Quotes About Aesthetics

Yet for better or worse we love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colors and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them.

...for the object of education is to teach us to love beauty.

I can only tell you this-I would rather have taste than either love or money.

I love a woman, I love to judge how beautiful she is, how beautiful I can make her.

There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty-unless she is wed to something more meaningful-is always superficial

I love everything that's beautiful. A lot of things.

What I love about design is the artistic and scientific complexity that also becomes useful.

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

I love going somewhere like Japan where you can't understand a word of the advertising - you just see it for its aesthetic beauty, without feeling that you're being sold something.

Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.

The loveliest tune imaginable becomes vulgar and insupportable as soon as the public begins to hum it and the hurdy-gurdies make it their own.

He wanted, in short, a work of art both for what it was in itself and for what it allowed him to bestow on it; he wanted to go along with it and on it, as if supported by a friend or carried by a vehicle, into a sphere where sublimated sensations would arouse within him an unexpected commotion, the causes of which he would strive to patiently and even vainly to analyse.

and, indeed, just as the most charming tune in the world becomes vulgar, intolerable, as soon as the general public is humming it, as soon as the street - organs have taken it up, the work for which charlatan art fanciers do not remain indifferent, the work which nitwits do not challenge, which is not satisfied with arousing the enthusiasm of the few, also becomes, by virtue of that very fact, corrupted, banal, almost repellent to the initiated.

There is nothing touches our imagination so much as a beautiful woman in a plain dress.

A man that has a taste of music, painting, or architecture, is like one that has another sense, when compared with such as have no relish of those arts.

There is nothing that makes its way more directly to the soul than beauty.

There is nothing that makes its way more directly into the soul than beauty.

But there is nothing that makes its way more directly to the Soul than Beauty, which immediately diffuses a secret satisfaction and complacency through the imagination, and gives a finishing to any thing that is Great or Uncommon.

For aesthetics is the mother of ethics. Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe-not empirically, alas, but only theoretically-that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.

He was watching Violet. Her fur had the rich darkness of storm clouds. Her long tail was thick and sleek. Her ears were wide and soft, framing her pretty face perfectly

Beauty is a symbol of goodness; the admiration we feel for it is a symbol of the reverence inspired by the moral law.

If it was occasionally ludicrous, it was always sublime. [Estelle Jussim on the 19th century Cult of the Beautiful.]

Of which beauty will you speak? There are many: there are a thousand: there is one for every look, for every spirit, adapted to each taste, to each particular constitution.

How strange painting is, it delights us with representations of objects that are not pleasing in themselves! (15 September 1854)