Nicola

“Viewed as a barometer of inner being, the face is seen to produce certain effects in both self and other. By one set of criteria or another, whether ugly or beautiful, the face is seen as both natural and cultivated - and these terms are polyvalent, signifying, respectively, degradation or purity, artifice or grace. To cultivate a beautiful visage is to cultivate sound morals, and thus to be dutiful - which is why Dorian Gray is such [a] powerfully contradictory character. And the face is also and always seen as a barometer of the characteristics of a people, not just of a person - of the lower or higher development of the race.”
― Elaine Stratford

“What you do and what you are is what matters.”
― Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many

“... cooptation of the rhetoric of beauty, morality and duty into the realm of commercial life set in train the development of other rhetorics designed to sell growing numbers of products that promised both surface change and inner transformation.”
― Elaine Stratford, Home, Nature, and the Feminine Ideal: Geographies of the Interior and of Empire

“Question not, but live and labour
Till yon goal be won,
Helping every feeble neighbour,
Seeking help from none;
Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone,
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own.”
― Adam Lindsay Gordon