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"The eye must be easy, before it can be pleased."
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Exlpore more Aesthetics quotes
"A goatee is to beards what diamonds are to ornaments."
"It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building."
"A slight deviation form what we would think of as symmetry gives us a bit more information and the mind seems to enjoy this stimulation because it is always looking for value. Beauty is a slight deviation from expectation."
"Everyone wants a little bit of something beautiful."
"Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice."
"In an animal's or a plant's expression of imagination (let's leave out the rest for now, so we don't have to deal with the question of consciousness in, for example, minerals), there is always purity in the connection between need and evolution. That which is created is a response to reality and very specific, essential concerns. This then is the origin of the union between what is so and mysterious harmony-truth and beauty. The bridge between them is inspired intuition and the actions it causes. Or, imagination causes inspiration causes intuition causes beauty, which then causes imagination again."
"The best works of art are never innocuous: they alter the viewer's perceptual predictions. It is only when the patterns of our vision are disrupted that we truly pay attention and must ask ourselves what we are looking at."
"It was the sort of beauty you feel so deeply it becomes contagious and somehow makes you feel beautiful too."
"était tard ; ainsi qu’une médaille neuve
La pleine lune s’étalait,
Et la solennité de la nuit, comme un fleuve
Sur Paris dormant ruisselait."
"Beauty without grace is like a fish far displaced from the water and looking at this kind of beauty is like watching that fish die right there on the cement in front of you."
Explore more quotes by William Shenstone
"The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical."
"The regard one shows economy, is like that we show an old aunt who is to leave us something at last."
"Laws are generally found to be nets of such a texture, as the little creep through, the great break through, and the middle-sized are alone entangled in it."
"Grandeur and beauty are so very opposite, that you often diminish the one as you increase the other. Variety is most akin to the latter, simplicity to the former."
"Every single instance of a friend's insincerity increases our dependence on the efficacy of money."
"The world may be divided into people that read, people that write, people that think, and fox-hunters."
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