Aesthetic Quotes - Page 13

• Puzzles are like songs - A good puzzle can give you all the pleasure of being duped that a mystery story can. It has surface innocence, surprise, the revelation of a concealed meaning, and the catharsis of solution.

  Stephen Sondheim

  Beauty, Song, Art

  4 Copy quote

• For though, in nature, depth and height
  Are equally held infinite:
  In poetry, the height we know;
  'Tis only infinite below.

  Jonathan Swift

  Beauty, Art, Depth

  Jonathan Swift (1841). “The Works. Containing Interesting and Valuable Papers, Not Hitherto Published. With Memoir of the Author, by Thomas Roscoe. -London, Washbourne 1841”, p.654

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• How full of the creative genius is the air in which these [snowflakes] are generated! I should hardly admire them more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat. Nature is full of genius. Full of the divinity. So that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Beauty, Art, Stars

  Henry David Thoreau (2011). “The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861”, p.356, New York Review of Books

  28 Copy quote

  Show source

• We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has as yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we. The most distinct and beautiful statements of any truth must take at last the mathematical form. We might so simplify the rules of moral philosophy, as well as of arithmetic, that one formula would express them both.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Beauty, Beautiful, Art

  Henry David Thoreau (1999). “Material Faith: Thoreau on Science”, p.12, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The universe is an enormous direct product of representations of symmetry groups.

  Steven Weinberg

  Beauty, Art, Groups

  11 Copy quote

• Not only in geometry, but to a still more astonishing degree in physics, has it become more and more evident that as soon as we have succeeded in unraveling fully the natural laws which govern reality, we find them to be expressible by mathematical relations of surprising simplicity and architectonic perfection. It seems to me to be one of the chief objects of mathematical instruction to develop the faculty of perceiving this simplicity and harmony.

  Hermann Weyl

  Beauty, Art, Reality

  Hermann Weyl (1950). “Space, Time, Matter”, p.23, Courier Corporation

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• Mathematics and art are quite different. We could not publish so many papers that used, repeatedly, the same idea and still command the respect of our colleagues.

  Antoni Zygmund

  Beauty, Art, Ideas

  4 Copy quote

• It is an admitted fact that the ordinary tomtit of commerce has a sounder aesthetic taste than the average female relative in the country.

  Hector Hugh Munro

  Country, Average, Ordinary

  "Reginald". Book by Hector Hugh Munro, 1904.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There's something about fear and aesthetic that go hand in hand.

  Christopher Bollen

  Hands, Hand In Hand

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. - Of Human Bondage

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Asking, Reason, Human Bondage

  W. Somerset Maugham (2017). “Of Human Bondage”, p.470, Open Road Media

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Axes, Ordinary

  Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I thought to discourage aesthetics... I threw the bottlerack and the urinal in their faces and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Beauty, Faces, Admire

  12 Copy quote

• Let the women play in more feminine clothes like they do in volleyball. They could, for example, have tighter shorts. Female players are pretty, if you excuse me for saying so, and they already have some different rules to men - such as playing with a lighter ball. That decision was taken to create a more female aesthetic, so why not do it in fashion?

  Sepp Blatter

  Soccer, Football, Volleyball

  "Make-up and short shorts improving women's football, says Brazilian official". www.theguardian.com. June 16, 2015.

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Footballers today are forced to conform to a bodily aesthetic that in its rigidity and uniformity makes fashion models look as varied as snowflakes. This wasn't always so. Up until the 1980s most teams in all divisions had a couple of fat ones, a couple of little ones, at least one bandy one, one completely covered in hair, two weaklings and a chap with no neck. This was an era when you didn't need names on the backs of shirts in order to tell who's who, you could clearly identify them with your eyes half shut from the other side of the pitch.

  Danny Baker

  Soccer, Football, Fashion

  11 Copy quote

• A handful of men working within the Zen sect of Buddhism created gardens in fifteenth-century Japan which were, and still are, far more than merely an aesthetic expression. And what is left of the earlier Mogul gardens in India suggests that their makers were acquainted with what lay behind the flowering of the Sufi movement in High Asia and so sought to add further dimensions to their garden scenes.

  Russell Page

  Buddhism, Men, Garden

  4 Copy quote

• Aesthetic isn't simply about good design for good design's sake.

  Noah Kerner

  Design, Good Design

  4 Copy quote

• If all feeling for grace and beauty were not extinguished in the mass of mankind at the actual moment, such a method of locomotion as cycling could never have found acceptance; no man or woman with the slightest aesthetic sense could assume the ludicrous position necessary for it.

  Ouida

  Acceptance, Men, Cycling

  Ouida (1901). “Critical Studies”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I wanted everything. What could you not want when you are brown and Indian-looking in a society in which the white aesthetic is praised as acceptable?

  Ana Castillo

  White, Want, Brown

  28 Copy quote

• My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our gross public to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth!

  Edith Wharton

  Thinking, Class, America

  7 Copy quote

• The aesthetic serviceability of objects of beauty is not greatly nor universally heightened by possession.

  Thorstein Veblen

  Possession, Objects

  Thorstein Veblen (1993). “A Veblen Treasury: From Leisure Class to War, Peace, and Capitalism”, p.71, M.E. Sharpe

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The film is a direct mirror of the director. If your director doesn't know how to dress, there will be an aesthetic of the film that won't come through - whether it's in the costumes if he doesn't know exactly what he wants or the look of the film.

  Channing Tatum

  Mirrors, Directors, Dresses

  "Channing Tatum Interview THE EAGLE". Roundtable Interview, collider.com. February 9, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.

  George Santayana

  Real, Intuition, Criticism

  George Santayana (2009). “The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress”, p.1058, The Floating Press

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• We Americans have always considered Hollywood, at best, a sinkhole of depraved venality. And, of course, it is. It is not a protective monastery of aesthetic truth. It is a place where everything is incredibly expensive.

  David Mamet

  Hollywood, Sinkholes, Monasteries

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  57 Copy quote

  Show source

• Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

  Andre Breton

  Mean, Psychics, Moral

  "First Manifesto of Surrealism". Book by Andre Breton, 1924.

  39 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's just plain learning something that you didn't know. There is a real aesthetic experience in being dumbfounded.

  Lewis Thomas

  Real, Learning, Knows

  4 Copy quote