Aesthetics Quotes

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game. (Octavio Paz)
It is a mistake to let aesthetics drive your rational decision making. View quote
Cory Doctorow
Aesthetics is for the artist like ornithology is for the birds. View quote
Barnett Newman
If you refuse to study anatomy, the arts of drawing and perspective, the mathematics of aesthetics, and the science of color, let me tell you that this is more a sign of laziness than of genius. View quote
Salvador Dalí
Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Design must be functional and functionality must be translated into visual aesthetics, without any reliance on gimmicks that have to be explained. View quote
Ferdinand Porsche
I consider myself to have been formed by a lot of the locutions and aesthetics and principles of the Muslim way of life, and those are an important part of my childhood and my identity. View quote
Ayad Akhtar
Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated. View quote
Paul Rand
At one of the annual conventions of the American Society for Aesthetics much confusion arose when the Society for Anesthetics met at the same time in the same hotel. View quote
Rudolf Arnheim
Let architects sing of aesthetics that bring Rich clients in hordes to their knees; Just give me a home, in a great circle dome Where stresses and strains are at ease. View quote
Buckminster Fuller
Vegetarianism has nothing to do with religion: it is something basically scientific. It has nothing to do with morality, but it has much to do with aesthetics. It is unbelievable that a man of sensitivity, awareness, understanding, love, can eat meat. And if he can eat meat then something is missing he is still unconscious somewhere of what he is doing, unconscious of the implications of his acts. (Rajneesh)
In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art, Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a "spiritual" force, for the benefit of the community. View quote
Susan Sontag
Don't talk to me about aesthetics or tradition. Talk to me about what sells and what's good right now. And what the American people like is to think the underdog still has a chance. View quote
George Steinbrenner
People ridiculously overvalue aesthetics and beauty when evaluating products. It's one of the reasons iPods, and, for that matter, Keanu Reeves, are so successful. View quote
Joel Spolsky
Capitalism, gaudy and greedy, has been inherent in western aesthetics from ancient Egypt on. It is the mysticism and glamour of things, which take on a personality of their own. As an economic system, it is in the Darwinian line of Sade, not Rousseau. View quote
Camille Paglia
Conditions of thought, memory, and desire, persuaded by impulse and irrationality, are influenced as well by personal aesthetics and private meanings. View quote
Kay Redfield Jamison
My favorite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a throw-away scene. View quote
Roger Zelazny
Art shouldn't be only the aesthetics we hang on the wall, but a dynamic to shape the society. View quote
Genco Gulan
Talk can neither be verified nor falsified in any rigorous sense. This is an open secret which hermeneutics and aesthetics, from Aristotle to Croce, have laboured to exorcise or to conceal from themselves and their clients. This ontological, which is to say both primordial and essential axiom (or platitude) of ineradicable undecidability needs, none the less, to be closely argued. View quote
George Steiner
Architects and painters know precisely what they are about as long as they deal with material phenomena.... But when they come to the aesthetics of their work, when they aim at a particular effect on the mind or on the senses, the rules dissolve into nothing but vague ideas. View quote
Carl von Clausewitz
The great work of art is the complete banality, and the fault with most banalities is that they are not banal enough. Banality here is not infinite in its depth and consequence, but rests on a foundation of spirituality and aesthetics. (Asger Jorn)
This is what aesthetics, development and progress depend upon: that we go out on thin ice. View quote
Asger Jorn
In the metaphysical elements of aesthetics the various nonmoral feelings are to be made use of; in the elements of moral metaphysics the various moral feelings of men, according to the differences in sex, age, education, and government, of races and climates, are to be employed. View quote
Immanuel Kant
Ethics and aesthetics are one. View quote
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I always loved aesthetics. Not particularly fashion, but an idea of beauty. View quote
Miuccia Prada