Aesthetic Quotes - Page 14

• The temptation to believe that the Universe is the product of some sort of design, a manifestation of subtle aesthetic and mathematical judgment, is overwhelming. The belief that there is "something behind it all" is one that I personally share with, I suspect, a majority of physicists.

  Paul Davies

  Believe, Design, Temptation

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• My fascination for studies proved highly beneficial, it assisted the development of my aesthetic understanding of chess, and improved my endgame play.

  Vasily Smyslov

  Play, Understanding, Fascination

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• Architecture has to be greater than just architecture. It has to address social values, as well as technical and aesthetic values.

  Samuel

  Social Values, Addresses, Architecture

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• There are a lot of guys out there with skills who have not contributed to the evolution of the instrument. It's about more than that...it's an emotive language, an aesthetic. Skill is an aspect, but it's what you do with that skill, or say with that skill, that matters.

  Vinnie Colaiuta

  Skills, Guy, Matter

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• I don't have an interest in any car that isn't good for the environment, other than maybe an aesthetic quality in a picture book.

  Emile Hirsch

  Book, Car, Quality

  "Fast-talking: Hirsch, Ricci share thoughts on `Speed Racer'". Interview with David Germain, www.foxnews.com. May 6, 2008.

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• Give people pride and they'll live on bread and water, bless their exploiters, and even die for them. Self-surrender is a transaction of barter: we surrender our sense of human dignity, our judgement, or moral and aesthetic sense for pride. If there is pride in being free, we are ready to die for liberty. If there is pride to be derived from an identification with a leader, we grovel in the dust before a Napoléon, Hitler or Stalin and are ready to die for him. If there is a distinction in suffering we search for martyrdom as for hidden treasure.

  Eric Hoffer

  Pride, Self, Dust

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• Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it. To the great poet, there is only one method of music - his own. To the great painter, there is only one manner of painting - that which he himself employs. The aesthetic critic, and the aesthetic critic alone, can appreciate all forms and all modes. It is to him that Art makes her appeal.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Pain, Appreciate

  Oscar Wilde (2015). “The critic as artist (low cost). Limited edition”, p.77, Oscar Wilde

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• A work of art can be called revolutionary if, by virtue of the aesthetic transformation, it represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the prevailing unfreedom and the rebelling forces, thus breaking through the mystified (and petrified) social reality, and opening the horizon of change (liberation).

  Herbert Marcuse

  Art, Fate, Reality

  Herbert Marcuse (2007). “Art and Liberation: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse”, p.62, Routledge

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• Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Preference, Mathematician, Indifferent

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• Just because something causes you to have a feeling of aesthetic beauty does not make it a work of art.

  Fred Ross

  Art, Aesthetic Beauty, Feelings

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• Evidence that [feminine aesthetic preferences and ways of expressing oneself] may be hardwired comes from the fact that they typically appear early in childhood and often in contradiction to one's socialization. […] This indicates that some aspects of feminine verbal and aesthetic expression precede and/or supersede gender socialization.

  Julia Serano

  Expression, Childhood, May

  Julia Serano (2007). “Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity”, p.323, Seal Press

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• Let us, rather, gather facts, all the facts, regardless of aesthetic appeal or theoretical social worth, and spread those facts before us not as the soothsayer spreads the innards of a turkey but as a newspaper spreads its columns. Let us be journalists, then. And like all good journalists, we shall present our facts in an order that will satisfy the famous five W's: wow, whoopee, wahoo, why-not and whew.

  Tom Robbins

  Order, Turkeys, Why Not

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues”, p.139, Bantam

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• God ever geometrizes.

  Plato

  Beauty, God, Art

  Attributed in Plutarch, Moralia

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• If I could be said to have any kind of aesthetic, it's sort of a magpie aesthetic - I just go and pick up whatever is around. If you think about it, the children were there, so I took pictures of my children. It's not that I'm interested in children that much or photographing them - it's just that they were there.

  Sally Mann

  Children, Thinking, Photographer

  "Dog Bone Prints: Sally Mann". Art in the Twenty-First Century Interview, art21.org. September 2001.

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• We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy.

  Sarah Waters

  Names, Indulge Yourself, Literature

  Sarah Waters (2002). “Fingersmith”, p.447, Penguin

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• All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression.

  David Foster Wallace

  Manhattan, Tvs, Blame

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• Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history. The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity. The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection.

  Alain Badiou

  Art, Real, Reflection

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• It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself-to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed and then to find yourself still in bed.

  C. S. Lewis

  Dream, Spiritual, Appreciation

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “Yours, Jack: The Inspirational Letters of C. S. Lewis”, p.16, HarperCollins UK

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• Espresso consumption is an aesthetic experience,like tasting a vintage wine or admiring a painting.

  Andrea Illy

  Wine, Vintage, Espresso

  Andrea Illy, Rinantonio Viani (2005). “Espresso Coffee: The Science of Quality”, p.16, Academic Press

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• Acting is an aesthetic career, which is annoying.

  Tamsin Egerton

  Careers, Acting, Annoying

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• After its hothouse incubation in the seventies, appropriation breathed important new life into art. This life flowered spectacularly over the decades - even if it's now close to aesthetic kudzu.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Important, New Life

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• A game may be as integral to a culture, as true an object of human aesthetic appreciation, as admirable a product of creativity as a folk art or a style of music; and, as such, it is quite as worthy of study.

  Michael Dummett

  Appreciation, Art, Creativity

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• A woman’s beauty lies, not in any exaggeration of the specialized zones, nor in any general harmony that could be worked out by means of the sectio aurea or a similar aesthetic superstition; but in the arabesque of the spine. The curve by which the back modulates into the buttocks. It is here that grace sits and rides a woman’s body.

  John Updike

  Lying, Mean, Curves

  Laurie G. Kirszner, John Updike (1998). “A and P”, Heinle & Heinle Pub

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• 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 pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.

  Harold Bloom

  Pain, Memories, Struggle

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• While a large segment of the art world has obsessed over a tiny number of stars and their prices, an aesthetic shift has been occurring. It's not a movement - movements are more sure of themselves. It's a change of mood or expectation, a desire for art to be more than showy effects, big numbers, and gamesmanship.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Stars, Numbers

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