194 Aesthetics Quotes

I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.

As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

I certainly think that when I flick through all the magazines at the hairdresser's I like to see and am drawn to images that have an intelligence and mind at work behind them.

The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.

I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth.

To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in, was a mark of the Greek spirit which distinguished it from all that had gone before. It is a vital distinction.

Consider everything in the nature of a hanging fixture a weakness, and naked radiators an abomination.

The concept of Queen is to be regal and majestic. Glamour is part of us, and we want to be dandy.

It seems then that it is not the excellence of any two things (or more) in themselves, but those two things as viewed by the light of each other, that makes beauty.

I did not care for Wagner. My tastes are more classical. Der Fuhrer had no musical taste and liked Wagner because of the bombastic Teutonic glories.

People ridiculously overvalue aesthetics and beauty when evaluating products. It's one of the reasons iPods, and, for that matter, Keanu Reeves, are so successful.

The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.

It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.

What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice, Of Attic taste?

I do not believe that ever any building was truly great, unless it had mighty masses, vigorous and deep, of shadow mingled with its surface.

The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?

Grace is in garments, in movements, in manners; beauty in the nude, and in forms. This is true of bodies; but when we speak of feelings, beauty is in their spirituality, and grace in their moderation.

Taste has never been corrupted by simplicity.

Taste is the literary conscience of the soul.

There are women who are not beautiful but only look that way.

The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art.

Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.

Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry.

In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

Even the nonreligious may exercise aesthetic judgment in matters of religion, and indeed our age has given the unbelieving a sophisticated taste in religious literature.

Who seems most hideous when adorned the most.

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.

A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad.

Formalism is music that people don't understand at first hearing.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

The Beautiful exists just as little as the True. In every case it is a question of the conditions of preservation of a certain type of man: thus the herd-man will experience the value feeling of the True in different things than will the Overman.

After a few days, Willie got tired of [the water-wheel] - and no blame to him, for it was no earthly use beyond amusement, and that which can only amuse can never amuse long. I think the reason children get tired of their toys so soon is just that it is against human nature to be really interested in what is of no use. If you say that a beautiful thing is always interesting, I answer, that a beautiful thing is of the highest use. Is not the diamond that flashes all its colours into the heart of a poet as useful as the diamond with which the glazier divides the sheets of glass into panes for our windows?

Truth, Goodness, Beauty - those celestial thrins, Continually are born; e'en now the Universe, With thousand throats, and eke with greener smiles, Its joy confesses at their recent birth.

Sphere Music - Some sounds seem to reverberate along the plain, and then settle to earth again like dust; such are Noise, Discord, Jargon. But such only as spring heavenward, and I may catch from steeples and hilltops in their upward course, which are the more refined parts of the former, are the true sphere music - pure, unmixed music - in which no wail mingles.

Poetry - No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. It is indeed all that we do not know. The poet does not need to see how meadows are something else than earth, grass, and water, but how they are thus much. He does not need discover that potato blows are as beautiful as violets, as the farmer thinks, but only how good potato blows are. The poem is drawn out from under the feet of the poet, his whole weight has rested on this ground. It has a logic more severe than the logician's. You might as well think to go in pursuit of the rainbow, and embrace it on the next hill, as to embrace the whole of poetry even in thought.

Everything about Florence seems to be coloured with a mild violet, like diluted wine.

In art economy is always beauty.

The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.

Do as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is the intermixing of different genres.

Individuality of expression is the beginning and end of all art.

A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.

Ethics and Aesthetics are one.

To tell you the truth, I am rather perplexed about the concept of 'art'. What one person considers to be 'art' is often not 'art' to another. 'Beautiful' and 'ugly' are old-fashioned concepts that are seldom applied these days; perhaps justifiably, who knows? Something repulsive, which gives you a moral hangover, and hurts your ears or eyes, may well be art. Only 'kitsch' is not art - we're all agreed about that. Indeed, but what is 'kitsch'? If only I knew!

The things I want to express are so beautiful and pure.

Use harms and even destroys beauty. The noblest function of an object is to be contemplated.

And, after all, what is a fashion? From the artistic point of view, it is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

Genius lasts longer than beauty.

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Beauty is a form of genius - is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.

Why make so much of fragmentary blue In here and there a bird, or butterfly, Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye, When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue.

It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound-that he will never get over it.

Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects and predicates. What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word 'quality' cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.

It is filled with beauty. . . a finely made whole that seems to emanate from a very special grace.

Music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.

Mozart's music is free of all exaggeration, of all sharp breaks and contradictions. The sun shines but does not blind, does not burn or consume. Heaven arches over the earth, but it does not weigh it down, it does not crush or devour it.

Ikenobo Sen'o, a master of flower arranging, once said (the remark is to be found in his Sayings): 'With a spray of flowers, a bit of water, one evokes the vastness of rivers and mountains.' The Japanese garden too, of course symbolizes the vastness of nature. The Western garden tends to be symmetrical, the Japanese garden asymmetrical, and this is because the asymmetrical has the greater power to symbolize multiplicity and vastness. The asymmetry, of course, rests upon a balance imposed by delicate sensibilities. Nothing is more complicated, varied, attentive to detail, than the Japanese art of landscape gardening. Thus there is the form called the dry landscape, composed entirely of rocks, in which the arrangement of stones gives expression to mountains and rivers that are not present, and even suggests the waves of the great ocean breaking in upon cliffs.

The single flower contains more brightness than a hundred flowers. The great sixteenth-century master of the tea ceremony and flower arranging, Rikyu, taught that it was wrong to use fully opened flowers. Even in the tea ceremony today the general practice is to have in the alcove of the tea room but a single flower, and that a flower in bud. In winter a special flower of winter, let us say a camellia, bearing some such name as White Jewel or Wabisuke, which might be translated literally as 'Helpmate in Solitude', is chosen, a camellia remarkable among camellias for its whiteness and the smallness of its blossoms; and but a single bud is set out in the alcove. White is the cleanest of colors, it contains in itself all the other colors. And there must always be dew on the bud. The bud is moistened with a few drops of water.

Among flower vases, the ware that is given the highest rank is old Iga, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it commands the highest price. When old Iga has been dampened, its colors and its glow take on a beauty such as to awaken on afresh. Iga was fired at very high temperatures. The straw ash and the smoke from the fuel fell and flowed against the surface, and as the temperature dropped, became a sort of glaze. Because the colors were not fabricated but were rather the result of nature at work in the kiln, color patterns emerged in such varieties as to be called quirks and freaks of the kiln. The rough, austere, strong surfaces of old Iga take on a voluptuous glow when dampened. It breathes to the rhythm of the dew of the flowers.

Wistaria sprays, as they trail in the breeze, suggest softness, gentleness, reticence. Disappearing and then appearing again in the early summer greenery, they have in them that feeling for the poignant beauty of things long characterized by the Japanese as mono no aware.

Wrap me up so superficial Tied up nicely with a bow

If we cannot write with the beauty of Mozart, let us at least try to write with his purity. ~ Johannes Brahms

My Quest for Beauty (1985)