Aesthetic Quotes - Page 9

• I could not possibly improve on the sentiment, but I don't think it ought to depend on the current austerities. Isn't Christmas a moral and aesthetic nightmare whether or not the days are prosperous?

  Christopher Hitchens

  Christmas, Thinking, Austerity

  "'Tis the Season To Be Incredulous" by Christopher Hitchens, www.slate.com. December 15, 2008.

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• When does a session of The Theatre of the Oppressed end? Never - since the objective is not to close a cycle, to generate a catharsis, or to end a development. On the contrary, its objective is to encourage autonomous activity, to set a process in motion, to stimulate transformative creativity, to change spectators into protagonists. And it is precisely for these reasons that the Theatre of the Oppressed should be the initiator of changes the culmination of which is not the aesthetic phenomenon but real life.

  Augusto Boal

  Real, Creativity, Theatre

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• People hide behind the word aesthetic. They say, ‘Well, it’s just that designer’s aesthetic.’ But when you see 18 seasons in a row and not one single model outside a certain skin color…? There are people in the industry who are advocates, who support diversity. And there are people who do not. I don’t get it. Beauty is universal. These doors have to open.

  Joan Smalls

  Skin Color, Doors, People

  "The Return of the Supermodel: It's Joan Smalls" by Molly Young, www.elle.com. December 4, 2013.

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• Man's first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void.

  Barnett Newman

  Dream, Communication, Men

  Barnett Newman, John Philip O'Neill (1992). “Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews”, p.158, Univ of California Press

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• And, in the future, while the dumb show of bohemianism plays itself out in the cookie cutter shape of the politically correct martyr/victim, aesthetic terrorists will not involve themselves in the dubious rewards of celebrity. The best of them will work alone, already a part of the enemy camp, and in chameleon-like style master the fifth-column algorithms to subvert the ancient regime. We won't know them by their name but their compensation will be to affect the outcome of the planet. Until then, there's a lot of work to be done.

  Adam Parfrey

  Play, Names, Dumb

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• Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion...Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality.

  Robert McKee

  Art, Reality, Giving

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• Aesthetics has become too important to be left to the aesthetes. To succeed, hard-nosed engineers, real estate developers, and MBAs must take aesthetic communication, and aesthetic pleasure, seriously. We, their customers, demand it.

  Virginia Postrel

  Real, Communication, Mba

  Virginia Postrel (2009). “The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness”, p.4, Harper Collins

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• The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.

  Eli Siegel

  Art, Self, Opposites

  Eli Siegel (1981). “Self and world: an explanation of aesthetic realism”, Definition Pr

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• Elegance? It may seem odd to non-scientists, but there is an aesthetic in software as there is in every other area of intellectual endeavour. Truly great programmers are like great poets or great mathematicians - they can achieve in a few lines what lesser mortals can only approach in three volumes

  John Naughton

  Intellectual, Three, Lines

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• Blindness to the aesthetic element in mathematics is widespread and can account for a feeling that mathematics is dry as dust, as exciting as a telephone book... Contrariwise, appreciation of this element makes the subject live in a wonderful manner and burn as no other creation of the human mind seems to do.

  Philip J. Davis

  Appreciation, Book, Dust

  Philip J. Davis, Reuben Hersh, Elena Anne Marchisotto (1995). “The Mathematical Experience: Study Edition”, p.185, Springer Science & Business Media

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• The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.

  Gottfried Leibniz

  Music, Beauty, Art

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• I cannot think that a player genuinely loving the game can get pleasure just from the number of points scored no matter how impressive the total. I will not speak of myself, but for the masters of the older generation, from whose games we learned, the aesthetic side was the most important. -

  Alexander Kotov

  Beauty, Thinking, Player

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• Novelty is a concept of commerce, not an aesthetic concept.

  Eva Zeisel

  Novelty, Commerce, Concepts

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• Worship in truth is worship that arises out of an actual encounter with God, a response to the experience of knowing God's real presence and activity in our daily lives. This has nothing to do with sentiment, thinking religious thoughts or having aesthetic experiences in church buildings; any religion can give you that sort of thing.

  Graham Kendrick

  Religious, Real, Thinking

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• Having Alexei Ratmansky create a new Romeo and Juliet for The National Ballet of Canada to mark our 60th anniversary is a dream come true. His aesthetic -- steeped in the Russian school but open to contemporary sources -- is ideal for this work and for our company, which, with our classical heritage and our passion for the modern, is perfectly suited to his distinctive dance vision.

  Karen Kain

  Dream, Passion, School

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• 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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• Physical separateness can never be overcome by electronics, but only by 'conviviality,' by 'living together' in the most literal physical sense. The physically divided are also the conquered and the controlled. 'True desires' - erotic, gustatory, olfactory, musical, aesthetic, psychic, & spiritual - are best attained in a context of freedom of self and other in physical proximity & mutual aid. Everything else is at best a sort of representation.

  Hakim Bey

  Spiritual, Self, Psychics

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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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• Scientists don't know what they are talking about when they talk about religion. Religion has nothing to do with belief, and I don't believe it has any negative impact on people's lives outside of intolerance. Why do I go to church? It's like asking, why did you marry that woman? You make up reasons, but it's probably just smell. I love the smell of candles. It's an aesthetic thing.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Believe, Impact, Talking

  "Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the Prophet of Boom and Doom" by Bryan Appleyard, www.thetimes.co.uk. June 01 2008,.

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• Marijuana is a useful catalyst for specific optical and aural aesthetic perceptions. I apprehended the structure of certain pieces of jazz and classical music in a new manner under the influence of marijuana, and these apprehensions have remained valid in years of normal consciousness.

  Allen Ginsberg

  Weed, Marijuana, Years

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• The emotional, physical and aesthetic value of a sound is linked not only to the causal explanation we attribute to it but also to its own qualities of timbre and texture, to its own personal vibration. So just as directors and cinematographers (even those who will never make abstract films) have everything to gain by refining their knowledge of visual materials and textures, we can similarly benefit from disciplined attention to the inherent qualities of sounds.

  Michel Chion

  Emotional, Quality, Gains

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• Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity. ... The geniuses of the computer field, on the the other hand, are the people with the keenest aesthetic senses, the ones who are capable of creating beauty. Beauty is decisive at every level: the most important interfaces, the most important programming languages, the winning algorithms are the beautiful ones.

  David Gelernter

  Beautiful, Learning, Winning

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