Aesthetics Quotes
77 quotes
"Nothing's perfect, the world's not perfect. But it's there for us, trying the best it can; that's what makes it so damn beautiful."
"The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art."
"Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it."
"God's pleasure--the beauty creation possesses in his regard--underlies the distinct being of creation, and so beauty is the first and truest word concerning all that appears within being; beauty is the showing of what is; God looked upon what he had wrought and saw that it was good."
"At last everything was satisfactorily arranged, and I could not help admiring the setting: these mingled touches betrayed on a small scale the inspiration of a poet, the research of a scientist, the good taste of an artist, the gourmet’s fondness for good food, and the love of flowers, which concealed in their delicate shadows a hint of the love of women"
"It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves."
"In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness."
"They walked on rather aimlessly. He hoped she wouldn't notice he was touched, because he wouldn't have known how to explain why. Here lay the great discrepancy between aesthetic truth and sleazy reality."
"I became an artist because I wanted to be an active participant in the conversation about art."
"What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant."
"[Hegel’s] system of nature seemed, at least to natural philosophers, absolutely crazy….Hegel…launched out with particular vehemence and acrimony against the natural philosophers, and especially against Isaac Newton. The philosophers accused the scientific men of narrowness; the scientific men retorted that the philosophers were insane."
Hermann von Helmholtz, Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays
"He had never believed that spirituality had to be anemic or aesthetic."
Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo
"All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war."
"There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism"
"It was one of God's jokes that such a dumb mind had been put in such an eloquent body."
"Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and . . . it is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal."
"Desire for beauty will endure and undermine the desire for truth."
"The philosophical study of beauty, art, and the splendor of nature nurtures a person’s fertile mind by exposing a person to the puzzling world of the beautiful, elegant, ugly, and grotesque. Human beings ability to experience sublime pleasure emanates from a variety of sensory experiences and a person’s ability to make discriminatory observations and judgment in taste and sentiment."
"Your skin has a memory.In ten, twenty, thirty years from now, your skin will show the results ofhow it was treated today.So treat it kindly and with respect."
"Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all."
"How convenient it is to declare that everything is totally ugly within the habit of the époque, rather than applying oneself to extract from it the dark and cryptic beauty, however faint and invisible it is."
"....it seems to me that a pleasurable Contemplation of Beauty has certainly an immeasurably greater value than mere Consciousness of Pleasure."
"There was a product which seemed attractive, expensive, portable, beautiful and simple. Everybody talked about its beauty but they bought it for it's simplicity."
"Christianity has from its beginning portrayed itself as a gospel of peace, a way of reconciliation (with God, with other creatures), and a new model of human community, offering the 'peace which passes understanding' to a world enmeshed in sin and violence. (1)"
"Christ is a persuasion, a form evoking desire, and the whole force of the gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also peace: that the desire awakened by the shape of Christ and his church is one truly reborn as agape, rather than merely the way in which a lesser force succumbs to a greater, as an episode in the endless epic of power. (3)"
David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth
"For if indeed God became a man, then Truth condescended to became a truth, from whose historical contingency one cannot simply pass to categories of universal rationality; and this means that whatever Christians mean when they speak of truth, it cannot involve simply the dialectical wrestling of abstract principles from intractable facts. (5)"
David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth
"Color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul."
"Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air."
"I think that's what art is: art is communication made in the hope that interesting miscommunications will arise."
"In my box of sound bites there are no jackhammers, no snowmobiles, no Jet Skis, no children wailing. Music but no Muzak.It's my box. Put what you want in yours."
Joan Oliver Goldsmith, How Can We Keep from Singing: Music and the Passionate Life
"[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,"
Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia 1910-1960
"With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art."
"In the past an artist produced things that were necessary socially; they were instruments, albeit of a special kind, that helped the dead reach eternity, spells to be cast, prayers to be liturgically fleshed. . . . The aesthetic component of those instruments enhanced their function but was never central, never an independent, nonutilitarian thing."
"Tensurrealism creates actual and non-compromised reality, jamboree, fervor, fascination, poetics of an active enthusiasm, interludium, lyrical practice, active happiness."
"We sing lyrical excess, exacerbated expressionism, imponed objectivity,inventiveness, meta-baroque, extravaganza, super metaphor, sublimity, strident, exposure, super-pone, noise, super-objectivity, zillionism, fragmentation and aesthetics of facts, suractivism."
"In the psychology of aesthetics, there is a name for the moment between the anxiety of confronting something new and the satisfying click of understanding it. It is called an 'aesthetic aha."
Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
"there's something wrong with any art that makes a woman all bust"
"And it suggests this truth about the place where aesthetic form meets the human mind. For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left-say we lost everything-we'd still have another kind of home, in aesthetic form itself, in the familiarity, the unchanging assurance that a known rhythm, a recognised line, the familiar shape of a story, a tune, a line or phrase or sentence gives us every time, even long after we've forgotten we even know it."
"Back then, I was still just a fan of music. And to be a fan of music also meant to be a fan of cities, of places. Regionalism—and the creative scenes therein—played an important role in the identification and contextualization of a sound or aesthetic. Music felt married to place, and the notion of “somewhere” predated the Internet’s seeming invention of “everywhere” (which often ends up feeling like “nowhere”)"
"...fiction is as useful as truth, for giving us matter, upon which to exercise the judgment of value."
"Rules of taste enforce structures of power."
"Writing is a series of verbal suggestions designed to provoke a psychological reaction and an aesthetic experience."
"Things wabi-sabi have no need for the reassurance of status or the validation of market culture. They have no need for documentation of provenance. Wabi-sabi-ness in no way depends on knowledge of the creator's background or personality. In fact, it is best if the creator is no distinction, invisible, or anonymous."
Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers
"Appreciate the aesthetic and creativity of the nature and be grateful for being part of it."
"Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition."
"Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates."
"Poverty and loneliness could be seen as a liberation from strivings to become rich and popular."
"A taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty"
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