Quotes About Aesthetics

What, indeed? It is art for art's sake, Watson.

They made houses so oddly back when Hill House was built, she thought; they put towers and turrets and buttresses and wooden lace on them, even sometimes Gothic spires and gargoyles; nothing was ever left undecorated.

Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.

what we know to be useless, but expect civilization to value, is beauty;

Doremus declared that the house was ugly, "but ugly in a nice way.

While he was bored by free verse and cubism, he thought rather well of Dreiser, Cabell, and so much of Proust as he had rather laboriously mastered.

What a difference! Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient! when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular and infinitely boring

Where the novel makes use of material from my life it does so because it's aesthetically convenient, not because of any allegiance it has to any verifiable facts.

I do not much care for nature, and believe that flowers belong in vases rather than loose and untidy on the ground.

His friends said, "Why do you have that ugly thing hanging there?" and Bull said, "I like it because it's ugly." All his life was in that line.

All that is beautiful can only be felt.

She's too sad to be beautiful. No one that sad can still be beautiful.

Sculpture is not the mere cutting of the form of anything in stone; it is the cutting of the effect of it. Very often the true form, in the marble, would not be in the least like itself.

Absolute and entire ugliness is rare.

The sky is the part of creation in which nature has done for the sake of pleasing man.

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men's lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.

Taste is not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is What do you like Tell me what you like, I'll tell you what you are.

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.

Remember that the most beautiful things in life are often the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.

At what point does the brown cloud over an industrial city become a problem as opposed to a sky-high banner proclaiming good times? When does the ration of clear-cuts and Christmas tree farms to healthy, intact forest begin to cause aesthetic and moral discomfort, or real environmental damage?

I think permitting the game to become too physical takes away a little bit of the beauty.