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"Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock."
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Exlpore more Aesthetics quotes
"I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow."
"Maybe, beauty, true beauty, is so overwhelming, it goes straight to our hearts.maybe it makes us feel emotions that are locked away inside."
"I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object."
"What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Andrei, did you like the opera?""Not particularly.""Andrei, do you see what you're missing?""I don't think I do, Kira. It's all rather silly. And useless.""Can't you enjoy things that are useless, merely because they are beautiful?""No. But I enjoyed it.""The music?""No. The way you listened to it."
"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."
Explore more quotes by Milan Kundera
"Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love."
"Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love."
"She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death."
"Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company."
"They were ready to sell people a future in exchange for their past... They wanted to compel him to cast his life away and become a shadow, a man without past, an actor without a role, and turn even his castaway life, even the role the actor had abandoned, into a shadow. Having turned him into a shadow, they would let him live."
"The unification of the planet's history, that humanist dream which God has spitefully allowed to come true, has been accompanied by a process of dizzying reduction. True, the termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories. But the character of modern society hideously exacerbates this curse: it reduces man's life to its social function; the history of a people to a small set of events that are themselves reduced to a tendentious interpretation; social life is reduced to political struggle, and that in turn to the confrontation of just two great global powers."
"There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos."
"Therein lies the power of culture: it redeems horror by transforming it into existential wisdom. If the spirit of the trial succeeds in annihilating this century's culture, nothing will remain of us but a memory of its atrocities sung by a chorus of children."
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