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.

Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.

All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.

There are two musical situations on which I think we can be confident that a blessing rests. One is where a priest or an organist, himself a man of trained and delicate taste, humbly and...

Aestheticism is the garbage of intuitive feeling.

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life.

To speak of sparing anything because it is beautiful is to waste one’s breath and incur ridicule in the bargain. The aesthetic sense- the power to enjoy through the eye, and the ear, and the...

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain,...

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

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

An artist’s concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,

He had never believed that spirituality had to be anemic or aesthetic.

I’d discovered that the range of beauty in breasts is wide; while one should never lightly say that a pair is ugly, one can easily say that a pair of breasts is beautiful. Hedgehogs are...

Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic

Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.

To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.

Truth is beheld by the intellect which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible; beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible. The...

In the past an artist produced things that were necessary socially; they were instruments, albeit of a special kind, that helped the dead reach eternity, spells to be cast, prayers to be liturgically fleshed. ....

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.