Quotes About Aesthetics

If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul

Beauty is its own excuse for being.

Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

WHOEVER considers the final cause of the world, will discern a multitude of uses that result. They all admit of being thrown into one of the following classes; Commodity; Beauty; Language; and Discipline. Under the general name of Commodity, I rank all those advantages which our senses owe to nature. This, of course, is a benefit which is temporary and mediate, not

For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conservationist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my books or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule.

the criterion a wealthy character sets for buying art is "that a picture should repel his sense and intelligence. Only then could he be sure of having bought a valuable modern work.

Keep in mind that when we talk of a great painting we are not really talking about anything great. We are talking of only a painting.

When a man despoils a work of art we call him a vandal, when he despoils a work of nature we call him a developer.

For, in movie logic, aesthetics has the authority of ethics: to be less than beautiful is sad, but to be willfully less than beautiful is immoral.

Apparently an aesthetic sense is instinctual. Just as the beauty of a rose exceeds its function in attracting insects to spread pollen, so human skill always flowers in excess, producing beauty beyond need. Nature is not hardheaded, hardhearted, mechanical, pratical, or economical. Neither are we. Our simplest and most practical acts, including the use of language, are likely to be infused with grace and elaboration wich utilitarian purposes cannot explain

He wants those who can appreciate beauty to be able to surround themselves with beautiful things;

Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

Humanity's self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

Form follows emotion

It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art.

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.

the whole question of how the Mass is celebrated, from which angle the Mass is celebrated, how much Latin is used in the Mass. All of these questions are important questions but without the proper end in view what happens to the liturgical life? It becomes an aesthetic or ideological battleground; Traditionalists versus Modernists. This is always a risk. The

to stand in front of some of his drawings or pictures gives a keener and more spiritual pleasure than any other kind of painting.

Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know.