Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
Beauty lacks an absolute standard, which keeps the pursuit of it engaging and open to interpretation.
In plain terms
Beauty has no fixed rules, making it interesting to chase.
What can you take from it?
Subjectivity makes aesthetic pursuit compelling.

Where it applies

  • art critique
  • design discussions
  • personal taste

Putting it to work

  • explore art
  • develop personal taste
  • discuss aesthetics

Questions to consider

  • Why does uncertainty make things more interesting?
  • Can standards of beauty ever be objective?

Another view

It assumes all people find the lack of standards interesting.

More from John Kenneth Galbraith

  1. In a community where public services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence a…

    Permalink to quote #8
  2. Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

    Permalink to quote #10
  3. It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.

    Permalink to quote #7

Related quotes

  1. Toutes les beautes contiennent, comme tous les phenomenes possibles, quelque chose d'eternel et quelque chose de transitoire - d'absolu et de particulier.

    Charles BaudelaireCharles Baudelaire quote #2
  2. The Greeks were the classicists of antiquity and they are still today the preeminent classicists. What marked all they did, the classic stamp, is a direct simp…

    Edith HamiltonEdith Hamilton quote #15
  3. Beauty ... is a relation, and the apprehension of it a comparison.

    Gerard Manley HopkinsGerard Manley Hopkins quote #21