Quotes About Aesthetics

Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.

Art, like Nature, has her monsters

Details are always vulgar

Yet the roses are not less lovely for all that.

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly

The public is largely influenced by the look of a book. So are we all. It is the only artistic thing about the public.

I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.

nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly for it expresses a need

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless. OSCAR WILDE

Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature.

La belleza, la auténtica belleza, termina allí donde empieza la expresión intelectual. El intelecto es en sí mismo un modo de exageración y destruye la armonía de cualquier rostro. En cuanto uno se sienta a pensar, se vuelve todo nariz, o todo frente, o algo quizá más espantoso.

And Beauty is a form of Genius - is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation.

To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders...It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid.

Moral grounds are always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty.

The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us...it is outside the proper sphere of art.

real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid.

Better to take pleasure in a rose than to put its root under a microscope.

Yesterday evening Mrs Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious sky, as she called it. Of course I had to look at it. She is one of those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing. And what was it? It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the painter's worst faults exaggerated and over-emphasized.

art had no moral responsibility. Art, he argued, should strive only to be a beautiful object entirely separate from its creator.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these, there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.

quand elle est en grande toilette, on dirait l'édition de luxe d'un mauvais roman français.

We should remember that all the arts are fine arts and all the arts decorative arts.