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Aesthetics Quotes
"We ascribe beauty to that which is simple which has no superfluous parts which exactly answers its ends."
53
"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."
41
"The eye is the jewel of the body."
34
"The quality of beauty lies on how beholder values an object."
33
"Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity " I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly."
31
"Her hair was full of lights."
24
"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."
21
"The pathetic almost always consists in the detail of little events."
21
"The Very first moment I beheld him, my heart was irrevocably gone."
20
"There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy."
19
"And as for Owen Warland, he looked placidly at what seemed the ruin of his life's labor, and which was yet no ruin. He had caught a far other butterfly than this. When the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the reality."
19
"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?"
19
"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."
18
"Keating stood still, because he understood for the first time what it was that artists spoke about when they spoke of beauty."
18
"Purposefully look for something beautiful today."
18
"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."
17
"There is nothing more beautiful than the light of a Candle and the Aroma of it's Heart."
15
"Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock."
15
"Well, I've always been interested in approaching a big city in a train, and I can't exactly describe the sensations, but they're entirely human and perhaps have nothing to do with aesthetics."
15
"Not lovelier. But a different kind of loveliness. There are so many kinds of loveliness."
14
"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."
14
"The ideal woman which is in every man's mind is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist her hand. The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement. Remember all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful and it's best to take the gesture the shadow of the branch and let the mind create the tree."
14
"Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language."
13
"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."
13
"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."
13
"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."
13
"Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there."
13
"Black as night and as beautiful as forever."
13
"Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul."
12
"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."
12
"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."
11
"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."
11
"I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow."
11
"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."
11
"The philosophical study of beauty, art, and the splendor of nature nurtures a person's fertile mind by exposing a person to the puzzling world of the beautiful, elegant, ugly, and grotesque. Human beings ability to experience sublime pleasure emanates from a variety of sensory experiences and a person's ability to make discriminatory observations and judgment in taste and sentiment."
11
"Beauty lies in the eye."
11
"Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul."
10
"Maybe, beauty, true beauty, is so overwhelming, it goes straight to our hearts.maybe it makes us feel emotions that are locked away inside."
10
"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."
10
"I've alway found that the most beautiful people, truly beautiful inside and out, are the ones who are quietly unaware of their effect."
10
"I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object."
10
"Beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,But rather a heart inflamed and a soul enchanted.It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a win attached to a claw,But rather a garden forever in bloom and a flock of angels forever in flight.Beauty is life when life unveils her holy face. But you are life and you are the veil.Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in the mirror.But you are eternity and you are the mirror."
9
"It was the sort of beauty you feel so deeply it becomes contagious and somehow makes you feel beautiful too."
8
"What is called poetic insight is the gift of discerning, in this sphere of strangely-mingled elements, the beauty and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid."
7
"No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and honesty are written across her face, she will be beautiful."
6
"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."
6
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