility. If you acknowledge ugliness as a permanent feature of human nature, you’re less likely to be shocked by it, and more likely to organize your ethics against it. Coming from a clergyman of Horton’s era, it reads as a critique of modernity’s fixation on surface and novelty - and a reminder that the truly enduring struggle isn’t about taste, but about character.