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"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."
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Exlpore more Aesthetics quotes
"A goatee is to beards what diamonds are to ornaments."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one's life. There is an urge to say, 'I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me."
Explore more quotes by John Ruskin
"There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey."
"The strength and power of a country depends absolutely on the quantity of good men and women in it."
"Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it."
"The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise as the greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure."
"I believe that the first test of a great man is his humility. I don't mean by humility, doubt of his power. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not of them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful."
"We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it."
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