Mary Mcclain

“The Ancient Greeks had this idea that being physically beautiful was the same as being ethically good and, likewise, being physically ugly was the same as being ethically bad.’ They had a word for this: kalokagathia, which came from kalos, meaning beautiful, kai, meaning ‘and’, and agathos, meaning ‘good’. ‘This idea, that the bodily form is inherently important for understanding who someone is, is very much still with us,’ he said. The scholar Professor Werner Jaeger has written of kalokagathia’s roots in early Greek aristocracy, describing it as their ‘ideal of human perfection, an ideal towards which the elite of the race was constantly trained’. Just as John Pridmore’s self snatched core ideas of who he was and who he ought to be from his culture, so does mine.”
― Will Storr, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us