Sylvia’s inherent appreciation for beauty as both artist and consumer is evident in her journals and letters…….she wrote beautifully about clothes. She wrote about them with irony and wit mixed in with all the rococo...

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

Show me what a people admire, and I will tell you everything about them that matters.

When people dis fantasy—mainstream readers and SF readers alike—they are almost always talking about one sub-genre of fantastic literature. They are talking about Tolkien, and Tolkien’s innumerable heirs. Call it ‘epic’, or ‘high’, or ‘genre’...

The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.

…the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn’t matter if it’s been through the Xerox machine a hundred times.

In the course of aesthetic experience, the perceiver may be overwhelmed by this ‘mere object’, overcome with emotion, altered to the very roots of his being.[…] The experience of beauty involves an exchange of power,...

And is not all of life material- based on the material- permeated by the material? Should not one learn, gladly, to utilize the beauty of the fine material? I do not speak of the gross...

Art is what appeals to the a priori.

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

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

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

Appreciate the aesthetic and creativity of the nature and be grateful for being part of it.

New clothes left Sylvia reeling with happiness. For Sylvia, a shopping list was a poem. She always shopped alone – it suited her deliberate nature and the artistic joy with which she approached all things...

Bread cannot feed the addicts of beauty.

What cannot be borne in reality, becomes a source of pleasure when it is transposed into the visual and somatic fiction of the dramatic spectacle.

315Beauty is, in some way, boring. Even if its concept changes through the ages… a beautiful object must always follow certain rules. A beautiful nose shouldn’t be longer than that or shorter than that, on...

The future will look futuristic only because we will be trying to make it look futuristic.

Everything good is good because of the love it contains.

If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without ascending it, the work would have been permitted.

There is none more beautiful than the lover of beauty.

We are beginning to play with ideas of ecology, and although we immediately trivialize these into commerce or politics, there is at least an impulse still in the human breast to unify and thereby sanctify...

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,...

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...

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...

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.

With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art.

If I beat my grandmother to death to-morrow in the middle of Battersea Park, you may be perfectly certain that people will say everything about it except the simple and fairly obvious fact that it...

The connoisseur’s hushed, museum-trained gaze is not well-designed for these purposes. That gaze values subtlety, complexity, ambiguity, and irony. Its most characteristic grace note is self-congratulation at being the kind of person who likes this...

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;...

In my box of sound bites there are no jackhammers, no snowmobiles, no Jet Skis, no children wailing. Music but no Muzak.It’s my box. Put what you want in yours.

Let a thing be but a sort of punctual surprise, like the first cache of violets in March, let it be delicate, painted and gratuitous, hinting that the Creator is solely occupied with aesthetic considerations,...

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.

Now I myself, I cheerfully admit, feel that enormity in Kensington Gardens as something quite natural. I feel it so because I have been brought up, so to speak, under its shadow; and stared at...

the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become...

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...

Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world – the extent to which...

Man is not better treated by nature in his first start than her other works are; so long as he is unable to act for himself as an independent intelligence she acts for him. But...

No man sings as beautifully as when his song is accompanied by a woman’s voice.

Poverty and loneliness could be seen as a liberation from strivings to become rich and popular.

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental...

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...

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.

We want people to represent us in politics—and in love and economics too. When people represent us fully, they are ourselves and are not ourselves. When an object is simultaneously the same as and different...

Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the...

In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.

The answer to these questions is tied to the public’s attitude about suicide. For many people, suicide is morally reprehensible. It’s against their religion, or against their culture, or contrary to their personal values. Like...

All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.

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...

I think that’s what art is: art is communication made in the hope that interesting miscommunications will arise.