Aesthetic Quotes

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern. (Alfred North Whitehead)
Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction. View quote
E. O. Wilson
Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books. View quote
Gaston Bachelard
It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade. View quote
Manuel Puig
I think I just have a natural operatic aesthetic. I can't help it. View quote
Zack Snyder
It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. View quote
W. Somerset Maugham
He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window. View quote
Henry James
The aesthetic of architecture has to be rooted in a broader idea about human activities like walking, relaxing and communicating. Architecture thinks about how these activities can be given added value. View quote
Thom Mayne
I think if you are writing an instrumental you are dealing with more of an aesthetic in a sense but a lyric is more of a putting yourself on the line and a much more expensive exercise. View quote
Leo Kottke
Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else. View quote
Evelyn Waugh
Every great work of art should be considered like any work of nature. First of all from the point of view of its aesthetic reality and then not just from its development and the mastery of its creation but from the standpoint of what has moved and agitated its creator. (Amedeo Modigliani)
Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities - his preeminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary. View quote
William James
I personally object to the veil on aesthetic as well as other grounds; but I must admit that, for instance in the suburbs of American cities, I have often seen women attired more sloppily than our Persian women normally are. View quote
Muhammad Reza Pahlavi
Cubism is not a manner but an aesthetic, and even a state of mind; it is therefore inevitably connected with every manifestation of contemporary thought. It is possible to invent a technique or a manner independently, but one cannot invent the whole complexity of a state of mind. View quote
Juan Gris
To the Young Artists of Italy! The cry of rebellion that we launch, linking our ideals with those of the Futurist poets, does not originate in an aesthetic clique. It expresses the violent desire that stirs in the veins of every creative artist today. View quote
Umberto Boccioni
I never view aesthetic ideas as having an existence purely of their own but as a function they have in connection with political or moral values. View quote
Antoni Tàpies
I have tried to draw the human effigy (and all the other subjects dealt with in my paintings) in an immediate and effective way without any reference to the aesthetic. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
Even the nonreligious may exercise aesthetic judgment in matters of religion, and indeed our age has given the unbelieving a sophisticated taste in religious literature. View quote
Lionel Trilling
Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them. View quote
Antonin Artaud
All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Whatever the practical origins of aesthetic discernment may have been, it has been used to create great works of art. When the very loftiest human creations are seen to derive from humble origins and functions, what needs revision is not our esteem for these creations but our notion of nobility. (Robert Nozick)
Inner experience ... is not easily accessible and, viewed from the outside by intelligence, it would even be necessary to see in it a sum of distinct operations, some intellectual, others aesthetic, yet others moral. ... It is only from within, lived to the point of terror, that it appears to unify that which discursive thought must separate. View quote
Georges Bataille
Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes. View quote
Willard van Orman Quine
What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation. View quote
Hans Hofmann
The general misunderstanding of a work of art is often due to the fact that the key to its spiritual content and technical means is missed. Unless the observer is trained to a certain degree in the artistic idiom, he is apt to search for things which have little to do with the aesthetic content of a picture. He is likely to look for pure representational values when the emphasis is really upon music-like relationships. View quote
Hans Hofmann