Quotes About Aesthetic

The Puritan, of course, is not entirely devoid of aesthetic feeling. He has a taste for good form; he responds to style; he is even capable of something approaching a purely aesthetic emotion. But he fears this aesthetic emotion as an insinuating distraction from his chief business in life: the sober consideration of the all-important problem of conduct. Art is a temptation, a seduction, a Lorelei, and the Good Man may safely have traffic with it when it is broken to moral uses--in other words, when its innocence is pumped out of it, and it is purged of gusto.

There is a sinister anachronistic interpretation of the aesthetic state as some kind of totalitarian regime that puts aesthetic over moral standards; one associates it with national-socialism. But this has nothing to do with the romantics, whose ideal of the aesthetic state has much more to do with the republican tradition.

The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid, and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of aesthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

Fashion museums think the more you know about the significance of clothes culturally, the more interesting they are. We certainly don't neglect the aesthetic aspects of clothes. But, I feel that what sets us apart from social, economic, and even aesthetic, or art historical context is that we are not only talking about clothes as kind of art objects created by an artist designer, but also we're talking about the various meanings that clothes have in the world, and how that changes and how we kind of create meanings around clothes.

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.

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 a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles... Contemporary or postmodernist art... will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past.

Satre found atheism 'cruel', Camus 'dreadful', and Nietzsche 'maddening'. Atheists who consistently try to live without God tend to commit suicide or go insane. Those who are inconsistent live on the ethical or aesthetic shadow of Christian truth while they deny the reality that made the shadow.

I think I just have a natural operatic aesthetic. I can't help it.

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

Too much of what passes for design now is theater. It's one thing to be eccentric- and by the way, most eccentrics tend to be rather well-educated people - and quite another to be a faddist, by which I mean someone who tries to conjure a totally foreign aesthetic in a misplaced environment.

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

I think that most successful artists - not always, but a lot of them, in any field - have business savvy as well and have some sense of marketing acumen. I think the key is to be good enough at it that it doesn't overwhelm your aesthetic interests, but have just enough that you make smart decisions.

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.

I really liked the design aesthetic of the mid-century modern for furniture and the early '60s stuff for the clothes. But then, personally, I'm a huge fan of 1970s muscle cars. Cell phones is just a laziness thing because it's so much easier to have somebody have a cell phone than have to go to a phone booth. So we're sort of, I guess, cherry-picking the best and easiest from several decades.

In architecture and interiors, as well as fashion, there is an interaction that is both functional and aesthetic.

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.

Virtue is as little to be acquired by learning as genius; nay, the idea is barren, and is only to be employed as an instrument, in the same way as genius in respect to art. It would be as foolish to expect that our moral and ethical systems would turn out virtuous, noble, and holy beings, as that our aesthetic systems would produce poets, painters, and musicians.

The more people explore the world, the more they realize in every country there's a different aesthetic. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.

We worship the aesthetic, but we do not have faith in it.

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

If you get it out into the urban field it's going to be used or misused but it'll also probably provide a way of people acknowledging what the aesthetic is about because people have to confront it every day.

Aesthetic matters are fundamental for the harmonious development of both society and the individual.

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.

To me, art and music inform each other continually, and when I was making more music there was an overall aesthetic that was shared by both mediums. Now I always listen to music when I work, so when I am working a lot, that is when I start searching out new music and finding new things to get excited about.

Don't get seduced by your own stuff. Don't get high on your own supply. The hardest thing as a filmmaker is when you're watching a film that you've worked on for several years. You know every frame so intimately that holding lots of the objectivity of a new viewer who has just seen it for the first time is the hardest thing. Every aesthetic decision you make - and you make thousands of them every day, have to - in theory, must be done from you being a blank slate. You almost have to run a program, like a mind wipe, every time you watch the movie.

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.

That aesthetic of the Star Wars universe: the do-it-yourself, hotrod ethic that George Lucas exported from his childhood, is exactly the same kind of soul behind what we do and build for the show. It may not look pretty, but it gets the job done.

It would seem that more than function itself, simplicity is the deciding factor in the aesthetic equation. One might call the process beauty through function and simplification.

Form follows profit is the aesthetic principle of our times.

By exposing the multiplicity, the facticity, the repetition and stereotype at the heart of every aesthetic gesture, photography deconstructs the possibility of differentiating between the original and the copy. [Photography calls] into question the whole concept of the uniqueness of the art object, the originality of the author, the coherence of the oeuvre within which it was made, and the individuality of so-called self-expression.

To live well is to live in harmony with ourselves, others and nature, and that idea of harmony is, of course, an aesthetic one.

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

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

The throat chakra is the center that is aesthetic. It gives an appreciation of beauty.

It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. - Of Human Bondage

I'm kind of still down with Virg Woolf on this one: "women must kill the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been 'killed' into art."

In the past, people couldn't place me. They thought that I was Danish or English or French. They never got that I am Italian. I'm not typical, maybe because my visual education was very mixed. There was a lot of London in my aesthetic: The Face, i-D, British music, and a lot of British fashion . . . But I really enjoy this contrast.

I don't call myself an 'industrial designer,' because I'm other things. Industrial designers want to make novel things. Novelty is a concept of commerce, not an aesthetic concept.

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.

I have always considered the aesthetic of a project, including press photos, as a means to further the message of the art itself.

It is true that the trees are for human use. But these are aesthetic uses as well as commercial uses-uses for the spiritual wealth of all, as well as the material wealth of some.

The analogies between science and art are very good as long as you are talking about the creation and the performance. The creation is certainly very analogous. The aesthetic pleasure of the craftsmanship of performance is also very strong in science.

I must pack my short lifer full of interesting events and creative activity. Philosophy and aesthetic contemplation are not enough. I intend to do everything possible to broaden my experiences and allow myself to reach the fullest development. Then, and before physical deterioration obtrudes, I shall go on some last wilderness trip to a place I have known and loved. I shall not return.

No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.

As soon as you think you have a firm idea you allow it to dissolve and you let go of it, particularly when it comes to a stylistic or aesthetic identity. In fact, you only really find out what it is when you deconstruct it; so, yeah, that's a sort of collage sensibility of having a lot of voicings coming from all over the place and not necessarily trying to shape them or try to commodify them. It keeps you in the living language... an opportunity to not be governed so much by intellect.

The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.

There can be no reasonable right to live on sidewalks. Society needs order, and hence has a right to a minimally civilized ambience in public spaces. Regarding the homeless, this is not merely for aesthetic reasons because the anesthetic is not merely unappealing. It presents a spectacle of disorder and decay that becomes a contagion.