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Aesthetics Quotes

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Aesthetics Quotes

“The purpose of art is then to reveal a beauty that we like or can be taught to like; the purpose of art is to give pleasure; the work of art as the source of pleasure is its own end; art is for art's sake. We value the work for the pleasure to be derived from the sight, sound, or touch of its aesthetic surfaces; our conception of beauty is literally skin-deep; questions of utility and intelligibility rarely arise, and if they arise are dismissed as irrelevant.”

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Book:Christian & Oriental Philosophy of Art Formerly: "Why Exhibit Works of Art?"
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“[...] one cannot understand a music – if it is a highly organized music – as long as one perceives only individual beautiful passages in it, which may even become a virtual wall blocking one's access to an understanding of the work itself. If you add up an important musical work for yourself from such beautiful passages, what you are really making of this work is nothing but a potpourri of itself – or you are moving it in the direction of a smash hit.”

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Book:Aesthetics
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“The philosophical study of beauty, art, and the splendor of nature nurtures a person’s fertile mind by exposing a person to the puzzling world of the beautiful, elegant, ugly, and grotesque. Human beings ability to experience sublime pleasure emanates from a variety of sensory experiences and a person’s ability to make discriminatory observations and judgment in taste and sentiment.”

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Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Then there are the fully intentional pleasures, which, although in some way tied up with sensory or perceptual experience, are modes of exploration of the world. Aesthetic pleasures are like this. Aesthetic pleasures are contemplative - they involve studying an object OUTSIDE of the self, to which one is GIVING something (namely, attention and all that flows from it), and not TAKING, as in the pleasure that comes from drugs and drinks. Hence such pleasures are not addictive - there is no pathway to reward that can be short-circuited here, and a serotonin injection is not a cheap way of obtaining the experience of PARISFAL or THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.”

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Book:On Human Nature
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“In the course of aesthetic experience, the perceiver may be overwhelmed by this 'mere object', overcome with emotion, altered to the very roots of his being.[...] The experience of beauty involves an exchange of power, and as such, it is often disorienting, a mix of humility and exaltation, subjugation and liberation, awe and mystified pleasure.[...] Many people, fearing a pleasure they cannot control, have vilified beauty as a siren or a whore. Since at one time or another though, everyone answers to 'her' call, it would be well if we could recognize the meaning of our succumbing as a valuable response, an opportunity for self-revelation rather than defeat.[...] It entails a flexibility and empathy toward 'Others' in general and the capacity to see ourselves as both active and passive without fearing that we will be diminished in the process.”

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Book:Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-century Art
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“There was a product which seemed attractive, expensive, portable, beautiful and simple. Everybody talked about its beauty but they bought it for it's simplicity.”

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Author:Amit Kalantri
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“I want to say something else about desire. I really do not know what it is. I experience something which, sometimes, if I pull it apart, I cannot make reason of. The word seems to me to fall apart under the pull and drag of its commodified shapes, under the weight of our artifice and our conceit. It is sometimes impossible to tell what is real from what is manufactured. We live in a world filled with commodified images of desire. Desire clings to widgets, chairs, fridges, cars, perfumes, shoes, jackets, golf clubs, basketballs, telephones, water, soap powder, houses, neighbourhoods. Even god. It clings to an endless list of objects. It clings to the face of television sets and movie screens. It is glaciered in assigned objects, it is petrified in repetitive cliched gestures. Their repetition is tedious, the look and sound of them tedious. We become the repetition despite our best efforts. We become numb. And though against the impressive strength of this I can't hope to say all that desire might be, I wanted to talk about it not as it is sold to us but as one collects it, piece by piece, proceeding through a life. I wanted to say that life, if we are lucky, is a collection of aesthetic experiences as it is a collection of pratical experiences, which may be one and the same sometimes, and which if we are lucky we make a sense of. Making sense may be what desire is. Or, putting the senses back together.”

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Book:A Map to the Door of No Return
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“What superficiality- and what stupidity- there is in trying to depict in a pretty manner things which one has thought pretty. The masters through their subjective perceptions created beauty out of trivialities. They did not hide their interest on things which were nauseatingly ugly, but soaked themselves in the pleasure of depicting them. In other words, they seemed not to rely in the least on the misconceptions of others.”

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Book:No Longer Human
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“Storytelling is a distinctive , fundamental part of being human: stories make sense of the world around us. We think in stories, remember in stories, and turn just about everything we experience into a story, sometimes adjusting or omitting facts to make it fit. By now, after twenty-one centuries, if we can't tell about something, then it does not exist.”

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Book:The Aesthetic Shift: Value Corruption and Normative Conflict
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“What runs so contrary to received wisdom is that it really is the male who is the aesthete while the woman is drawn to abstractions. Wealth. Power. What a man seeks is beauty, plain and simple. No other way to put it. The rustle of her clothes, her scent. The sweep of her hair across his naked stomach. Categories all but meaningless to a woman. Lost in her calculations. That the man knows not how to even name that which enslaves him hardly lightens his burden.”

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Book:The Passenger
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“More than once have I thought, Why does crime, even when as powerful as Cæsar, and assured of being beyond punishment, strive always for the appearances of truth, justice, and virtue? Why does it take the trouble? I consider that to murder a brother, a mother, a wife, is a thing worthy of some petty Asiatic king, not a Roman Cæsar; but if that position were mine, I should not write justifying letters to the Senate. But Nero writes. Nero is looking for appearances, for Nero is a coward. But Tiberius was not a coward; still he justified every step he took. Why is this? What a marvellous, involuntary homage paid to virtue by evil! And knowest thou what strikes me? This, that it is done because transgression is ugly and virtue is beautiful. Therefore a man of genuine æsthetic feeling is also a virtuous man. Hence I am virtuous.”

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Book:Quo Vadis
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“If I beat my grandmother to death to-morrow in the middle of Battersea Park, you may be perfectly certain that people will say everything about it except the simple and fairly obvious fact that it is wrong. Some will call it insane; that is, will accuse it of a deficiency of intelligence. This is not necessarily true at all. You could not tell whether the act was unintelligent or not unless you knew my grandmother. Some will call it vulgar, disgusting, and the rest of it; that is, they will accuse it of a lack of manners. Perhaps it does show a lack of manners; but this is scarcely its most serious disadvantage. Others will talk about the loathsome spectacle and the revolting scene; that is, they will accuse it of a deficiency of art, or æsthetic beauty. This again depends on the circumstances: in order to be quite certain that the appearance of the old lady has definitely deteriorated under the process of being beaten to death, it is necessary for the philosophical critic to be quite certain how ugly she was before. Another school of thinkers will say that the action is lacking in efficiency: that it is an uneconomic waste of a good grandmother. But that could only depend on the value, which is again an individual matter. The only real point that is worth mentioning is that the action is wicked, because your grandmother has a right not to be beaten to death. But of this simple moral explanation modern journalism has, as I say, a standing fear. It will call the action anything else—mad, bestial, vulgar, idiotic, rather than call it sinful.”

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Book:All Things Considered
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“Philosophy means and includes five fields of study and discourse: logic, aesthetics, ethics, politics, and metaphysics. Logic is the study of ideal method in thought and research: observation and introspection, deduction and induction, hypothesis and experiment, analysis and synthesis - such are the forms of human activity which logic tries to underhand the guide; it is a dull study for most of us, and yet the great events in the history of understand are the improvements men have made in their methods of thinking and research. Aesthetics is the study of ideal form, or beauty; it is the philosophy of art. Ethics is the study of ideal conduct; the highest knowledge, said Socrates, is the knowledge of good and evil, the knowledge of good and evil, the knowledge of the wisdom of life. Politics is the study of ideal social organization (it is not, as one might suppose, the art and science of capturing and keeping office); monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, socialism, anarchism, feminisim - these are the dramatis personae of political philosophy. And lastly, metaphysics (which gets into so much trouble because it is not, like the other forms of philosophy, an attempt to coordinate the real in the light of the ideal) is the study of the "ultimate reality" of all things: of the real and final nature of "matter" (ontology), of "mind" (philosophical psychology), and of the interrelation of "mind" and "matter" in the processes of perception and knowledge (epistemology).”

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Book:The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers
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“they would be astonished to discover the seriously German problem that we are dealing with, a vortex and a turning-point at the very centre of German hopes. But perhaps those same people will find it distasteful to see an aesthetic problem taken so seriously, if they can see art as nothing more than an entertaining irrelevance, an easily dispensable tinkle of bells next to the 'seriousness of life': as if no one was aware what this contrast with the 'seriousness of life' amounted to. Let these serious people know that I am convinced that art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life in the sense of that man, my noble champion on that path, to whom I dedicate this book.”

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Book:The Birth of Tragedy
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“Only an idealist can be a cynic, for unless there is an ideal there is nothing to be cynical about. One does not paint a revolting image of a man and give it a cynical title unless one expects something better than degeneration in a man. Believing that, if God existed, He would have produced a better universe, Shelley took refuge in agnosticism. Yet the Christian holds that it was God who gave Shelley his notion of worth. One has yet to see an agnostic horse or a cynical cow. (From The Arts and the Christian Imagination : Essays on Art, Literature, and Aesthetics)”

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Author:Clyde Kilby (Editor) C. S. Lewis
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“Während der Kritiker in Theater und Concert, der Journalist in der Schule, die Presse in der Gesellschaft zur Herrschaft gekommen war, entartete die Kunst zu einem Unterhaltungsobject der niedrigsten Art, und die aesthetische Kritik wurde als das Bindemittel einer eiteln, zerstreuten, selbstsüchtigen und überdies ärmlich - unoriginalen Geselligkeit benutzt, deren Sinn jene Schopenhauerische Parabel von den Stachelschweinen zu verstehen giebt; so dass zu keiner Zeit so viel über Kunst geschwatzt und so wenig von der Kunst gehalten worden ist. Kann man aber mit einem Menschen noch verkehren, der im Stande ist, sich über Beethoven und Shakespeare zu unterhalten? Mag Jeder nach seinem Gefühl diese Frage beantworten: er wird mit der Antwort jedenfalls beweisen, was er sich unter „Bildung“ vorstellt, vorausgesetzt dass er die Frage überhaupt zu beantworten sucht und nicht vor Ueberraschung bereits verstummt ist. Dagegen dürfte mancher edler und zarter von der Natur Befähigte, ob er gleich in der geschilderten Weise allmählich zum kritischen Barbaren geworden war, von einer eben so unerwarteten als gänzlich unverständlichen Wirkung zu erzählen haben, die etwa eine glücklich gelungene Lohengrinaufführung auf ihn ausübte: nur dass ihm vielleicht jede Hand fehlte, die ihn mahnend und deutend anfasste, so dass auch jene unbegreiflich verschiedenartige und durchaus unvergleichliche Empfindung, die ihn damals erschütterte, vereinzelt blieb und wie ein räthselhaftes Gestirn nach kurzem Leuchten erlosch. Damals hatte er geahnt, was der aesthetische Zuhörer ist.”

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Book:Die Geburt der Tragödie. Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I - IV. Nachgelassene Schriften 1870 - 1873
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“DYSTOPIA Dark, early streets and high walls of empty houses a lonesome bird singing a hollow duet with its own echo - autumn feels like spring once you have lost everything and stand with nothing to hold onto at winter's edge - walkways glooming in buzzing orange neon light imitating fallen leaves, making the city's concrete jungle a forest - soon November is here, crawling along the pavement and dulling the grey of the ruins they call buildings - sudden flickering accompanied by loud buzzing: the lights went out while winter's edge cuts violently through the streets & building cracks - the bird stopped singing.”

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Author:Laura Chouette
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“FLORENCE Soft emerald valleys lay in crimson light beneath the rolling hills; the waters of the Arno gleam like bronze the city's vein, so still. Each artist at the shore of the river stares in wonder and delight - how far do the lines reach across the bridge, beyond their work? One may seek rest under the cypresses and soft light of the August amber sun - here, at his grave, the city walls lay high around the garden, he knew once as paradise. His dark eyes still seem to pierce the lines of the hills, like he searches for his soul - still; (somewhere between the Arno and the nightfall). The trees - heavily laid with summer's fruit - stand high above the city in marble glance. Clear is now the dark sky - full of shards which dreamers call the stars.”

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Author:Laura Chouette
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“THE MONSTER & THE MAN One obstacle pierces his soul and calls him down the dark road - heavy sighing he must carry on and at last, the thorn is retrieved - with agony in his brown eyes - he suddenly sees: Fever dreams, scarlet on blue velvet, like ink drowning in words - words drowning inside his veins - words that pleaded in vain - words so scarlet... so stained. Empty lines for empty souls that carry too much inside; empty pages for empty hands with nothing else to hide nor to control the beast inside his soul.”

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Author:Laura Chouette
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“SIENA I wander down the steps along the walls of bricks and high houses - down to the waters that lay deep. Streaming down from the hill on which the old city was built with a tower standing high, that reaches up not far from the grave that these waters lay in. Alabaster is the hand that reaches in it and cold is the heart that touches the pale divine. Beating fast after climbing back to the light and narrow streets - I found now what it seeks. Descending down, down to the hidden stream - oh Siena, my goddess without a pomegranate seed.”

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Author:Laura Chouette
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“October creeps into the room through faint grey light that stopped dancing on the windowsill since July left. Being haunted by silence makes the air grow weary and faintly colder. I hear the noise of people walking in solitude, thinking to themselves about others— sitting alone in between their steps. Company of ghosts on lonely eves, threading through the rustling of leaves. I can write down what haunts me, yet I cannot read the ones who do. October.”

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Author:Laura Chouette
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“At a certain point, you no longer hope; you just keep on existing. One day at a time, for the rest of your life. And that feeling is not shallow but runs deep— deeper than any happiness or love could ever run. A vein is a mere line poets like me used to write on and a lifeline where sailors swim towards at night. If we keep on writing and giving, we grow on that existing line with millions of words that save hope - and thus give existence and life.”

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Author:Laura Chouette
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“COLOURS IN THE MIRROR One day my pride will outlive myself and whatever remains of its colours will be remembered by others - for I was always my true self. I live too little for things that make me dream & care too much for fears that sleep in between the fine lines of my weary mind - so write me gentle words, for it may break. My diversity should not be a mistake but a celebration of identity & guiding light to others who ache to leave the numbness of »pretending-to-be«. We are not broken mirrors that hurt the world by showing our true reflection; we are merely hearts used to rejection - yet, their words will only blur but not break our shine.”

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Author:Laura Chouette
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“CROSSROAD Lights flicker above the crossroad shining in green now and then for people who won't cross and red for others - which won't stop; The dull grey splits the city in pieces of lines and corners, sometimes outshined by heavy rain and flooded glimpses of chaos; Broken glass upon crimson roads empty silence and nothing to say - while the city sleeps on and will awake, eventually.”

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Author:Laura Chouette
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