35 Quotes Tagged: aesthetics

All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.

We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising, his brother; and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers and miserable workers. Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.

Now, analysis, the breaking of the wholes into parts, is fundamental to science, but for judging works of art, the procedure is more uncertain: what are the natural parts of a story, a sonnet, a painting? The maker's aim is to project his vision by creating not a machine made up of parts but the impression of seamless unity that belongs to a living thing. Looking at an early example of systematic criticism by analysis — say, Dante's comments on his sonnet sequence La Vita Nuova — one sees that the best he can do is to tell again in prose what the first two lines mean, then the next three, and so on in little chunks through the entire work. We may understand somewhat better his intention here and there, but at the same time we vaguely feel that the exercise was superfluous and inappropriate. Reflection tells us why: those notations taken together do not add up to the meaning of the several poems. In three words: analysis is reductive. Since its patent success in natural sciences, analysis has become a universal mode of dealing not merely with what is unknown or difficult, but also with all interesting things as if they were difficult. Accordingly, analysis is a theme. Depending on the particulars of its effect, it can also be designated reductivism.

Refinement creates beauty everywhere: it is the grossness of the spectator that discovers nothing but grossness in the object.

Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic

Su interés en la obra es simplemente moral o simplemente físico, y no es precisamente lo que debe ser: estético. Lectores tales gozan de una poesía sería y patética como de un sermón, y de una poesía humorística e ingenua, como de una bebida embriagadora, y carecen lo bastante de gusto para exigir edificación en una tragedia o epopeya.

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.

there's something wrong with any art that makes a woman all bust

What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

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.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

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.

"Fairest of the deathless gods.

This idea the Greeks had of him is best summed up not by a poet, but by a philosopher,
Plato: "Love — Eros — makes his home in men's hearts, but not in every heart, for where
there is hardness he departs. His greatest glory is that he cannot do wrong nor allow it;
force never comes near him. For all men serve of him their own free will. And he whom
Love touches not walks in darkness.

With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art.