Quotes About Aesthetics

Art and savagery, aesthetics and violence. Were they contradictory or symbiotic?

It seemed monstrous that people who could only afford cheap houses should find themselves automatically surrounded by ugliness.

When we surround ourselves with quality design, it influences our mood. If our surroundings are nice, we feel cosy and safe. It makes us happier.

It becomes clear that cleanliness is next to Danishness ... from an early age they develop an understanding that functional yet beautiful design is essential to realising the good life.

The more people explore the world, the more they realize in every country there's a different aesthetic. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.

It's my goal to make a building as immaterial as possible. Architecture is a very material thing. It takes a lot of resources, so why not eliminate what you don't need as long as you're able to achieve the same result?

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept

Introducing the idea of beauty as a salve and of aesthetics making something difficult accessible.

All that is not useful in a picture is detrimental. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety; for superfluous details would, in the mind of the beholder, encroach upon the essential elements.

Longinus's text had recently been the subject of a detailed commentary by William Smith, and it was soon to be further popularized in Britain by Burke. Yet Johnson was suspicious, and not just because he considered the word 'sublime' a barbarous import. The theory threatened to unite aesthetics and psychology. As Napoleon would remark, 'Du sublime au ridicule il n'y a qu'un pas.' It had already resulted in a flood of meretricious poetry

In art economy is always beauty.

There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.

Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.

It seems to me that what we call beauty in a face lies in the smile: if the smile heightens the charm of the face, the face is a beautiful one; if it does not alter it, the face is ordinary, and if it is spoilt by a smile, it is ugly.

Beauty: the adjustment of all parts proportionately so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole.

In fact, the public will accept any city plan and skyline provided that its architecture is traditional.

In the realm of aesthetics, reason is always subordinate to perception.

The smallest feline is a masterpiece.

American architecture is the art of covering one thing with another thing, to immitate a third thing which, if genuine, would not be desirable

Beauty is altogether in the eye of the beholder.

If a work of art is placed before me, I believe I can enjoy it; but I do not overlook the fact, that Art is one thing, another thing Amusement; and that people do like amusements, and will run after it.

Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only "liked": it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

I live by Edith Wharton's rule to get rid of anything neither useful nor beautiful. So I put the TV out on the street.