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Aesthetics Quotes
"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."
9
"The quality of beauty lies on how beholder values an object."
3
"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."
2
"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."
1
"Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language."
1
"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."
1
"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."
1
"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."
1
"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."
1
"Black as night and as beautiful as forever."
1
"Beauty lies in the eye."
1
"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?"
1
"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."
"Not lovelier. But a different kind of loveliness. There are so many kinds of loveliness."
"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."
"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."
"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 is nothing more beautiful than the light of a Candle and the Aroma of it's Heart."
"There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy."
"The Very first moment I beheld him, my heart was irrevocably gone."
"The eye is the jewel of the body."
"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."
"The pathetic almost always consists in the detail of little events."
"Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock."
"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."
"Keating stood still, because he understood for the first time what it was that artists spoke about when they spoke of beauty."
"I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow."
"Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul."
"Her hair was full of lights."
"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 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."
"We ascribe beauty to that which is simple which has no superfluous parts which exactly answers its ends."
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