Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all aims, objectives and intentions.

Original: Porque é bela a arte? Porque é inútil. Porque é feia a vida? Porque é toda fins e propósitos e intenções.

¿Por qué es bello el arte? Porque es inútil ¿Por qué es tan fea la vida? Porque en ella todo son fines y propósitos. Todos sus caminos conducen de un punto hasta otro punto. ¡ojalá hubiera un camino hecho en un lugar donde nadie parta hacia otro lugar al que nadie va! Quién

The usefulness of the useless is good news for artists, for art serves no useful purpose. It has to do with changing minds and spirits.

Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

Some sort of pressure must exist; the artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.

Beauty, my dear Sir, is not so much a quality of the object beheld, as an effect in him who beholds it. If our sight were longer or shorter, or if our constitution were different, what now appears beautiful to us would seem misshapen, and what we now think misshapen we should regard as beautiful. The most beautiful hand seen through the microscope will appear horrible. Some things are beautiful at a distance, but ugly near; thus things regarded in themselves, and in relation to God, are neither ugly nor beautiful. Therefore, he who says that God has created the world, so that it might be beautiful, is bound to adopt one of the two alternatives, either that God created the world for the sake of men's pleasure and eyesight, or else that He created men's pleasure and eyesight for the sake of the world. Now, whether we adopt the former or the latter of these views, how God could have furthered His object by the creation of ghosts, I cannot see. Perfection and imperfection are names which do not differ much from the names beauty and ugliness.

There is nothing truly beautiful but that which can never be of any use whatsoever; everything useful is ugly.

Beauty is, in some way, boring. Even if its concept changes through the ages… a beautiful object must always follow certain rules. A beautiful nose shouldn’t be longer than that or shorter than that, on the contrary, an ugly nose can be as long as the one of Pinocchio, or as big as the trunk of an elephant, or like the beak of an eagle, and so ugliness is unpredictable, and offers an infinite range of possibility. Beauty is finite, ugliness is infinite like God.

Life, like art, is purposeless and unpredictable. That’s what makes it beautiful and rare! In life, we are given the choice between three paths: utopia, illusion or nonsense. The funny thing is, none of us get the joke.

There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what untrained eyes consider abominable.

Many things that if you’re attractive it for us become ugly to us when we gain deeper knowledge: a building that took an oppressed class to build, a tool that will not hold an edge, clothes that shrink or fade on Washington. Are these beautiful? That way we answer this question is momentous impact for our concept of society.

The hardest thing these days is to make something that’s beautiful; it’s easy to make ugly art. I think it takes a lot more talent to make something beautiful. Beauty to me is when you show something to someone that they’ve never seen before. That’s what a great work of art does; it shows you something that you didn’t know existed.

Beauty without purpose is beauty without virtue. But all beautiful things, inherently, have this function — to excite the viewers toward sublime thought. Glory to the world, that good teacher.