#Aesthetics Quotes

“Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.”

“Without the great arts which speak to the sense of beauty, a man seems to me a poor, naked, shivering creature. These are his becoming draperies, which warm and adorn him.”

“All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is taste. Others have the same love in such success that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is art.”

“We call the beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean, escaping the dowdiness of the good and the heartlessness of the true.”

“I cannot pretend to be impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.”

“We imperatively require a perception of and a homage to beauty in our companions. Other virtues are in request in the field and workyard, but a certain degree of taste is not to be spared in those we sit with.”

“Tis the eternal law,That first in beauty should be first in might.”

“The refining influence is the study of art, which is the science of beauty; and I find that every man values every scrap of knowledge in art, every observation of his own in it, every hint he has caught from another. For the laws of beauty are the beauty of beauty, and give the mind the same or a higher joy than the sight of it gives the senses. The study of art is of high value to the growth of the intellect.”

“Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.”

“Does not beauty confer a benefit upon us, even by the simple fact of being beautiful?”

“To a toad what is beauty? A female with two lovely pop-eyes, a wide mouth, yellow belly, and green spotted back.”

“The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.”

“All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain.”

“Every beauty, when out of it's place, is a beauty no longer.”

“The abuse of grace is affectation, as the abuse of the sublime is absurdity; all perfection is nearly a fault.”

“Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need a little rest from everything, even the beautiful.”

“Art is - representing the beautiful. There must be Art in everything.”

“The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.”

“As taxpayers, we have quietly accepted the fact that our taxes will be spent to pay big bucks for all sorts of ugly, twisted metal to be displayed in front of or inside government buildings, in the name of 'art' that was obviously never meant to give the public any enjoyment and often represented a thumbing of the artist's nose at the public.”

“No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.”

“A good form strikes all eyes pleasantly, long before they have any science on the subject; and a beautiful face sets twenty hearts in palpitation, prior to all consideration of the mechanical proportions of the features and head.”

“All art is at once surface and symbol.”

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.”

“I like looking at geniuses and listening to beautiful people.”

“Do not be caught by the sensational in nature, as a coarse red-faced sunset, a garrulous waterfall, or a fifteen thousand foot mountain... avoid prettiness - the word looks much like pettiness - and there is but little difference between them.”

“One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.”

“This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.”

“I love great music and art, but I think 'cubist' songs and paintings are hideous.”

“There is nothing more practical than the preservation of beauty, than the preservation of anything that appeals to the higher emotions of mankind”

“There is more fine abstract design in Navajo rugs than in all these modern paintings.”

“Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.”

“I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.”

“I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.”

“A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection.”

“Characteristics which define beauty are wholeness, harmony and radiance.”

“One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.”

“The ugly can be beautiful. The pretty, never.”

“Make it like a sunflower.”

“The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.”

“I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art.”

“After all the statistics and calculations are formulated, the one element that breathes life into marketing is good design.”

“In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design.”

“Beauty is the brilliance of truth.”

“What a difference! Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient! when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular and infinitely boring”

“By means of beauty all beautiful things become beautiful.”

“Even in reaching for the beautiful there is beauty, and also in suffering whatever it is that one suffers en route.”

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

“Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.”

“Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sensual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.”

“Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic - a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.”