Aesthetic Quotes - Page 5

• Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Book, Writing, Criticism

  Jorge Luis Borges, Eliot Weinberger (2009). “Seven Nights”, p.7, New Directions Publishing

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• All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.

  Walter Benjamin

  War, Effort, One Thing

  "Illuminations".

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• Scientific truth is too beautiful to be sacrificed for the sake of light entertainment or money. Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.

  Richard Dawkins

  Beautiful, Astrology, Light

  "The Real Romance in the Stars". www.independent.co.uk. December 31, 1995.

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• Fly-fishing is solitary, contemplative, misanthropic, scientific in some hands, poetic in others, and laced with conflicting aesthetic considerations. It's not even clear if catching fish is actually the point.

  John Gierach

  Hands, Fishing, Poetic

  John Gierach (2010). “Dances With Trout”, p.210, Simon and Schuster

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• I am suggesting that we can and do regain eternity when we are so immersed in life, in moral action, or in aesthetic contemplation, that we completely forget about time and anxiety.

  Don Cupitt

  Anxiety, Action, Moral

  Don Cupitt (2010). “Theology's Strange Return”, p.5, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

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• Dryness promotes the formation of flower buds...flowering is, after all, not an aesthetic contribution, but a survival mechanism.

  Ann Zwinger

  Flower, Acceptance, Survival

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• Behind the aesthetic form lies the repressed harmony of sensuousness and reason

  Herbert Marcuse

  Lying, Harmony, Reason

  Herbert Marcuse (2015). “Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud”, p.144, Beacon Press

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• Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.

  John H. McWhorter

  Writing, Issues, Insecurity

  John H. McWhorter (2001). “The Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of "pure" Standard English”, p.62, Basic Books

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• The fans, the vampire groupies, love the idea of this androgynous, preternatural figure stalking the night, and craving aesthetic pleasure just as he craves blood, wearing only the best velvet clothes, and savoring red roses.

  Anne Rice

  Night, Blood, Ideas

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• A cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the 'standpoint of art' can deliver. The Romantic desire for a new mythology... gives the artist and his task in the world the consciousness of a new consecration. He is something like a 'secular saviour' for his creations are expected to achieve on a small scale the propitiation of disaster for which an unsaved world hopes.

  Hans-Georg Gadamer

  Religious, Art, Giving

  "Truth and Method". Book by Hans-Georg Gadamer (p. 76), 1960.

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• Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Art, Lying

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.130, Macmillan

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• There are few humanities that could surpass in discipline, in beauty, in emotional and aesthetic satisfaction, those humanities which are called mathematics, and the natural sciences.

  Robert Watson-Watt

  Emotional, Discipline, Humanity

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• Taste and smell are often the beggars among our five senses - they leave no written language and therefore no standards other than wholly personal ones. Tasting a superlative Moselle wine can be an aesthetic experience no less genuine than hearing a Mozart piano concerto or seeing for the first time an original Breughel painting.

  Frank Schoonmaker

  Wine, Piano, Smell

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• The concept of the public welfare is broad and inclusive ... the values it represents are spiritual as well as physical, aesthetic as well as monetary. It is within the power of the legislature to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean, well balanced as well as carefully patroled.

  William O. Douglas

  Beautiful, Spiritual, Community

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• There is an aesthetic excitement about painting which is one of the most beautiful experiences that can be. Put things down while you feel that joy.

  Charles Webster Hawthorne

  Beautiful, Joy, Painting

  Richard Mühlberger, Charles Webster Hawthorne (1999). “Charles Webster Hawthorne”, University of Washington Press

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• I like the concept of shooting beautiful, aesthetic, cinematographic pieces, and still allowing them to be explicit

  Erika Lust

  Beautiful, Explicit

  "The future of female-led porn". Interview with Leah Sinclair, www.dazeddigital.com. April 15, 2015.

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• The aesthetic pleasure of dance is a secondary reflection of the primary, vital joy of courtship.

  Havelock Ellis

  Dance, Reflection, Dancing

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• Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before. Some day, I doubt not, we shall arrive at an understanding of the evolution of the aesthetic faculty; but all the understanding in the world will neither increase nor diminish the force of the intuition that this is beautiful and that is ugly.

  Thomas Huxley

  Beautiful, Men, Evil

  Thomas Henry Huxley (2011). “Collected Essays”, p.80, Cambridge University Press

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• I'm actually happier with my body now . . . because the body I have now is the body I've worked for. I have a better relationship with it. From a purely aesthetic point of view, my body was better when I was 22, 23. But I didn't enjoy it. I was too busy comparing it to everyone else's.

  Cindy Crawford

  Views, Age, Body

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• Do you really expect me to say gravity hasn't taken its toll? No. But as I'm earning these lines [in my face], I'm making an aesthetic choice.

  Susan Sarandon

  Taken, Choices, Age

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• Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Its basic elements are logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generality and individuality. Though different traditions may emphasize different aspects, it is only the interplay of these antithetic forces and the struggle for their synthesis that constitute the life, usefulness, and supreme value of mathematical science.

  Richard Courant

  Struggle, Expression, Perfection

  Richard Courant, Herbert Robbins, Ian Stewart (1996). “What is Mathematics?: An Elementary Approach to Ideas and Methods”, p.23, Oxford University Press, USA

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• The best stroked putt in a lifetime does not bring the aesthetic satisfaction of a perfectly hit wood or iron shot. There is nothing to match the whoosh and soar, the almost magical flight of a beautifully hit drive or 5-iron.

  Al Barkow

  Golf, Iron, Doe

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• The foundations of the world are to be found, not in the cognitive experience of conscious thought, but in the aesthetic experience of everyday life.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Beauty, Everyday, Foundation

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• A garden is a result of an arrangement of natural materials according to aesthetic laws; interwoven throughout are the artist's outlook on life, his past experiences, his affections, his attempts, his mistakes and his successes.

  Roberto Burle Marx

  Mistake, Artist, Past

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• If you're anxious to shine in the high aesthetic line as a man of culture rare, you must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant them everywhere.

  W. S. Gilbert

  Men, Shining, Culture

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