All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our
spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of
artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver
behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity
has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship
the spine and its tingle.

Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy.

The appreciation of the connoisseur is the highest pleasure of the artiste.

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle...

Gradually I arrived at the conclusion that the power of realistic art arises from the pleasure we derive from recognizing the truth as it is mirrored by art. The painting, the sculpture, or the words that represent the original with fidelity, create the impression of reality and the feeling of pleasure. This goes beyond dead photography. It involves artistic re-creation, and if the result coincides with the subject, this artistic integrity becomes a source of aesthetic enjoyment. It is truth that we admire and that is the source of our artistic delight. The heart experiences a thrill in recognizing a friend in a faithful portrait. But capitalist critics don't want the truth. It disturbs the class they serve.

It must be emphasized that in seeing a work of art that has been composed by precise means, the viewer does not perceive dominant details. His impression is one of perfect balance to which all the parts contribute, an impression which not only applies to the parts as such, but is transmitted also to the relation existing between the work of art and the viewer. Although it is very difficult to express in words the effect of a work of art, it may be said that the viewer’s deepest impression can best be defined as the achievement of a balance between objective meaning and subjective meaning, both directly penetrated by awareness. He has a sensation of height and of depth which are no longer in any way bound to natural conditions or to spatial dimensions, a sensation which places the viewer in a state of consciousness harmony.

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain,” said Lord Byron,

Feelings, the most diverse, very strong and very weak, very significant and very worthless, very bad and very good, if only they infect the reader, the spectator, the listener, constitute the subject of art.

Art is the stored honey of the human soul.

"This new concept of the "finest, highest achievement of art" had no sooner entered my mind than it located the imperfect enjoyment I had had at the theater, and added to it a little of what it lacked; this made such a heady mixture that I exclaimed, "What a great artiste she is!" It may be thought I was not altogether sincere. Think, however, of so many writers who, in a moment of dissatisfaction with a piece they have just written, may read a eulogy of the genius of Chateaubriand, or who may think of some other great artist whom they have dreamed of equaling, who hum to themselves a phrase of Beethoven for instance, comparing the sadness of it to the mood they have tried to capture in their prose, and are then so carried away by the perception of genius that they let it affect the way they read their own piece, no longer seeing it as they first saw it, but going so far as to hazard an act of faith in the value of it, by telling themselves "It's not bad you know!" without realizing that the sum total which determines their ultimate satisfaction includes the memory of Chateaubriand's brilliant pages, which they have assimilated to their own, but which, of course, they did not write. Think of all the men who go on believing in the love of a mistress in whom nothing is more flagrant than her infidelities; of all those torn between the hope of something beyond this life (such as the bereft widower who remembers a beloved wife, or the artist who indulges in dreams of posthumous fame, each of them looking forward to an afterlife which he knows is inconceivable) and the desire for a reassuring oblivion, when their better judgement reminds them of the faults they might otherwise have to expiate after death; or think of the travelers who are uplifted by the general beauty of a journey they have just completed, although during it their main impression, day after day, was that it was a chore — think of them before deciding whether, given the promiscuity of the ideas that lurk

It has been accepted now that the joy of art is the heritage of all and aesthetic activity and appreciation are indispensable aids in the enrichment and refinement of the human soul in general. Art refines our inner as well as our physical life and provides that satisfaction and joy which acquisitions and activities on a merely material plane can never give. As Nachiketa said, na vittena tarpaniyo manushyo. In other words, man does not live by bread alone. Music and dance, among the arts, have always had a high place in Indian aesthetics. They are conceived as having their origin in the Divine, which is itself described the Upanishads as the quintessence of aesthetic pleasure raso vai sah. Our arts embody the deepest experience and wisdom of mankind, and they have a spiritual import and purpose.

[R]eading a splendid writer, or even just a very entertaining writer, is not a particularly passive business. An accomplished artist is giving us his or her best shots, in what she or he regards as their most effective sequence—of words, of actions, of foreshadowings and plot-twists and insights and carefully prepared dramatic moments. It's up to us to respond to those best shots with our minds and hearts and spirits and our accumulated experience of life and of art.