top of page
"Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Aesthetics quotes

"The eye is the jewel of the body."

"The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books."

"Purposefully look for something beautiful today."

"There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy."

"As for her hair, or rather hairs, they are too complicated to describe, but one system went down her back, lying in a thick pad there, while another, created for a lighter destiny, rippled around her forehead."

"There stood a young man who had the figure of a Greek athlete and the face of an English one...Just where he began to be beautiful the clothes started."

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

"Black as night and as beautiful as forever."
Explore more quotes by John Updike

"Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience."

"Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works."

"The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks."

"The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all."

"Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art."

"To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit."
bottom of page