Quotes About Aesthetics

Art is aesthetic communication of the soul—in fact, it's the best of that communication—and taken in its entirety has formed a body of work to stand alongside Science and Religion as one of the three great constructs of culture to aid the individual in his or her struggle to survive in Nature.

Art was important to the pessimistic Schopenhauer because the aesthetic mode of knowing, the pure contemplation of beauty, the tranquil appreciation of the Ideas, enabled the individual to escape, for the time being, from the never-ending misery of unsatisfied desire into a Nirvana of spiritual peace.

Strangeness is the form taken by beauty when beauty has no hope.

The advice to simplify our lives brings to mind William Morris' dictum that we should have nothing in our houses that we don't know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. More recently, Marie Kondo has suggested that unless an object 'sparks joy' in our heart, we should get rid of it.

Color in certain places has the great value of making the outlines and structural planes seem more energetic.

Design must seduce, shape, and perhaps more importantly, evoke an emotional response.

I applaud the needlessly beautiful in all things.

It is bad taste for a poet to be coarse and hairy.

The most beautiful colors, laid on confusedly, will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait.

Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies.

The greater the length, the more beautiful will the piece be by reason of its size, provided that the whole be perspicuous.

If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.

The primary factor is proportions.

And when an architect has designed a house with large windows, which is a necessity today in order to pull the daylight into these very deep houses, then curtains come to play a big role in architecture.

If architecture had nothing to do with art, it would be astonishingly easy to build houses, but the architect's task - his most difficult task - is always that of selecting.

But the exponents of the theory "art for art's sake" maintain that any reference to actualities beyond the work of art must irretrievably destroy its aesthetic illusion. That may be correct, and yet this aesthetic illusion is not all, to produce it is not the exclusive or the most important aim of the artistic endeavor.

The technology that threatens to kill off books as we know them - the 'physical book ' a new phrase in our language - is also making the physical book capable of being more beautiful than books have been since the middle ages.

As for everything else, so for a mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained.

As for everything else, so for mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained.

The Pyramids are perfect, but you can't put the Pyramids in the middle of Manhattan. In the desert, the combination of light and form makes it perfect.

Beauty is a combination of qualities. I don't think one can deny that certain people or things feel aesthetically pleasing. But without an equally pleasing being behind that form, there is no beauty there.

Color does not add a pleasant quality to design - it reinforces it.

Between two products equal in price, function and quality, the better looking will outsell the other.

I love Comme des Garcons. I think everything she touches is almost like gold. And she does it so quietly. No branding.