I never quite understand the way society decides who is beautiful and who is not. But an open face and a capacity for kindness always feel like reliable signifiers to me.
Interpretation
Society's standards of beauty are often unclear, yet kindness and an open demeanor are true indicators of beauty.
Tilda Swinton's quote reflects on the subjective and often arbitrary nature of societal beauty standards. She suggests that instead of adhering to conventional definitions of beauty, one should look to the qualities of kindness and openness as more reliable markers of a person's true beauty and worth.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about beauty standards in a classroom setting.
I believe that all great art holds the power to dissolve things: time, distance, difference, injustice, alienation, despair. I believe that all great art holds the power to mend things: join, comfort, inspire hope in fellowship, reconcile us to our selves. Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place.
I don't have a career, I have a life. I don't have an exterior judgment on what would be good or bad for me.
For a lot of actors, there's a sort of code of honor around playing something other than yourself, which I just don't have. I love feeling like I'm - I won't even say acting out, but performing in some deep seam of my consciousness or my family's consciousness or my past. That's really amusing to me.
If we don't accept loneliness, then capitalism wins hands down. Because capitalism is all about trying to convince people that you can distract yourself, that you can make it better. And it ain't true.
Elegance comes from being as beautiful inside as outside.
You can be gorgeous at thirty, charming at forty, and irresistible for the rest of your life.
I can't tell you how many doctors try to sell me a facelift. I've even gone as far as having someone talk me into it, but when I went over and looked at pictures of myself, I thought 'What are they going to lift?' . . Frankly, I think that in the art of aging well there's this sexuality to having those imperfections. It's sensual.
I don't want to have to be beautiful all the time. I want to be able to look cruddy in my weekend sweats, with a pimple on my face and pimple cream on top of the pimple. The expectation to always be beautiful bothers me.
Even virtue is fairer when it appears in a beautiful person.
I didn't want to create a makeup line for one ethnic group; it had to be multi-ethnic. To me, beauty is beauty. It doesn't matter to me what colour the skin is.
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