Selected aesthetics quotes

1. The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.

2. I believe in low lights and trick mirrors.

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

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

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

6. The body expresses our very being. The striving for beauty is inborn among the Aryan.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. Curiously enough, the Sublime is generally achieved through want of proportion.

13. There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

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

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

16. Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

17. 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.

18. What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. 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.

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

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

24. 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.

25. 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?

26. 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.

27. Taste has never been corrupted by simplicity.

28. Taste is the literary conscience of the soul.

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

30. 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.

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

32. Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry.

33. 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.

34. 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.

35. Who seems most hideous when adorned the most.

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

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

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

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

40. Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

41. Why are young widows in mourning so beautiful? (Look into it.)

42. 'For every thing there is an embellishment (or a decoration), and the embellishment of the Qur'an is a good voice.'

43. Qu'est-ce que l'Art, monsieur? C'est la Nature concentree.

44. I like listening to it just as I like looking at a fuchsia drenched with rain.

45. Sounds cool. Looks cool. Feels cool.

46. I don't like encores. It's like, if you see a great painting, you don't want an extra bit painted on the side.

47. Ruskin's special gift was the feeling for beauty, in nature as in art. It was in Beauty that his nature led him to seek reality, and his entirely religious life received from it an entirely aesthetic use. But this Beauty to which he thus happened to dedicate his life was not conceived by him as an object of enjoyment made to charm, but as a reality infinitely more important than life, for which he would have given his own life. From this, as you will see, the whole aesthetic system of Ruskin follows. First, you will understand that the years when he became acquainted with a new school of architecture or of painting were the principal landmarks in the development of his ethics. He would speak of the years when Gothic art presented itself to him with the same gravity, the same emotional nostalgia, the same serenity with which a Christian speaks of the day the truth was revealed to him.

48. Wilde was not a great poet nor a consummate prose writer. He was a very astute Irishman who encompassed in epigrams an esthetic credo which others before him scattered in the space of long pages. He was an enfant terrible.

49. The integral vision, I believe, is more than happy to welcome empirical science as a part - a very important part - of the endeavor to befriend the Kosmos, to be attuned to its many moods and flavors and facets and forms. But a more integral psychology goes beyond that . . . With science we touch the True, the 'It' of Spirit. With morals we touch the Good, the 'We' of Spirit. What, then, would an integral approach have to say about the Beautiful, the 'I' of Spirit itself? What is the Beauty that is in the eye of the Beholder? When we are in the eye of Spirit, the I of Spirit, what do we finally see?

50. And so the arbitrary union of three incommensurate, mutually disconnected concepts became the basis of a bewildering theory... [by which] one of the lowest renderings of art, art for mere pleasure - against which all of the master teachers warned - was idealized as the ultimate in art.

51. Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting.

52. Goethe is an altogether practical Poet. He is in his works what the English are in their wares: highly simple, neat, convenient and durable. He has done in German Literature what Wedgwood did in English Manufacture. He has, like the English, a natural turn for Economy, and a noble Taste acquired by Understanding. Both these are very compatible, and have a near affinity in the chemical sense.

53. If only for esthetic reasons, I am not overfond of the term 'Bottom-Up Management.'

54. I like listening to it just as I like looking at a fuschia drenched with rain.

55. I like a church, I like a cowl, I love a prophet of the soul, And on my heart monastic aisles Fall like sweet strains or pensive smiles; Yet not for all his faith can see, Would I that cowled churchman be. Why should the vest on him allure, Which I could not on me endure?

56. Your tenderness and terrorization, your prose sentences - like Bernini graves, staggeringly expensive, Italianate, warm, sentences once-and-for-all.

57. When I did that Metallic stuff for my Umbrella video, I didn't do it to show my body. I didn't do it for people to like me. I did it because it was a cool visual, unexpected and I looked hot. I just find myself leaning towards stuff that only Madonna can pull off.

58. Many moviegoers and video viewers say they do not 'like' black and white films. In my opinion, they are cutting themselves off from much of the mystery and beauty of the movies. Black and white is an artistic choice, a medium that has strengths and traditions, especially in its use of light and shadow. Moviegoers of course have the right to dislike b&w, but it is not something they should be proud of. It reveals them, frankly, as cinematically illiterate.? I have been described as a snob on this issue. But snobs exclude; they do not include. To exclude b&w from your choices is an admission that you have a closed mind, a limited imagination, or are lacking in taste.

59. I could list some Japanese films illustrating this, but the last thing the audience for Memoirs of a Geisha wants to see is a more truthful film with less gorgeous women and shabbier production values.

60. Schiller has the material sublime.

61. Hoc incendium e turre Maecenatiana prospectans laetusque 'flammae,' ut aiebat, 'pulchritudine' Halosin Ilii in illo suo scaenico habitu decantavit.

62. Sadomasochism has always been the furthest reach of the sexual experience: when sex becomes most purely sexual, that is, severed from personhood, from relationships, from love. It should not be surprising that it has become attached to Nazi symbolism in recent years. Never before was the relation of masters and slaves so consciously aestheticized. Sade had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the decor and costumes and blasphemous rites. Now there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.

63. What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.

64. 'Taste is the ability to keep in balance the contradiction in art between the made and the apparent not-having-become; true works of art, however, never at one with taste, are those which push this contradiction to the extreme, and realize themselves in their resultant downfall.'

65. 'What is it that separates human beings from the so called lower animals? Well as I see it, it's exactly one half dozen significant things: Humor, Imagination, Eroticism-as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glow-worms or raccoons-Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for it's own sake. Now, since those are the features that define a human being, it follows that the extent to which someone is lacking in those qualities is the extent to which he or she is less than human. Capisce?'

66. I like my philosophy smothered in beauty and not the opposite.

67. Order and disorder, they each have their beauty

68. In the tragedy in question, for example, he condemned the ideas but admired the style, abhorred the conception but praised all the details, found the characters impossible but their speeches marvelous

69. -You know what Aquinas says: The three things requisite for beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry and radiance. Some day I will expand that sentence into a treatise. Consider the performance of your own mind when confronted with any object, hypothetically beautiful. Your mind to apprehend that object divides the entire universe into two parts, the object, and the void which is not the object. To apprehend it you must lift it away from everything else: and then you perceive that it is one integral thing, that is a thing. You recognise its integrity. Isn't that so? - And then? -That is the first quality of beauty: it is declared in a simple sudden synthesis of the faculty which apprehends. What then? Analysis then. The mind considers the object in whole and in part, in relation to itself and to other objects, examines the balance of its parts, contemplates the form of the object, traverses every cranny of the structure. So the mind receives the impression of the symmetry of the object. The mind recognises that the object is in the strict sense of the word, a thing, a definitely constituted entity. You see? - Let us turn back, said Cranly.

70. 'I simply love what you've done with this place! (to Two-Face) Heavy Metal meets House & Garden! Ha ha ha! It's so...dark and gothic! Despisingly decedant! And yet so...bright and chipper, and (hops happily across)..conservative. Very few people are both a summer and a winter, but...you pull it off nicely.' (Batman Forever)

71. ...having acknowledged the measure of the good to be pleasure, i.e., beauty, the European upper classes went back in their comprehension of art to the gross conception of the primitive Greeks which Plato had already condemned. And with this understanding of life, a theory of art was formulated.

72. After Plotinus, says Schassler, fifteen centuries passed without the slightest scientific interest for the world of beauty and art. ...In reality, nothing of the kind happened. The science of aesthetics... neither did nor could vanish, because it never existed. ...the Greeks were so little developed that goodness and beauty seemed to coincide. On that obsolete Greek view of life the science of aesthetics was invented by men of the eighteenth century, and especially shaped and mounted in Baumgarten's theory. The Greeks (as anyone may read in Benard's book on Aristotle and Walter's work on Plato) never had a science of aesthetics.

73. The good is the everlasting, the pinnacle of our life. ...life is striving towards the good, toward God. The good is the most basic idea... an idea not definable by reason... yet is the postulate from which all else follows. But the beautiful... is just that which is pleasing. The idea of beauty is not an alignment to the good, but is its opposite, because for most part, the good aids in our victory over our predilections, while beauty is the motive of our predilections. The more we succumb to beauty, the further we are displaced from the good. ...the usual response is that there exists a moral and spiritual beauty... we mean simply the good. Spiritual beauty or the good, generally not only does not coincide with the typical meaning of beauty, it is its opposite.

74. Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

75. Too fair to worship, too divine to love.

76. Beauty? What's that?

77. The partisans of aesthetic theory denied that it was their own invention, and professed that it existed in the nature of things and even that it was recognized by the ancient Greeks. But... among the ancient Greeks, due to their low grade (compared to the Christian) moral ideal, their conception of the good was not yet sharply distinguished from their conception of the beautiful. That highest conception of goodness (not identical with beauty and for the most part, contrasting with it) discerned by the Jews even in the time of Isaiah and fully expressed by Christianity, was unknown to the Greeks. It is true that the Greek's foremost thinkers - Socrates, Plato, Aristotle - felt that goodness may not coincide with beauty. ...But notwithstanding all this, they could not quite dismiss the notion that beauty and goodness coincide. And consequently in the language of that period a compound word (????-???????, beauty-goodness) came into use to express that notion. Evidently the Greek sages began to draw close to the perception of goodness which is expressed in Buddhism and in Christianity, but they got entangled in defining the relationship between goodness and beauty. And it was just this confusion of ideas that those Europeans of a later age...tried to elevate into law. ...On this misunderstanding the new science of aesthetics was built.

78. Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment in recognition of the pattern.

79. There's a joy without canker or cark, There's a pleasure eternally new, 'T is to gloat on the glaze and the mark Of china that's ancient and blue.

80. The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.

81. We have to regard art as the greater enhancement, the more perfect development of all this; for essentially it achieves just the same thing as is achieved by the visible world itself, only with greater concentration, perfection, intention and intelligence; and therefore, in the full sense of the word, it may be called the flower of life.

82. I have loved colours, and not flowers; Their motion, not the swallows wings; And wasted more than half my hours Without the comradeship of things.

83. But though there be naturally a wide difference in point of delicacy between one person and another, nothing tends further to encrease and improve this talent, than practice in a particular art, and the frequent survey or contemplation of a particular species of beauty.

84. ''Is the hotel Marge? It has to be Marge. I want atmosphere.' Marge is Anna-Louise's word describing sad, 1950s-ish diner-type places where the waitresses are named Marge.'

85. 'We call Jasmine's room 'The Harem,' a sexy place, about which Dan never complained, even though his own possessions, his laptop PC and briefcase, for example, looked crazy in the environment, invasive and overcomplex, like Stealth bombers in SmurfWorld.'

86. Wasting time has an esthetics to it.

87. Il y a des personnes a qui les defauts sieent bien, et d'autres qui sont disgraciees avec leurs bonnes qualites.

88. What is now decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons.

89. 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.

90. 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?

91. 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.

92. 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.

93. 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.

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

95. In art economy is always beauty.

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

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

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

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

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