Quotes About Aesthetic

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.

Public taste changes and the aesthetic of a culture changes over time, so the idea isn't to appeal to the aesthetic of the moment and what people will like right now; the idea is to somehow keep yourself in the public memory so that as taste evolves it will eventually come to embrace your thing. So, it's about writing to be remembered rather than writing to be liked.

I find that deadlines form part of the aesthetic. I don't have that "It could only have been this way" kind of thing. I tend to rewrite it and say that after the fact, but on the way there, there are just some routes that you have to give up and make decisions, and that decision-making I find torturous. But I'm used to that torture.

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.

Perhaps the central question about [Eliot] Porter's work is about the relationship between science, aesthetics, and environmental politics. His brother, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, wrote in a 1960 review of [Porter's] colour photographs: 'There is no subject and background, every corner is alive,' and this suggests what an ecological aesthetic might look like.

I love jazz. So to me, there are two main types of jazz. There's dancing jazz, and then there's listening jazz. Listening jazz is like Thelonius Monk or John Coltrane, where it's a listening experience. So that's what I like; I like to make stuff that you listen to. It's not really meant to get you up; it's meant to get your mind focused. That's why you sit and listen to jazz. You dance to big band or whatever, but for the most part, you sit and listen to jazz. I think it comes from that aesthetic, trying to take that jazz listening experience and put it on hip-hop.

Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.

You can't compare us, but I do think that Calvin Klein influenced his way of working. Calvin created this whole aesthetic with imagery - the whole sex thing. I can see that Calvin influence on his work. What Calvin has created is untouchable. My legacy, whatever it is I'm doing here, is miniscule compared to what he has done. It's just like an update deal.

In the end, I believe that the most important influence on my aesthetic has been the photographs I have taken.

Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator. Shorn of the game's aesthetic pleasures, or the comfort of a crowd that feels the same way as you, or the sense of security that you get when you see that your defenders and goalkeeper are more or less where they should be, all that is left is naked fear.

Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us.

I was also always interested in the aesthetic realm - architecture and that kind of stuff - but music was my first love.

Staying true to my vision, to the word as it comes to me, to my own aesthetic judgments, even when they disagree with the majority culture, is very important to me, and I think important for every artist. It's what we have: our voice, our intuition, the truth as we understand and know it.

Art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. Realism is striving for truth, and truth is always beautiful. Here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.

Kitsch tends to wallow in beauty - its shortcoming is not aesthetic, but ethical

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.

Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness.

In prose fiction the freedom to work honestly exists, although you may have to fight for it. In those other areas of literature, I mean drama, there is only silence. That sort of aesthetic integrity does not exist in radio and television, and seldom on film.

It starts with the writing. We have to think of all these characters - we have to treat them all equally. We have to think of them as having an interior life and having motivations. When I'm drawing female characters, I'm looking for that. I'm looking for subtext. I'm looking for ways to make the reader relate to them in a way that goes beyond the pure aesthetic value. You know, just drawing an attractive woman really gets kind of boring after a while.

Once one has realized, following the great English literary visionaries William Shakespeare and Thomas Nashe, that sexual puritanism, political disciplinarianism, and abuse of the poor are the result of the refusal of true Christianity ... one is led to articulate a more incarnate, more participatory, more aesthetic, more erotic, more socialized, even a more 'Platonic' Christianity.

Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Chess computers do not sweat during time pressure and commit costly blunders. Furthermore, the strength of these programs (over and above their faultless recall processes) lies in their capacity to make relatively superficial tactical decisions with incredible speed. Positional values, long-range strategy, aesthetic judgment, and political astuteness remain staples of human performance, man vs. machine results in the foreseeable future to the contrary not withstanding.

Old stories would tell how Weavers would kill each other over aesthetic disagreements, such as whether it was prettier to destroy an army of a thousand men or to leave it be, or whether a particular dandelion should or should not be plucked. For a Weaver, to think was to think aesthetically. To act - to Weave - was to bring about more pleasing patterns. They did not eat physical food: they seemed to subsist on the appreciation of beauty.

Artists who have produced experimental innovations have been motivated by aesthetic criteria: they have aimed at presenting visual perceptions. Their goals are imprecise, so their procedure is tentative and incremental.

From the viewpoint of analytic psychology, the theatre, aside from any aesthetic value, may be considered as an institution for the treatment of the mass complex.

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

All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.

Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed.

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.

A lot of children don't have a developed aesthetic. I did. I made early choices in life, even about cloth; I liked flannel and not polyester.

We are devastated to learn of the death of Alexander McQueen, one of the greatest talents of his generation. He brought a uniquely British sense of daring and aesthetic fearlessness to the global stage of fashion. In such a short career, Alexander McQueen's influence was astonishing - from street style, to music culture and the world's museums. His passing marks an insurmountable loss.

Writing is the act of creation. Put words on page. Words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to 7-book epic fantasy cycles with books so heavy you could choke a hippo. But don't give writing too much power, either. A wizard controls his magic; it doesn't control him. Push aside lofty notions and embrace the workmanlike aesthetic. Hammers above magic wands; nails above eye-of-newt. The magic will return when you're done. The magic is what you did, not what you're doing.

Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.

The novel may stimulate you to think. It may satisfy your aesthetic sense. It may arouse your moral emotions. But if it does not entertain you it is a bad novel.

The aesthetic experience has to be given. And beauty is a regular experience of every person - every person who is not clinically depressed!

What is extraordinary about contemporary art is the energy - it has our energy. New energy. Pieces hundreds of years old are beautiful from an aesthetic point of view, but without our modern energy.

Painting is the aesthetic side of the object but it has never been original, has never been its own goal.

I didn't want to be criticized for taking low-quality photographs, so I tried to reach the best, highest quality of photography and then to combine this with a conceptual art practice. But thinking back, that was the wrong decision [laughs]. Developing a low-quality aesthetic is a sign of serious fine art-I still see this.

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

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.

The important thing to understand is that the case for pollution control isn't based on some kind of aesthetic distaste for industrial society. Pollution does real, measurable damage, especially to human health.

For me, reggae music and its aesthetic are touchstones in both simple and complex ways. Reggae's capacity to be a folk music that is created in a wholly modern context of the recording studio (and sometimes that is the sole performance space) is riddled with the kinds of contradictory impulses that we have come to expect from the post-modern. I revel in this, for it gives me, shall I say, permission.

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.

When I wasn't as attractive as I am now, I suffered at the hands of cruel children and their taunts until I realised that confidence and a bit of aesthetic care can overcome that.