Life & Wisdom Quote by John Galsworthy

Beauty, in Galsworthy's line, isn’t a halo; it’s a solvent. The sentence turns on a sly causal chain: Beauty makes things go crooked, and because crookedness scares people who depend on rules, they relabel it as “immoral.” It’s not a defense of vice so much as a diagnosis of how quickly societies moralize what they can’t regulate.

The phrasing matters. “Afflicted” suggests the thought is a kind of illness: the character can’t unsee the pattern. “Nothing ever ran quite straight” is wonderfully elastic. It hints at bent ethics, but also at bent narratives - plotlines, careers, marriages, reputations. Beauty introduces contingency: desire, envy, risk, performance. Straight lines belong to bureaucracies and marriage contracts; Beauty belongs to the side of life that refuses to stay legible.

Then Galsworthy lands the punch with “looked on it as immoral,” locating the judgment in the observers, not in Beauty itself. Morality here is exposed as a social defense mechanism. When people can’t account for why they’re tempted, why they’re destabilized, why standards suddenly feel negotiable, they externalize the blame. Beauty becomes the scapegoat for their own volatility.

Contextually, it’s very early-20th-century English: a culture preoccupied with propriety, status, and the idea that aesthetic pleasure must be justified by virtue. Galsworthy, chronicler of respectable worlds with rotting beams, uses Beauty to show how fragile “respectability” is - and how quickly it turns punitive when confronted with anything that makes it wobble.