88 Quotes About Aesthetic

Art is an important part of life. From the looks of your house to the types of clothes you wear, art has a powerful influence on how we feel and how we live. Art is also one of our oldest forms of communication, dating back thousands of years, and it has evolved over time. The way we create art today can be very different from what our ancestors did, but it still serves the same purpose: to make us feel better about ourselves and to help us understand who we are Read more

Below are some true true facts about art to get you thinking about how it affects our lives.

Nothing's perfect, the world's not perfect. But it's there for...
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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. Hiromu Arakawa
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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. David Bentley Hart
The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art...
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The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art. Theodor W. Adorno
Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible...
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Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it. Theodor W. Adorno
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Finer feeling, which we now wish to consider, is chiefly of two kinds: the feeling of the *sublime* and that of the *beautiful*. The stirring of each is pleasant, but in different ways. The sight of a mountain whose snow-covered peak rises above the clouds, the description of a raging storm, or Milton's portrayal of the infernal kingdom, arouse enjoyment but with horror; on the other hand, the sight of flower strewn meadows, valleys with winding brooks and covered with grazing flocks, the description of Elysium, or Homer's portrayal of the girdle of Venus, also occasion a pleasant sensation but one that is joyous and smiling. In order that the former impression could occur to us in due strength, we must have *a feeling of the sublime*, and, in order to enjoy the latter well, *a feeling of the beautiful*. Tall oaks and lonely shadows in a sacred grove are sublime; flower beds, low hedges and trees trimmed in figures are beautiful. Night is sublime; day is beautiful. Temperaments that possess a feeling for the sublime are drawn gradually, by the quiet stillness of a summer evening as the shimmering light of the stars breaks through the brown shadows of night and the lonely moon rises into view, into high feelings of friendship, of disdain for the world, of eternity. The shining day stimulates busy fervor and a feeling of gaiety. The sublime *moves*, the beautiful *charms*. Immanuel Kant
In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even...
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In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness. Clarice Lispector
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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. Patrick White
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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 August Strindberg
What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental...
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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. Murray GellMann
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[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
He had never believed that spirituality had to be anemic...
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He had never believed that spirituality had to be anemic or aesthetic. Irving Stone
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The goal of all principled people is to recognize truth. Simple or complex thoughts and feelings standing alone rarely express any universal truths. Thoughts and feelings combine to create profound truths and compose extravagant falsities. Truth making exposes certain falsehoods, and lies shed light upon irrefutable truths. Art reveals the pageantry of nature along with the unmitigated grotesqueness that accompanies an earthly life. The search for truth begins with an intellectual journey into darkness whereas the search for beauty requires an imaginative act trussed with the classical beauty of Apollonian lightness. Aesthetic appreciation represents the perfect reconciliation of the sensual and rational parts of humankind’s animalistic nature. Similar to aesthetic experience — contemplation of beauty without imposition of a worldly agenda — love depends upon human sensory-emotional values, a judgement of values and sentiments. Kilroy J. Oldster
All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing,...
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All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war. Walter Benjamin
There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism
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There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism Alan Hollinghurst
Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in...
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Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical. Sophia Loren
It was one of God's jokes that such a dumb...
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It was one of God's jokes that such a dumb mind had been put in such an eloquent body. Charlaine Harris
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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. Unknown
Desire for beauty will endure and undermine the desire for...
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Desire for beauty will endure and undermine the desire for truth. Richard O. Prum
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When a work of painting, music or other form attains two-way communication, it is truly art. One occasionally hears an artist being criticized on the basis that his work is too 'literal' or too 'common.' But one has rarely if ever heard any definition of 'literal' or 'common.' And there are many artists simply hung up on this, protesting it. Also, some avant-garde schools go completely over the cliff in avoiding anything 'literal' or 'common'–and indeed go completely out of communication! The return flow from the person viewing a work would be contribution. True art always elicits a contribution from those who view or hear or experience it. By contribution is meant 'adding to it.’ An illustration is 'literal' in that it tells everything there is to know. Let us say the illustration is a picture of a tiger approaching a chained girl. It does not really matter how well the painting is executed, it remains an illustration and it is literal. But now let us take a small portion out of the scene and enlarge it. Let us take, say, the head of the tiger with its baleful eye and snarl. Suddenly we no longer have an illustration. It is no longer 'literal.' And the reason lies in the fact that the viewer can fit this expression into his own concepts, ideas or experience: he can supply the why of the snarl, he can compare the head to someone he knows. In short, he can CONTRIBUTE to the head. The skill with which the head is executed determines the degree of response. Because the viewer can contribute to the picture, it is art. In music, the hearer can contribute his own emotion or motion. And even if the music is only a single drum, if it elicits a contribution of emotion or motion, it is truly art. . L. Ron Hubbard
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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. Kilroy J. Oldster
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Then there are the fully intentional pleasures, which, although in some way tied up with sensory or perceptual experience, are modes of exploration of the world. Aesthetic pleasures are like this. Aesthetic pleasures are contemplative - they involve studying an object OUTSIDE of the self, to which one is GIVING something (namely, attention and all that flows from it), and not TAKING, as in the pleasure that comes from drugs and drinks. Hence such pleasures are not addictive - there is no pathway to reward that can be short-circuited here, and a serotonin injection is not a cheap way of obtaining the experience of PARISFAL or THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. . Roger Scruton
Your skin has a memory. In ten, twenty, thirty years...
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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. Jana Elston
Is the world really beautified by the fact that man...
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Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all. Friedrich Nietzsche
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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. Charles Baudelaire
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We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce, then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light–his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow. . Unknown
....it seems to me that a pleasurable Contemplation of Beauty...
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....it seems to me that a pleasurable Contemplation of Beauty has certainly an immeasurably greater value than mere Consciousness of Pleasure. G.E. Moore
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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. Walter Pater
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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) David Bentley Hart
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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
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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
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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. Wassily Kandinsky
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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. Leonard Bernstein
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To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived. Arthur Conan Doyle
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Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern. Alfred North Whitehead
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I think that's what art is: art is communication made in the hope that interesting miscommunications will arise. Misha Glouberman
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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
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[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds, Ross Wetzsteon
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With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art. Peter Weiss
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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. Unknown
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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
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There's something wrong with any art that makes a woman all bust Djuna Barnes
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And if, as all philosophers on the subject have noted, art is a human activity that relies on the senses to reach the soul, did it not also stand to reason that dogs -- at least dogs of Mr. Bones' caliber -- would have it in them to feel a similar aesthetic impulse? Would they not, in other words, be able to appreciate art? As far as Willy knew, no one had ever thought of this before. Did that make him the first man in recorded history to believe such a thing was possible? No matter. It was an idea whose time had come. If dogs were beyond the pull of oil paintings and string quartets, who was to say they wouldn't respond to an art based on the sense of smell? Why not an olfactory art? Why not an art for dogs that dealt with the world as dogs knew it? . Paul Auster
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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. Ali Smith
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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”). Carrie Brownstein
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...fiction is as useful as truth, for giving us matter, upon which to exercise the judgment of value. G.E. Moore
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Rules of taste enforce structures of power. Susan Sontag
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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
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Appreciate the aesthetic and creativity of the nature and be grateful for being part of it. M.F. Moonzajer
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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. Rainer Maria Rilke
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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
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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
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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. Unknown
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Poverty and loneliness could be seen as a liberation from strivings to become rich and popular. Donald Richie
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A taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty JeanJacques Rousseau
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In a single wave of meaning the triumphant purity of being. Boris Pasternak
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When you watch Olympic athletes in competition, does your self-esteem plummet? Of course not. On the contrary, you feel wonder and admiration; you're inspired that such exceptional individuals exist. So why can't we feels the same way about beauty? Ted Chiang
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The answer to these questions is tied to the public's attitude about suicide. For many people, suicide is morally reprehensible. It's against their religion, or against their culture, or contrary to their personal values. Like other unpleasant subjects - incest, disease, discrimination - it's avoided. John Bateson
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More than once have I thought, Why does crime, even when as powerful as Cæsar, and assured of being beyond punishment, strive always for the appearances of truth, justice, and virtue? Why does it take the trouble? I consider that to murder a brother, a mother, a wife, is a thing worthy of some petty Asiatic king, not a Roman Cæsar; but if that position were mine, I should not write justifying letters to the Senate. But Nero writes. Nero is looking for appearances, for Nero is a coward. But Tiberius was not a coward; still he justified every step he took. Why is this? What a marvellous, involuntary homage paid to virtue by evil! And knowest thou what strikes me? This, that it is done because transgression is ugly and virtue is beautiful. Therefore a man of genuine æsthetic feeling is also a virtuous man. Hence I am virtuous. . Henryk Sienkiewicz
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If I beat my grandmother to death to-morrow in the middle of Battersea Park, you may be perfectly certain that people will say everything about it except the simple and fairly obvious fact that it is wrong. Some will call it insane; that is, will accuse it of a deficiency of intelligence. This is not necessarily true at all. You could not tell whether the act was unintelligent or not unless you knew my grandmother. Some will call it vulgar, disgusting, and the rest of it; that is, they will accuse it of a lack of manners. Perhaps it does show a lack of manners; but this is scarcely its most serious disadvantage. Others will talk about the loathsome spectacle and the revolting scene; that is, they will accuse it of a deficiency of art, or æsthetic beauty. This again depends on the circumstances: in order to be quite certain that the appearance of the old lady has definitely deteriorated under the process of being beaten to death, it is necessary for the philosophical critic to be quite certain how ugly she was before. Another school of thinkers will say that the action is lacking in efficiency: that it is an uneconomic waste of a good grandmother. But that could only depend on the value, which is again an individual matter. The only real point that is worth mentioning is that the action is wicked, because your grandmother has a right not to be beaten to death. But of this simple moral explanation modern journalism has, as I say, a standing fear. It will call the action anything else–mad, bestial, vulgar, idiotic, rather than call it sinful. . G.k. Chesterton
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Against the subtle cries of nature, I found peace. I found home. I found the past and the future strung into a present that demanded to be lived. Jeni Dhodary
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Such competence is not necessarily acquired by means of the 'scholastic' labours in which some 'cinephiles' or 'jazz-freaks' indulge. Most often it results from the unintentional learning made possible by a disposition acquired through domestic or scholastic inculcation of legitimate culture. This transposable disposition, armed with a set of perceptual and evaluative schemes that are available for general application, inclines its owner towards other cultural experiences and enables him to perceive, classify and memorize them differently. In identifying what is worthy of being seen and the right way to see it, they are aided by their whole social group and by the whole corporation of critics mandated by the group to produce legitimate classifications and the discourse necessarily accompanying any artistic enjoyment worthy of the name. Pierre Bourdieu
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All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation. Susan Sontag
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Man is not better treated by nature in his first start than her other works are; so long as he is unable to act for himself as an independent intelligence she acts for him. But the very fact that constitutes him a man is that he does not remain stationary, where nature has placed him, that he can pass with his reason, retracing the steps nature had made him anticipate, that he can convert the work of necessity into one of free solution, and elevate physical necessity into a moral law. Friedrich Schiller
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People who insist upon dressing casually also want to think casually. And in a fallen world, thinking casually means being wrong more often than not. Douglas Wilson
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One interesting thing is the idea that people have of a kind of science of Aesthetics. I would almost like to talk of what could be meant by Aesthetics.You might think Aesthetics is a science telling us what's beautiful - almost too ridiculous for words. I suppose it ought to include also what sort of coffee tastes well. I see roughly this - there is a realm of utterance of delight, when you taste pleasant food or smell a pleasant smell, etc., then there is a realm of Art which is quite different, though often you may make the same face when you hear a piece of music as when you taste good food. (Though you may cry at something you like very much.) Supposing you meet someone in the street and he tells you he has lost his greatest friend, in a voice extremely expressive of his emotion. You might say: 'It was extraordinarily beautiful, the way he expressed himself.' Supposing you then asked: 'What similarity has my admiring this person with my eating vanilla ice and like it?' To compare them seems almost disgusting. (But you can connect them by intermediate cases.) Suppose someone says 'But this is a quite different kind of delight.' But did you learn two meanings of 'delight'? You use the same word on both occasions. There is some connection between these delights. Although in the first case the emotion of delight would in our judgement hardly count. Ludwig Wittgenstein
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No man sings as beautifully as when his song is accompanied by a woman’s voice. Roman Payne
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I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life. Clive Bell
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In a Fisherian world, animals are slaves to evolutionary fashion, evolving extravagant and arbitrary displays and tastes that are all "meaningless"; they do not involve anything other than perceived qualities. Richard O. Prum
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Now I myself, I cheerfully admit, feel that enormity in Kensington Gardens as something quite natural. I feel it so because I have been brought up, so to speak, under its shadow; and stared at the graven images of Raphael and Shakespeare almost before I knew their names; and long before I saw anything funny in their figures being carved, on a smaller scale, under the feet of Prince Albert. I even took a certain childish pleasure in the gilding of the canopy and spire, as if in the golden palace of what was, to Peter Pan and all children, something of a fairy garden. So do the Christians of Jerusalem take pleasure, and possibly a childish pleasure, in the gilding of a better palace, besides a nobler garden, ornamented with a somewhat worthier aim. But the point is that the people of Kensington, whatever they might think about the Holy Sepulchre, do not think anything at all about the Albert Memorial. They are quite unconscious of how strange a thing it is; and that simply because they are used to it. The religious groups in Jerusalem are also accustomed to their coloured background; and they are surely none the worse if they still feel rather more of the meaning of the colours. It may be said that they retain their childish illusion about their Albert Memorial. I confess I cannot manage to regard Palestine as a place where a special curse was laid on those who can become like little children. And I never could understand why such critics who agree that the kingdom of heaven is for children, should forbid it to be the only sort of kingdom that children would really like; a kingdom with real crowns of gold or even of tinsel. But that is another question, which I shall discuss in another place; the point is for the moment that such people would be quite as much surprised at the place of tinsel in our lives as we are at its place in theirs. If we are critical of the petty things they do to glorify great things, they would find quite as much to criticise (as in Kensington Gardens) in the great things we do to glorify petty things. And if we wonder at the way in which they seem to gild the lily, they would wonder quite as much at the way we gild the weed. . G.k. Chesterton
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Show me what a people admire, and I will tell you everything about them that matters. Jack McDevitt
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The writer has to die to give birth to the intellectual in the service of the wretched of the earth. Annie CohenSolal
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The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters. Harold Bloom
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An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it. Kazuo Ishiguro
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What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural. Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Everything good is good because of the love it contains. Unknown
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The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true. Adam Phillips
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To speak of sparing anything because it is beautiful is to waste one’s breath and incur ridicule in the bargain. The aesthetic sense- the power to enjoy through the eye, and the ear, and the imagination- is just as important a factor in the scheme of human happiness as the corporeal sense of eating and drinking; but there has never been a time when the world would admit it. John Van Dyke
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Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic James Branch Cabell
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In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity. Baruch Spinoza
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New clothes left Sylvia reeling with happiness. For Sylvia, a shopping list was a poem. She always shopped alone - it suited her deliberate nature and the artistic joy with which she approached all things aesthetic. Elizabeth Winder
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And is not all of life material- based on the material- permeated by the material? Should not one learn, gladly, to utilize the beauty of the fine material? I do not speak of the gross crudities of soporific television, of loud brash convertibles and vulgar display- but rather of grace and line and refinement- and there are wonderful and exciting things that only money can buy, such as theater tickets, books, paintings, travel, lovely clothes- and why deny them when one can have them? The only problem is to work, to stay awake mentally and physically, and NEVER become mentally, physically, spiritually flabby or over complacent! . Elizabeth Winder
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Sylvia’s inherent appreciation for beauty as both artist and consumer is evident in her journals and letters…….she wrote beautifully about clothes. She wrote about them with irony and wit mixed in with all the rococo prettiness. Elizabeth Winder
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The future will look futuristic only because we will be trying to make it look futuristic. Anonymous
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Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. Oscar Wilde
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When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young, ” [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture– the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of ‘the wild’ from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. ‘Deranging the senses’ was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that.“ Today, ” he continued, “the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity. . Peter Coyote
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We are beginning to play with ideas of ecology, and although we immediately trivialize these into commerce or politics, there is at least an impulse still in the human breast to unify and thereby sanctify the total natural world, of which we are.. There have been, and still are, in the world many different and even contrasting epistemologies which have been alike in stressing an ultimate unity, and, although this is less sure, which have also stressed the notion that ultimate unity is aesthetic. The uniformity of these views gives hope that perhaps the great authority of quantitative science may be insufficient to deny an ultimate unifying beauty. I hold to the presupposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply, an epistemological mistake. . Gregory Bateson
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By engaging with film illusions both actively and passively — as I attempt to do in this book — we strengthen the capacity of our minds to reason, imagine and think through ideas in a way unrestrained by some static conception of objective Truth. In so doing, the nihilistic gap existing between the real world and the whole variety of film worlds perhaps widens, but it also serves to offer a free, open space into which our interpretations may spill, mingle and propagate in uninhibited, nihilistic liberty. John Marmysz