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Aesthetics Quotes
"Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous."
35
"No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and honesty are written across her face, she will be beautiful."
33
"Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them."
33
"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."
30
"Outer beauty pleases the EYE. Inner beauty captivates the HEART."
29
"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."
28
"Watching them was like watching the sunset and the sunrise, equally beautiful in different ways."
25
"Oh, glorious Art!" thus mused the enthusiastic painter, as he trod the street. "Thou art the image of the Creator's own. The innumerable forms that wander in nothingness start into being at thy beck. The dead live again. Thou recallest them to their old scenes, and givest their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and immortal. Thou snatchest back the fleeing moments of History. With thee, there is no Past; for at thy touch, all that is great becomes forever present; and illustrious men live through long ages in the visible performance of the very deeds which made them what they are."
25
"Isn't he beautiful? His silky hair, his muscles so strong and powerful yet amazingly, he trembles slightly at my touch, and the more I stroke him, the more he leans into my hand,' Keirah said her eyes remaining on the horse. Yes, Keirah, the horse is a fine one,' Wharick said as he slowly walked closer to her. 'What I said was not to you, Gwarda,' she teased, 'I was speaking to the horse."
24
"The cat . . . is for the man who appreciates beauty as the one living force in a blind and purposeless universe."
24
"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."
21
"Beauty is truth - truth beauty - that is all Ye know on earth and all ye need to know."
21
"The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude."
21
"The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of all the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of whichher beauty was a part."
21
"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."
21
"The best works of art are never innocuous: they alter the viewer's perceptual predictions. It is only when the patterns of our vision are disrupted that we truly pay attention and must ask ourselves what we are looking at."
21
"It was very still. The tree was tall and straggling. It had thrown its briers over a hawthorn-bush, and its long streamers trailed thick, right down to the grass, splashing the darkness everywhere with great spilt stars, pure white. In bosses of ivory and in large splashed stars the roses gleamed on the darkness of foliage and stems and grass. Paul and Miriam stood close together, silent, and watched. Point after point the steady roses shone out to them, seeming to kindle something in their souls. The dusk came like smoke around, and still did not put out the roses."
21
"It's the imperfections that make things beautiful."
20
"Everyone wants a little bit of something beautiful."
20
"I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That's what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don't see him as a living individual painter any more."
19
"A goatee is to beards what diamonds are to ornaments."
18
"They wore their strange beauty like war paint."
18
"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."
18
"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."
16
"I would wear pink because I knew my future was anything but rosy. I would accessorize myself to the hilt, and I would wear flirty shoes because my world needed more beauty to counter all the ugliness in it. I would wear pink because I hated gray, I didn't deserve white, and I was sick of black."
15
"It seems to me that the pleasure one feels in a work of art is just one thing that one does not have to explain."
11
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