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Quote by Felisa Tan

“I have learned to accept and appreciate beauty as it is, without always having to reason why. As Ralph Waldo Emerson eloquently conveyed in his poem ‘The Rhodora’ (1834), ‘If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty has its own excuse for being.”

Quote by Felisa Tan

Book:In Search for Meaning
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In Search for Meaning

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Felisa Tan

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“Therefore, I present to you this book—a tribute to light, the sense of sight, and the vision it gives, outside in. This work is none other than an invitation to see and experience life in all its unadulterated fullness, both outward, and above all, inward. I hope that it can offer you a new way of looking at the world.”

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Book:In Search for Meaning
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“Kant noted that we typically apply labels or concepts to the world to classify sensory inputs that suit a purpose. ... Beautiful objects do not serve ordinary human purposes, as plates and spoons do. A beautiful rose pleases us, but not because we necessarily want to eat it or even pick it for a flower arrangement. Kant’s way of recognizing this was to say that something beautiful has purposiveness without a purpose’.”

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Book:Art Theory: A Very Short Introduction
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“Hume emphasized education and experience: men of taste acquire certain abilities that lead to agreement about which authors and artworks are the best. Such people, he felt, eventually will reach consensus, and in doing so, they set a ‘standard of taste’ which is universal. … Hume said men of taste must ‘preserve minds free from prejudice’, but thought no one should enjoy immoral attitudes or ‘vicious manners’ in art … Kant too spoke about judgements of taste but he was more concerned with explaining judgements of Beauty. He aimed to show that good judgements in aesthetics are grounded in features of artworks themselves, not just in us and our preferences. Kant tried to describe our human abilities to perceive and categorize the world around us. There is a complex interplay among our mental faculties including perception, imagination, and intellect or judgement. Kant held that in order to function in the world to achieve our human purposes, we label much of what we sense, often in fairly unconscious ways.”

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Book:Art Theory: A Very Short Introduction by Cynthia Freeland, Oxford University Press
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“Of course I could never let you know anything about this. It would have been impossible. You would not have understood it. I hardly understood it myself. I only knew that I had seen perfection face to face, and that the world had become wonderful to my eyes— too wonderful, perhaps, for in such mad worships there is peril, the peril of losing them, no less than the peril of keeping them.”

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Book:The Picture Of Dorian Gray
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