1. “Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”
2. “Nothing’s perfect, the world’s not perfect. But it’s there for us, trying the best it can; that’s what makes it so damn beautiful.”
3. “Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.”
4. “Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”
5. “In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.”
6. “Rules of taste enforce structures of power.”
7. “Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.”
8. “Color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul.”
9. “All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.”
10. “Aesthetics have substantial political consequences. How one views oneself as beautiful or not beautiful or desirable or not desirable has deep consequences in terms of one’s feelings of self-worth and one’s capacity to be a political agent.”
11. “Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world – the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.”
12. “It was one of God’s jokes that such a dumb mind had been put in such an eloquent body.”
13. “I think that’s what art is: art is communication made in the hope that interesting miscommunications will arise.”
14. “Christianity has from its beginning portrayed itself as a gospel of peace, a way of reconciliation (with God, with other creatures), and a new model of human community, offering the ‘peace which passes understanding’ to a world enmeshed in sin and violence. (1)”
15. “In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.”
16. “To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.”
17. “Desire for beauty will endure and undermine the desire for truth.”
18. “Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and . . . it is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal.”
19. “God’s pleasure–the beauty creation possesses in his regard–underlies the distinct being of creation, and so beauty is the first and truest word concerning all that appears within being; beauty is the showing of what is; God looked upon what he had wrought and saw that it was good.”
20. “He had never believed that spirituality had to be anemic or aesthetic.”
21. “At last everything was satisfactorily arranged, and I could not help admiring the setting: these mingled touches betrayed on a small scale the inspiration of a poet, the research of a scientist, the good taste of an artist, the gourmet’s fondness for good food, and the love of flowers, which concealed in their delicate shadows a hint of the love of women”
22. “Aestheticism is the garbage of intuitive feeling.”
23. “In the life of the individual, an aesthetic sensibility is both more authentic and more commendable than a political or religious one.”
24. “Let a thing be but a sort of punctual surprise, like the first cache of violets in March, let it be delicate, painted and gratuitous, hinting that the Creator is solely occupied with aesthetic considerations, and combines disparate objects simply because they look so well together, and that thing will admirably fill the role of a flower.”
25. “Christ is a persuasion, a form evoking desire, and the whole force of the gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also peace: that the desire awakened by the shape of Christ and his church is one truly reborn as agape, rather than merely the way in which a lesser force succumbs to a greater, as an episode in the endless epic of power. (3)”
26. “What is the aesthetician But a mule hitched to the times?”
27. “In my box of sound bites there are no jackhammers, no snowmobiles, no Jet Skis, no children wailing. Music but no Muzak. It’s my box. Put what you want in yours.”
28. “The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.”
29. “Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.”
30. “They walked on rather aimlessly. He hoped she wouldn’t notice he was touched, because he wouldn’t have known how to explain why. Here lay the great discrepancy between aesthetic truth and sleazy reality.”
31. “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.”
32. “The aesthetic can have its revenge upon ideology by revealing a power to complicate that is also a power to undermine.”
33. “With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art.”
34. “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 liturgically fleshed. . . . The aesthetic component of those instruments enhanced their function but was never central, never an independent, non utilitarian thing.”
35. “For if indeed God became a man, then Truth condescended to became a truth, from whose historical contingency one cannot simply pass to categories of universal rationality; and this means that whatever Christians mean when they speak of truth, it cannot involve simply the dialectical wrestling of abstract principles from intractable facts. (5)”
36. “In going to the cross, Jesus was not being practical; he was being faithful. Jesus didn’t take a pragmatic approach to the problem of evil; Jesus took an aesthetic approach to the problem of evil. Jesus chose to absorb the ugliness of evil and turn it into something beautiful—the beauty of forgiveness.”
37. “A six-week trip to China in 1973 convinced me—if I needed convincing—that the autonomy of the aesthetic is something to be protected, and cherished, as indispensable nourishment to intelligence. But a decade-long residence in the 1960s, with its inexorable conversion of moral and political radicalisms into “style,” has convinced me of the perils of over- generalizing the aesthetic view of the world.”
38. “A religious person is able to see the ‘gods’ in a dewdrop, a flower, a falling star, an animal which crosses his path, a sunbeam. When this happens, he has a total experience. But if he adopts an aesthetic attitude towards this flower or this dewdrop, he looks at only one aspect. The aesthetic attitude is a partial attitude. Such an attitude protects against an abundance of other sensations and is therefore per definition one-sided and superficial.”
39. “There is an expression in Japanese that says that someone who makes things of poor quality is in fact worse than a thief because he doesn’t make things that will last or provide true satisfaction. A thief at least redistributes the wealth of a society.”
40. “The flower is strong in its beauty as it can be forgotten, set aside, or destroyed. The ambitious do not know beauty. The feeling of essence is beauty.”
41. “The historical division between the beautiful and the sublime indicates that an aesthetic experience is not necessarily linked to beauty, but can also be induced by the unpleasant, unbalanced, distorted, or even hideous.”
42. “The starry sky began to shine,when assigned night spread with its ‘moon lamp’ for all of the wistful thoughts,lay below the tormented Earth’s nocturnal light and those splendid visions caught my pounding spirits.”
43. “The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.”
44. “Refinement creates beauty everywhere: it is the grossness of the spectator that discovers nothing but grossness in the object.”
45. “The local is the only universal, upon that all art is built.”
46. “The ideal of “working exactly” is also inherent in the historical disciplines. Art historians pursue it, above all, in order to avoid the baleful contact with aesthetics; and often exert themselves merely to say what happened after what– and nothing more than that.”
47. “We pay a small fortune for a variegated monstera whose epidermis is unevenly colored.However, we pay a small fortune for skin creams that promise to make our epidermis evenly colored.”
48. “In a Fisherian world, animals are slaves to evolutionary fashion, evolving extravagant and arbitrary displays and tastes that are all “meaningless”; they do not involve anything other than perceived qualities.”
49. “In here, Phryne, is the nursery. Do you like babies? Phryne laughed. No, not at all. they are not aesthetic like a puppy or a kitten. In fact, they always look drunk to me. look at that one—you’d swear he had been hitting the gin.”
50. “It’s hard to combine a simple life with a love of aesthetics.”
51. “Aesthetic sense is the twin of one’s instinct for self-preservation and is more reliable than ethics.”
52. “It’s very modern. Very gamine. You look like a jazz singer.”
53. “It’s better to have a hunger and appreciation for beauty than to be merely beautiful. In the end, life is richer that way. She may learn that.”
54. “Writing is a series of verbal suggestions designed to provoke a psychological reaction and an aesthetic experience.”
55. “The aesthetics aren’t merely a side note, they’re as important as anything else.”
56. “According to this view, all that matters to art appreciation is beauty of form. The logical extreme of aestheticism turns out to be homicidal art. (Taken from the book Hannibal Lecter & Philosophy: The Heart of the Matter)”
57. “Ten Surrealism creates actual and non-compromised reality, jamboree, fervor, fascination, poetics of an active enthusiasm, interludium, lyrical practice, active happiness.”
58. “What finite beings say about transcendence is the semblance of transcendence; but as Kant well knew, it is a necessary semblance. Hence the incomparable metaphysical relevance of the rescue of semblance, the object of esthetics.”
59. “We sing lyrical excess, exacerbated expressionism, imponed objectivity, inventiveness, meta-baroque, extravaganza, super metaphor, sublimity, strident, exposure, super-pone, noise, super-objectivity, zillionism, fragmentation and aesthetics of facts, suractivism.”
60. “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.
