Success Quote by Barry Cornwall

Human beauty shows up here as a kind of elegant swindle: not evil, not trivial, just dangerously dreamlike. Cornwall’s line stages desire as a voluntary self-sabotage, the speaker almost marveling at the bargain humans keep making - trading “life and hopes” for something stunning, transient, and ultimately unownable. Calling beauty a “dream” does two things at once: it elevates it (dreams are luminous, transporting) and discredits it (dreams evaporate on waking). That double move is the engine of the quote’s bite.

The address “O” gives it the posture of prayer or invocation, but the god being hailed is an illusion. There’s a Romantic-era hangover here: early 19th-century poetry loved beauty as revelation, a pathway to truth. Cornwall, writing in that same cultural atmosphere, tilts the frame toward skepticism. Beauty doesn’t lead upward; it lures sideways, pulling ambition, attention, and moral clarity off course. The “we” matters, too. This isn’t one man’s private weakness; it’s a shared civic pathology, a collective readiness to mistake appearance for meaning.

The subtext is less “beauty is bad” than “beauty is costly.” It’s a confession with teeth: we know it’s a dream, yet we still spend our limited lives as if the dream were real. Cornwall’s intent feels like a warning disguised as a lyric - the kind that lands because it doesn’t pretend we’re above temptation, only briefly aware of its price.