104 quotes found
“[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,”
“With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art.”
“In the past an artist produced things that were necessary socially; they were instruments, albeit of a special kind, that helped the dead reach eternity, spells to be cast, prayers to be liturgical...”
“In the psychology of aesthetics, there is a name for the moment between the anxiety of confronting something new and the satisfying click of understanding it. It is called an 'aesthetic aha.”
“there's something wrong with any art that makes a woman all bust”
“And if, as all philosophers on the subject have noted, art is a human activity that relies on the senses to reach the soul, did it not also stand to reason that dogs -- at least dogs of Mr. Bones' ...”
“And it suggests this truth about the place where aesthetic form meets the human mind. For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left-say we lost e...”
“...fiction is as useful as truth, for giving us matter, upon which to exercise the judgment of value.”
“We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.”
“What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant.”
“[Hegels] system of nature seemed, at least to natural philosophers, absolutely crazy.Hegellaunched out with particular vehemence and acrimony against the natural philosophers, and especially agains...”
“Against the subtle cries of nature, I found peace. I found home. I found the past and the future strung into a present that demanded to be lived.”
“Such competence is not necessarily acquired by means of the 'scholastic' labours in which some 'cinephiles' or 'jazz-freaks' indulge. Most often it results from the unintentional learning made poss...”
“All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.”
“Poverty and loneliness could be seen as a liberation from strivings to become rich and popular.”
“A taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty”
“Man is not better treated by nature in his first start than her other works are; so long as he is unable to act for himself as an independent intelligence she acts for him. But the very fact that c...”
“People who insist upon dressing casually also want to think casually. And in a fallen world, thinking casually means being wrong more often than not.”
“One interesting thing is the idea that people have of a kind of science of Aesthetics. I would almost like to talk of what could be meant by Aesthetics.You might think Aesthetics is a science telli...”
“In a single wave of meaning the triumphant purity of being.”
