"The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own even more, one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being"
About this Quote
Porter treats beauty less like decoration and more like a living asset with a moral claim on us. The phrase "real sin against life" swaps out religious bookkeeping for an earthy ethics: the crime isn’t pleasure, vanity, or ambition, but the willful wrecking of what makes life feel worth inhabiting. By calling it a sin "against life", she aims her judgment at the kinds of damage that don’t always show up as scandal - the slow brutality of neglect, cynicism, and self-contempt.
The syntax does something revealing: "abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own even more, one's own" stumbles, repeats, corrects itself. That little stutter reads like urgency, as if Porter is catching the reader before they dodge the charge by thinking only of museums, landscapes, or other people's bodies. The sharper accusation lands inward. "One's own" beauty is framed as entrusted property: "put in our care". That caretaking language drags aesthetics into responsibility, the way you’d speak about a child, a body, a talent, a mind.
Porter wrote from a century that industrialized both ugliness and self-erasure: war, mass culture, hard economics, and the pressure on women in particular to treat their appearance as either currency or shame. Coming from a journalist, it also reads like a creed against the deadening effects of daily exposure to cruelty: you can report the world without letting it flatten you. The subtext is unromantic and bracing: your interior life - your capacity for attention, delight, refinement, and tenderness - is not a luxury. It's a duty.
The syntax does something revealing: "abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own even more, one's own" stumbles, repeats, corrects itself. That little stutter reads like urgency, as if Porter is catching the reader before they dodge the charge by thinking only of museums, landscapes, or other people's bodies. The sharper accusation lands inward. "One's own" beauty is framed as entrusted property: "put in our care". That caretaking language drags aesthetics into responsibility, the way you’d speak about a child, a body, a talent, a mind.
Porter wrote from a century that industrialized both ugliness and self-erasure: war, mass culture, hard economics, and the pressure on women in particular to treat their appearance as either currency or shame. Coming from a journalist, it also reads like a creed against the deadening effects of daily exposure to cruelty: you can report the world without letting it flatten you. The subtext is unromantic and bracing: your interior life - your capacity for attention, delight, refinement, and tenderness - is not a luxury. It's a duty.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Love |
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