Top 100 Aesthetic Quotes
#1. There is a "yoga body" aesthetic, which is long and sinewy. I am curvy. I get praised on a regular basis, with people telling me, "Wow, you're so brave," simply for showing my curvy body. Being brave is going to war; being curvy is not brave. We need to be careful with how we use our words.
Kathryn Budig
#2. I was once described by one of my critics as an aesthetic fascist.
Alan Parker
#3. Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself. It is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life.
Roger Kimball
#4. A film fable so structured that all alchemical searchings are clearly filmwise (gold being discovered cinematically in each sequence ot mixed black-and-white and color) so that when the drama-discovery is actually made, it acts as a deliberate anti-climax of aesthetic perfection.
Stan Brakhage
#5. The last thing they want to hear is that math is really about raw creativity and aesthetic sensitivity. Many
Paul Lockhart
#6. We have created our own aesthetic!"
"You mean our own Ghetto.
Larry Kramer
#7. You don't have to conform to a very specific aesthetic today, whereas 1950s women definitely had to.
Romola Garai
#8. I was a screenwriting and studio art major in college, so even though I don't have any training as a floral designer, I have a very particular visual aesthetic.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh
#9. I love deeply and admire the beauties of life and its expression in many different art forms. I am an aesthetic philosopher.
Debasish Mridha
#10. 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.
Louis De Bernieres
#11. Ceony shut the book and glanced to her new teacher. "It's . . . amazing, but I admit it's also superficial. Aesthetic."
"But entertaining," he combated. "Never dismiss the value of entertainment, Ceony. Good-quality entertainment is never free, and it's something everyone wants.
Charlie N. Holmberg
#12. Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.
Richard Dawkins
#13. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express
verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner
the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
Andre Breton
#14. Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#15. The distinction between a gallery and a museum is enormous. The gallery is about looking at a thing of beauty; the purpose of the activity is an aesthetic response. The museum is actually about the object that lets you get into somebody else's life.
Neil MacGregor
#16. Inaudible prayers, particularly of the Canon, which at first don't seem to have anything to do with music, end up being a very important part of the aesthetic of the traditional structure of the Mass.
Richard Morris
#17. It is not merely the feeling that something is familiar. It is one step beyond that. It is something new, challenging, or surprising that opens a door into a feeling of comfort, meaning, or familiarity. It is called an aesthetic aha.
Derek Thompson
#18. I'm used to coming up with a lot of parts. And I don't have to do that so much [with Divine Fits]. This is the kind of band I've always wanted to be in because we never set up any aesthetic rules when we started it. We just wrote and edited, and it ended up sounding like Divine Fits.
John Britt Daniel
#19. Men=earthbound creatures, living in communities, endowed with common sense, sensus communis, a community sense; not autonomous, needing each other's company even for thinking ("freedom of the pen")=first part of the Critique of Judgment: aesthetic judgment.
Hannah
#20. For better or worse, whether it is a sign of aesthetic complexity or of intellectual indecision, this novel [Frankenstein] offers equally fertile ground to those readers who like their meanings ambiguous and indeterminate and to those who prefer to discern a deeply important doctrine.
Richard T. Nash
#21. Children frighten me. I mean, I appreciate them on a cute aesthetic level, but they're very demanding and unreasonable creatures and often smell funny.
Rachel Cohn
#22. All I can say about the work I try to do, is that the aesthetic is in reality itself.
Helen Levitt
#23. Which even though we do have a very visual aesthetic and identity, we love it when people make their own videos to the music.
Lizzy Plapinger
#24. Our conception of 1950s underwear is a lovely vintage aesthetic, but actually, wearing stockings with no elastic and a girdle was heavy duty.
Romola Garai
#25. Recently, the Germans have developed a tendency to prefer the so-called first (youthful) style of great artists to their mature works. Could it be that they do not realize that their aesthetic criteria, generally speaking, are juvenile?
Franz Grillparzer
#26. The effortlessness of a performance for which great strength is needed is a spectacle of whose aesthetic beauty the East has an exceedingly sensitive and grateful appreciation.
Eugen Herrigel
#27. There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.
A.S. Byatt
#28. So many pickles, so little time.
M.P.
#29. There's a lesbian aesthetic, just as there's gay camp, but I don't know if there's such a thing as 'lesbian art.'
Catherine Opie
#30. Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women's bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them.
Germaine Greer
#31. The more people explore the world, the more they realize in every country there's a different aesthetic. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.
Helena Christensen
#32. Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#33. Do you really expect me to say gravity hasn't taken its toll? No. But as I'm earning these lines [in my face], I'm making an aesthetic choice.
Susan Sarandon
#34. A garden is a result of an arrangement of natural materials according to aesthetic laws; interwoven throughout are the artist's outlook on life, his past experiences, his affections, his attempts, his mistakes and his successes.
Roberto Burle Marx
#35. Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
Alain De Botton
#36. Aesthetic culture is not the high-road to all the virtues, and, indeed, certain of the vices have been known to infest it. Neither, on the other hand, is there any special grace in ugliness. Art is only utterance. It must express something; and the vital question is, what does it express?
Lewis Foreman Day
#37. We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy.
Sarah Waters
#38. The film's dramatic requirements should always take precedence over the mere aesthetics of editing.
Edward Dmytryk
#39. The novel may stimulate you to think. It may satisfy your aesthetic sense. It may arouse your moral emotions. But if it does not entertain you it is a bad novel.
W. Somerset Maugham
#40. For me, it's important to experience aesthetic shock, which sets in motion our imagination, our emotions, our feelings, and our thoughts. That's the purpose of a painting and of art in general.
Pierre Soulages
#41. Scientific understanding is often beautiful, a profoundly aesthetic experience which gives pleasure not unlike the reading of a great poem.
Paul Nurse
#43. It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. - Of Human Bondage
W. Somerset Maugham
#44. What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles ... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.
Hans Hofmann
#45. We all have Tumblr, and we all have Instagram and everything. People care so much about it because, now, any random can be famous on the Internet if their world looks good on Tumblr. And so everyone at high school strives for this kind of aesthetic correctness.
Lorde
#46. What you call looking like an idiot are splashes of mediatic splendor that give shine to your personality and make you more human, more likable. If ethical and aesthetic principles no longer exist, looking like an idiot disappears as a consequence.
Niccolo Ammaniti
#47. There is none more beautiful than the lover of beauty.
Raheel Farooq
#48. Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.' 'Everybody's a critic. This wasn't an aesthetic endeavor.
David Foster Wallace
#49. I want big ideas to have aesthetic relevance. I want to tickle people's intellectual sensibilities and instill a sense of wonder.
Jason Silva
#50. This relationship, often called the Golden mean, has been discovered and rediscovered at various times in history as a unique proportion believed to have both aesthetic and mystic significance. That the Egyptians knew of it and used it seems certain.
John Pile
#51. I never view aesthetic ideas as having an existence purely of their own but as a function they have in connection with political or moral values.
Antoni Tapies
#52. It's not like you're being fake, it's just the way you color it, like a guitar player uses pedals or different effects. That's why I get so mad about people who are down on vocal reverb. It's not a crutch, people, it's an aesthetic choice!
Kelly Hogan
#53. Some people', Miss R. said,'run to conceits or wisdom but I hold to the hard, brown, nutlike word. I might point out that there is enough aesthetic excitement here to satisfy anyone but a damned fool.
Donald Barthelme
#54. While extroverts tend to attain leadership in public domains, introverts tend to attain leadership in theoretical and aesthetic fields.
Susan Cain
#55. The connection between romantic politics and aesthetics is plain in Schiller's and Novalis's concept of the aesthetic or poetic state.
Frederick C. Beiser
#56. A technical failure that shows some attempt at aesthetic expression is of infinitely more value than uninspired success.
Cecil Beaton
#57. The music that I have always liked has always been more rooted in anger or sadness or alienation or any of those inspirational factors that drove rock'n'roll, gospel, and blues. I tend not to value a more pop aesthetic.
DJ Shadow
#58. The aesthetic experience has to be given. And beauty is a regular experience of every person - every person who is not clinically depressed!
Peter Schjeldahl
#59. I like anything with my face on it, just from an aesthetic point of view.
Martin Freeman
#60. The Ilan-Lael Foundation is an arts education foundation celebrating nature and the aesthetic of the built environment for its ability to help us see ourselves and our world in new ways.
James T. Hubbell
#61. I've seen knives pierce the chest,
Children dying in the road
Crawling things hooked and baited,
Rapists bound and then castrated,
Villains singed in public square.
Yet none these sights did make me cringe
Like when my Love cut all her hair.
Roman Payne
#62. I am a person who holds the aesthetic high. I have suits made in Savile Row.
Gary Kemp
#63. My particular aesthetic of light and color and design wouldn't change as a result of working with computer graphics rather than with slit scan or miniatures.
Douglas Trumbull
#64. There is an aesthetic excitement about painting which is one of the most beautiful experiences that can be. Put things down while you feel that joy.
Charles Webster Hawthorne
#65. I love to play a character. If I'm playing Cinderella or Aurora in 'Sleeping Beauty' or something like that, then I enjoy classical a lot. But to do just a two-minute solo, purely to show classical aesthetic, is not my favorite thing to do.
Sarah Hay
#66. On the opposite wall was a Damien Hirst spot painting, bought by Arabella after a decent bonus season. Roger's considered view of the painting, looking at it from aesthetic, art-historical, interior-design, and psychological points of view, was that it had cost forty-seven thousand pounds, plus VAT.
John Lanchester
#67. And then you start getting into the technical side of it and the aesthetic side and with those areas you can come up with new ways to visualise things, new ways to render and use the computer to make things look different and new and stuff like that.
Dennis Muren
#68. What you wear can largely govern your feelings and your emotions, and how you look influences the way people regard you. So fashion plays an important role on both the practical level and the aesthetic level of activity.
Rei Kawakubo
#69. The secret is to remain true to your aesthetic vision, so that people can see that you really believe passionately in what you are doing. That way, they can relate to your style. At the same time, you experiment-you try new things.
Giorgio Armani
#70. I have never collected an object or figure from Africa or Oceania because of anything curious about it or because of its utility or historic interest. Everything has been chosen entirely because of its aesthetic significance; its form, feeling, structure, and plastic values.
Frank Crowninshield
#71. Mormonism has this great cheesy aesthetic - when you watch their videos, it's almost as if they're about to flash a smile at the camera and burst into song. Mormon cheesiness is so close to musical cheesiness.
Matt Stone
#72. One of the staples of discussion about basic aesthetic principles is that art has to exist for its own self and cannot be prostituted to advance any particular cause or point of view. Perfect nonsense, of course, but that doesn't keep it from being repeated ad nauseam.
Douglas Wilson
#73. Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.
Chaim Potok
#74. I always just been a fan of the music ... and the aesthetic only in an abstract sense.
Colin Marston
#75. All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression.
David Foster Wallace
#76. A part of sexuality may go to research, and a much larger part must lead to aesthetic creation. The art of the future will, because of the very opportunities and materials it will have at its command, need an infinitely stronger formative impulse than it does now.
John Desmond Bernal
#77. No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest.
Goldwin Smith
#78. It may well be, of course, that America's pop culture is on balance better than our high art. I don't think so, but you can certainly make a case that the best of it aspires to a degree of aesthetic and emotional seriousness that is directly comparable to all but the very greatest works of high art.
Terry Teachout
#79. Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#80. You just have to have the right gear and a few people to put you in motion with a good aesthetic and the film will take care of itself.
Andrew Wight
#81. Dryness promotes the formation of flower buds ... flowering is, after all, not an aesthetic contribution, but a survival mechanism.
Ann Zwinger
#82. Consider your house from an aesthetic point of view.
Anthea Turner
#83. Staying true to my vision, to the word as it comes to me, to my own aesthetic judgments, even when they disagree with the majority culture, is very important to me, and I think important for every artist. It's what we have: our voice, our intuition, the truth as we understand and know it.
Micheline Aharonian Marcom
#84. My hair is an aesthetic choice ... At the same time, how you wear your hair is a political statement as well.
Erykah Badu
#85. The logic of Palladian architecture presented an aesthetic formula which could be applied universally.
Stephen Gardiner
#87. A lot of children don't have a developed aesthetic. I did. I made early choices in life, even about cloth; I liked flannel and not polyester.
Patti Smith
#88. Philosophy has a great sort of appeal in terms of an artistic or aesthetic organization of concepts. It's a conceptual art.
William H Gass
#89. I wanted the press to become something of a movement. Not a movement committed to a particular 'ism', but a gathering together of writers with an aesthetic approach to literature and with a lust for excellence.
John Metcalf
#90. Nature supplies the game of chess with its implements; science with its system; art with its aesthetic arrangement of its problems; and God endows it with its blessed power of making people happy.
Peter Weiss
#91. Only as an aesthetic product can the world be justified to all eternity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#92. The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.
Julian Barnes
#93. Your ethnic or sexual identity, what region of the country you're from, what your class is - those aspects of your identity are not the same as your aesthetic identity.
Stanley Crouch
#94. The Japanese are, to the highest degree, both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite, rigid and adaptable, submissive and resentful of being pushed around, loyal and treacherous, brave and timid, conservative and hospitable to new ways.
Ruth Benedict
#95. What is extraordinary about contemporary art is the energy - it has our energy. New energy. Pieces hundreds of years old are beautiful from an aesthetic point of view, but without our modern energy.
Victor Pinchuk
#96. I live an artistic double life: one of classical realism and the other of aesthetic exploration.
Alton Tobey
#97. So long as the most vulnerable people in our population are consigned to places that the rest of us will always shun and flee and view with fear, I am afraid that educational denial, medical and economic devastation, and aesthetic degradation will be inevitable.
Jonathan Kozol
#98. All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.
Walter Benjamin
#99. Generally the aesthetics of broadcast journalism seem to me to be incredibly primitive.
Ira Glass
#100. I think taking design out of the studio and really having a relationship with the people that you're making it for really convinced me of how powerful a thing design is. It's not just an aesthetic decoration.
Genevieve Gorder
