Quotes About Aesthetics

Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.

We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).

Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism.

Because beauty is typically the result of a few qualities working in concert, it can take more to guarantee the appeal of a bridge or a house than strength alone. (p 205)

We seem incapable of looking at buildings or pieces of furniture without tying them to the historical and personal circumstances of our viewing; as a result, architectural and decorative styles become, for us, emotional souvenirs of the moments and settings in which we came across them.

Technology may make it easier to reach beauty, but it does not simplify the process of possessing or appreciating it.

A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.

The notion of buildings that speak helps us to place at the very centre of our architectural conundrums the question of the values we want to live by — rather than merely of how we want things to look.

How seldom we notice rooftops; how easily our eyes are drawn to the more flamboyant attractions of a Roman temple or Renaissance church.

It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word 'beautiful', alludes to a state that, on a psychological level, we can describe as mental health or happiness.

Eroticism is therefore seemingly most clearly manifest at the intersection between the formal and the intimate.

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A thought provoking number of the world's most intelligent people have disdained any interest in decoration and design, equating contentment with discarnate and invisible matters instead.

However, the immediacy with which aesthetic judgments arise should not fool us into assuming that their origins are entirely natural or their verdicts unalterable.

what Ruskin judged to be the twin purposes of art: to make sense of pain and to fathom the sources of beauty.

Precedent forces us to suppose that later generations will one day walk around our houses with the same attitude of horror and amusement with which we now consider many of the possessions of the dead. They will marvel at our wallpapers and our sofas and laugh at aesthetic crimes to which we are impervious. This awareness can lend to our affections a fragile, nervous quality.

Any object of design will give off an impression of the psychological and moral attitudes it supports.

We may find ourselves arguing that, ultimately, it doesn't matter what buildings look like, what is on the ceiling or how the wall is treated - professions of detachment that stem not so much from an insensitivity to beauty as from a desire to deflect the sadness we would face if we left ourselves open to all of beauty's many absences.

And insofar as we travel in search of beauty, works of art may in small ways start to influence where we would like to travel to.

Nada que no asuma un riesgo calculado con la fealdad puede ser bello.

It just appears natural to be struck by the beauty of some things and to be left cold by others.

there are a few houses on the street left in their original trim, today's newcomers seldom moving in until they have ripped the guts out of these decent Victorian villas to turn them into models of white and modish minimalism.

There is beauty,' she said, 'in the least beautiful things.

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.