Aesthetic Quotes - Page 17

• The big moment came when it was decided to paint...Just To Paint. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value- political, aesthetic, moral.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Political, Gestures, Moral

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• I've had many more thousands of books in my possession than my shelves at home would indicate. At one time, I tried to keep them all, but that quest soon became impossible; I now only keep the ones I'm sure I'm going to reread, the ones I'm definitely going to read before I die, and the ones I can't bear to part with because of an aesthetic or emotional attachment.

  Lewis Buzbee

  Book, Home, Emotional

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• The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room. Thus there may be a covert, betraying link between the cultivation of aesthetic response and the potential of personal inhumanity.

  George Steiner

  Real, Moving, Risk

  George Steiner (1987). “George Steiner: A Reader”, p.31, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Loss, Maturity, Sorrow

  Rebecca Solnit (2006). “A Field Guide to Getting Lost”, p.24, Penguin

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• Art that imposes conditions - human or otherwise - on the receiver for its appreciation in my eyes constitutes aesthetic fascism.

  Lawrence Weiner

  Appreciation, Art, Eye

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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. On top of that, the one true gift that an architect has is his or her imagination. We take something ordinary and elevate it to something extraordinary.

  Samuel Mockbee

  Social Values, Imagination, Design

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• The flux of life is pouring its aesthetic aspect into your eyes, your ears - and you ignore it because you are looking for your canons of beauty in some sort of frame or glass case or tradition.

  Mina Loy

  Eye, Glasses, Pouring

  Mina Loy, Maeera Shreiber, Keith Tuma (1998). “Mina Loy: woman and poet”, Natl Poetry Foundation

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• I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic. A Buick radiator grille is as much a political statement as a Rolls Royce radiator grille, one enshrining a machine aesthetic driven by a populist optimism, the other enshrining a hierarchical and exclusive social order.

  J. G. Ballard

  Order, Optimism, Political

  "Age of unreason". Interview With Jeannette Baxter, www.theguardian.com. June 22, 2004.

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• I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Book, Writing, Years

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• I guess when I look over my shoulder at other designers, I feel like people are so definitive. It's so clear to me what their aesthetic is, what they're projecting. And I look at my own work and I think, Who could ever decipher what the hell is going on?

  Marc Jacobs

  Thinking, People, Looks

  Interview with Calvin Klein, www.harpersbazaar.com. August 10, 2010.

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• 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

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• Design is a matter of balancing different needs and outlooks-practical and aesthetic, masculine and feminine, designer and client, dream and reality.

  Alexa Hampton

  Dream, Reality, Masculine And Feminine

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• 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

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• 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

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• This aesthetic quality, then, is what politics is all about. It's authenticity that separates winners from losers, good politics from bad, and he-man leader-types from consultant-directed puppet-boys.

  Thomas Frank

  Sunset, Boys, Men

  "Joe Klein’s Turnip Day" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 26, 2006.

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

  Steven Weinberg

  Beauty, Art, Groups

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• All the effects of Nature are only the mathematical consequences of a small number of immutable laws.

  Pierre-Simon Laplace

  Beauty, Art, Nature

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• ...the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and of forms, of geometric elegance. It is a genuinely aesthetic feeling, which all mathematicians know

  Henri Poincare

  Math, Numbers, Feelings

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• A collection of bad love songs, tattered from overuse, has to touch us like a cemetery or a village. So what if the houses have no style, if the graves are vanishing under tasteless ornaments and inscriptions? Before an imagination sympathetic and respectful enough to conceal momentarily its aesthetic disdain, that dust may release a flock of souls, their beaks holding the still verdant dreams that gave them an inkling of the next world and let them rejoice or weep in this world.

  Marcel Proust

  Dream, Song, Dust

  Marcel Proust, Joachim Neugroschel, Roger Shattuck (2003). “The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust”, p.127, Rowman & Littlefield

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• After illuminating the work of Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Louise Bourgeois, Balthus, and other modern artists, Mieke Bal again demonstrates her extraordinary flair for cultural criticism in taking on the work of Doris Salcedo, exploring the philosophical and aesthetic stakes of this committed political art and the relation between beauty, violence, and memory. A tour de force.

  Jonathan Culler

  Art, Memories, Philosophical

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• Bob Dylan was the source of pop music's unpredictability in the Sixties. Never as big a record-seller as commonly imagined, his importance was first aesthetic and social, and then as an influence.

  Jon Landau

  Records, Bob, Firsts

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• Many of our greatest musicians abandoned all of their aesthetic objectives to try to become pertinent. And, at the end of the day, they never became pop stars. I counter stated that very strongly, and I continue to do that.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Stars, The End Of The Day, Trying

  "Wynton Marsalis: Jazz Messenger". Interview with Eugene Holley, Jr., www.ebony.com. September 4, 2012.

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• It reminded us that propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose - a political, social and religious purpose - that our aesthetic judgements are always coloured by our prejudices and beliefs

  George Orwell

  Religious, Art, Book

  George Orwell (1998). “The complete works of George Orwell”

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• More and more are turning to photography as a medium of expression as well as communication. The leavening of aesthetic approaches continues. While it is too soon to define the characteristic of the photographic style today, one common denominator, rooted in tradition, seems in the ascendancy. The direct use of the camera for what it can do best, and that is the revelation, interpretation, and discovery of the world of man and of nature. The greatest challenge to the photographer is to express the inner significance through the outward form.

  Beaumont Newhall

  Photography, Communication, Men

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• 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

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