Aesthetics Quotes - Page 2

Color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul.

Wassily Kandinsky

For if indeed God became a man, then Truth condescended to became a truth, from whose historical contingency one cannot simply pass to categories of universal rationality; and this means that whatever Christians mean when they speak of truth, it cannot involve simply the dialectical wrestling of abstract principles from intractable facts. (5)

David Bentley Hart

Christ is a persuasion, a form evoking desire, and the whole force of the gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also peace: that the desire awakened by the shape of Christ and his church is one truly reborn as agape, rather than merely the way in which a lesser force succumbs to a greater, as an episode in the endless epic of power. (3)

David Bentley Hart

Christianity has from its beginning portrayed itself as a gospel of peace, a way of reconciliation (with God, with other creatures), and a new model of human community, offering the 'peace which passes understanding' to a world enmeshed in sin and violence. (1)

David Bentley Hart

There was a product which seemed attractive, expensive, portable, beautiful and simple. Everybody talked about its beauty but they bought it for it's simplicity.

Amit Kalantri

It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.

Walter Pater

We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce, then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light—his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

....it seems to me that a pleasurable Contemplation of Beauty has certainly an immeasurably greater value than mere Consciousness of Pleasure.

G.E. Moore

How convenient it is to declare that everything is totally ugly within the habit of the époque, rather than applying oneself to extract from it the dark and cryptic beauty, however faint and invisible it is.

Charles Baudelaire

Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Your skin has a memory.In ten, twenty, thirty years from now, your skin will show the results ofhow it was treated today.So treat it kindly and with respect.

Jana Elston

Then there are the fully intentional pleasures, which, although in some way tied up with sensory or perceptual experience, are modes of exploration of the world. Aesthetic pleasures are like this. Aesthetic pleasures are contemplative - they involve studying an object OUTSIDE of the self, to which one is GIVING something (namely, attention and all that flows from it), and not TAKING, as in the pleasure that comes from drugs and drinks. Hence such pleasures are not addictive - there is no pathway to reward that can be short-circuited here, and a serotonin injection is not a cheap way of obtaining the experience of PARISFAL or THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.

Roger Scruton

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.

Kilroy J. Oldster

When a work of painting, music or other form attains two-way communication, it is truly art. One occasionally hears an artist being criticized on the basis that his work is too 'literal' or too 'common.' But one has rarely if ever heard any definition of 'literal' or 'common.' And there are many artists simply hung up on this, protesting it. Also, some avant-garde schools go completely over the cliff in avoiding anything 'literal' or 'common'—and indeed go completely out of communication! The return flow from the person viewing a work would be contribution. True art always elicits a contribution from those who view or hear or experience it. By contribution is meant 'adding to it.’ An illustration is 'literal' in that it tells everything there is to know. Let us say the illustration is a picture of a tiger approaching a chained girl. It does not really matter how well the painting is executed, it remains an illustration and it is literal. But now let us take a small portion out of the scene and enlarge it. Let us take, say, the head of the tiger with its baleful eye and snarl. Suddenly we no longer have an illustration. It is no longer 'literal.' And the reason lies in the fact that the viewer can fit this expression into his own concepts, ideas or experience: he can supply the why of the snarl, he can compare the head to someone he knows. In short, he can CONTRIBUTE to the head. The skill with which the head is executed determines the degree of response. Because the viewer can contribute to the picture, it is art. In music, the hearer can contribute his own emotion or motion. And even if the music is only a single drum, if it elicits a contribution of emotion or motion, it is truly art.

L. Ron Hubbard

Desire for beauty will endure and undermine the desire for truth.

Richard O. Prum

Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and . . . it is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal.

Louis de Bernières

It was one of God's jokes that such a dumb mind had been put in such an eloquent body.

Charlaine Harris

Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.

Sophia Loren

There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism

Alan Hollinghurst

All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.

Walter Benjamin

The goal of all principled people is to recognize truth. Simple or complex thoughts and feelings standing alone rarely express any universal truths. Thoughts and feelings combine to create profound truths and compose extravagant falsities. Truth making exposes certain falsehoods, and lies shed light upon irrefutable truths. Art reveals the pageantry of nature along with the unmitigated grotesqueness that accompanies an earthly life. The search for truth begins with an intellectual journey into darkness whereas the search for beauty requires an imaginative act trussed with the classical beauty of Apollonian lightness. Aesthetic appreciation represents the perfect reconciliation of the sensual and rational parts of humankind’s animalistic nature. Similar to aesthetic experience – contemplation of beauty without imposition of a worldly agenda – love depends upon human sensory-emotional values, a judgement of values and sentiments.

Kilroy J. Oldster

He had never believed that spirituality had to be anemic or aesthetic.

Irving Stone

[Hegel’s] system of nature seemed, at least to natural philosophers, absolutely crazy….Hegel…launched out with particular vehemence and acrimony against the natural philosophers, and especially against Isaac Newton. The philosophers accused the scientific men of narrowness; the scientific men retorted that the philosophers were insane.

Hermann von Helmholtz

What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant.

Murray Gell-Mann

Hermann von Helmholtz

What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant.

Murray Gell-Mann

At last everything was satisfactorily arranged, and I could not help admiring the setting: these mingled touches betrayed on a small scale the inspiration of a poet, the research of a scientist, the good taste of an artist, the gourmet’s fondness for good food, and the love of flowers, which concealed in their delicate shadows a hint of the love of women

August Strindberg

I became an artist because I wanted to be an active participant in the conversation about art.

Kamand Kojouri

They walked on rather aimlessly. He hoped she wouldn't notice he was touched, because he wouldn't have known how to explain why. Here lay the great discrepancy between aesthetic truth and sleazy reality.

Patrick White

In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.

Clarice Lispector

Finer feeling, which we now wish to consider, is chiefly of two kinds: the feeling of the *sublime* and that of the *beautiful*. The stirring of each is pleasant, but in different ways. The sight of a mountain whose snow-covered peak rises above the clouds, the description of a raging storm, or Milton's portrayal of the infernal kingdom, arouse enjoyment but with horror; on the other hand, the sight of flower strewn meadows, valleys with winding brooks and covered with grazing flocks, the description of Elysium, or Homer's portrayal of the girdle of Venus, also occasion a pleasant sensation but one that is joyous and smiling. In order that the former impression could occur to us in due strength, we must have *a feeling of the sublime*, and, in order to enjoy the latter well, *a feeling of the beautiful*. Tall oaks and lonely shadows in a sacred grove are sublime; flower beds, low hedges and trees trimmed in figures are beautiful. Night is sublime; day is beautiful. Temperaments that possess a feeling for the sublime are drawn gradually, by the quiet stillness of a summer evening as the shimmering light of the stars breaks through the brown shadows of night and the lonely moon rises into view, into high feelings of friendship, of disdain for the world, of eternity. The shining day stimulates busy fervor and a feeling of gaiety. The sublime *moves*, the beautiful *charms*.

Immanuel Kant

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

Theodor W. Adorno

Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.

Theodor W. Adorno

God's pleasure--the beauty creation possesses in his regard--underlies the distinct being of creation, and so beauty is the first and truest word concerning all that appears within being; beauty is the showing of what is; God looked upon what he had wrought and saw that it was good.

David Bentley Hart

Nothing's perfect, the world's not perfect. But it's there for us, trying the best it can; that's what makes it so damn beautiful.

Hiromu Arakawa

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Aesthetics Quotes - Page 2

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