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"We ascribe beauty to that which is simple which has no superfluous parts which exactly answers its ends."
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Explore more quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson

"There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly."

"Line in nature is not found;Unit and universe are round;In vain produced, all rays return;Evil will bless, and ice will burn."

"Go forth into the busy world and love it. Interest yourself in its life, mingle kindly with its joys and sorrows."

"The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief."

"If a man carefully examines his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His well-being is always ahead."

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in, forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
Exlpore more Aesthetics quotes

"I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object."

"There is a very delicate line between pornography and beauty. A naked woman is not necessarily pornographic; a naked man is not necessarily pornographic. A beautiful man, a beautiful woman, naked, can be examples of beauty, of health, of proportion. They are the most glorious products of nature. If a deer can be naked and beautiful-and nobody thinks the deer is pornographic-then why should it be that a naked man or woman cannot be just seen as beautiful?"

"I've alway found that the most beautiful people, truly beautiful inside and out, are the ones who are quietly unaware of their effect."

"A few flat clouds folded themselves like crepes over fillings of apricot sky. Pompadours of supper-time smoke billowed from chimneys, separating into girlish pigtails as the breeze combed them out, above the slate rooftops. Chestnut blossoms, weary from having been admired all day, wore faint smiles of anticipation."

"One thing, however, did become clear to him-why so many perfect works of art did not please him at all, why they were almost hateful and boring to him, in spite of a certain undeniable beauty. Workshops, churches, and palaces were full of these fatal works of art; he had even helped with a few himself. They were deeply disappointing because they aroused the desire for the highest and did not fulfill it. They lacked the most essential thing-mystery. That was what dreams and truly great works of art had in common: mystery."

"But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think."

"Beauty lies in the eye."

"Hitherto we have been permitted to seek beauty only in the morally good - a fact which sufficiently accounts for our having found so little of it and having had to seek about for imaginary beauties without backbone! - As surely as the wicked enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty: and many of them have not yet been discovered."
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