Daily Inspiration Quote by Lily Tomlin

The joke lands because it drags an airy slogan down into fluorescent lighting. “Truth is beauty” borrows the perfume of high culture (Keats, reverence, capital-B Beauty), then Lily Tomlin punctures it with a question any working person would recognize: if knowledge is so glamorous, why does the place devoted to it look like the waiting room for a tax audit?

Tomlin’s intent isn’t to dunk on libraries; it’s to mock the way culture flatters itself. We love to claim that reading, studying, and “truth” are ennobling, but we don’t treat them like we treat beauty-as-spectacle. No one gets blowouts for the card catalog. The subtext is a critique of what the culture rewards: appearance gets maintenance, money, and ritual; intellectual labor gets silence, beige carpeting, and underfunding. By choosing hair - the most publicly curated, status-coded part of the body - she frames “beauty” as something performed and policed, not discovered in a book.

It’s also a sly feminist jab. Hair “done” implies a beauty regime historically demanded of women: time, expense, and compliance. The library, by contrast, is a space where that performance is irrelevant, even mildly out of place. Tomlin exposes the bargain: society praises truth in theory, but in practice it glamorizes surfaces and leaves the pursuit of truth looking unphotogenic. That’s why the line still plays now, in an age where ideas circulate best when they’re styled for the feed.