Quotes About Aesthetics

This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers, and everyone else who is involved in the telling of stories: to us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans. As with all the most important artistic endeavors in human history, this is a task that is at once aesthetic and political—and because of the magnitude of the crisis that besets the planet, it is now freighted with the most pressing moral urgency.

A painter was asked why he became a painter. He replied, Because I love the smell of paint.

El lujo no es para mí una necesidad, pero las cosas hermosas y buenas sí.

I have always thought that great artists were those who dared to confer the right of beauty on things so natural that people say on seeing them, Why did I never realize before that that was beautiful too?

You see, the great weakness of the symbolist school is that it brought nothing but an æsthetic with it; all the other great schools brought with them, besides their new styles, a new ethic, new tables, a new way of looking at things, of understanding love, of behaving oneself in life. As for the symbolist, it's perfectly simple; he didn't behave himself at all in life; he didn't attempt to understand it; he denied its existence; he turned his back on it.

what makes an object beautiful has nothing to do with its usefulness or its exchange value.

When I was young, all I wanted to read were pretentious little books. Camus and Tournier and Calvino. If it had a plot, I hated it.

I never read. I just look at pictures.

I really don't care that much about 'Beauties'. What I really like are Talkers.

Aesthetic experiences are still, more than likely, internal excitations of the brain, as we see from the fact that ingesting recreational drugs can bring on even more intense experiences of transcendence. And the particular triggers for natural aesthetic experiences are readily explicable from the evolutionary pressures that have shaped the perceptual systems of human beings

She looks at her watch - a real one, with arms. Those digital ones came and went, thank God. When will people learn that just because you can make something doesn't mean you should?

A suspicion that lightness is not deeply serious (but instead whimsical) pervades aesthetic discourse. But what if lightness is a philosophical choice to temper reality with strangeness, to temper the intellect with emotion, and to temper emotion with humor.

Honestly, the only question most Americans ask about a new building at this point is basically: Is it a soul-sucking eyesore of cheap-ass despair? It's not? Whew.

There is something aesthetically pleasing about trading one engraving - and old map - for another - American money.

First, from this side of the twentieth century, après strip malls, fast-food franchises, glass boxes, housing projects, and other architectural gaffes, it's fun to look back on this dilemma of to-column-or-not-to-column, because honestly, the only question most Americans ask about a new building at this point is basically: Is it a soul-sucking eyesore of cheap-ass despair? It's not? Whew.

Tacking an object up on a wall changes things.

What a strange place it was in which there could be no running water, no dishwasher, no computer, no telephone, no supermarket, none of the things she took for granted, other than the ubiquitous TV aerial, yet the houses were painted to look like jewellery boxes and the people in them clothed themselves to look like jewels.

Beauty is not a human invention.

Ljepota nije ljudski izum.

The world needed more fireworks- especially now that there was going to be a shortage of beautiful, useless things.

Can we never take pleasure in nature without having recourse to art?

Classisch ist das Gesunde, romantisch das Kranke.

Estamos acostumbrados a que los seres humanos se rían de lo que no entienden, a que rezonguen ante lo bueno y lo bello, que a menudo les resulta fastidioso

Die Stimmung, die von der Baukunst ausgeht, kommt dem Effekt der Musik nahe.