164 Quotes About Aesthetics

People who insist upon dressing casually also want to think casually. And in a fallen world, thinking casually means being wrong more often than not.

The philosophical attitudes of awe and wonder of the Ancient Greeks and the Enlightenment Philosophy of Kant have been inverted into the "modern" moods of terror and boredom.

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.

Aesthetic sense is the twin of one's instinct for self-preservation and is more reliable than ethics.

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

We want people to represent us in politics—and in love and economics too. When people represent us fully, they are ourselves and are not ourselves. When an object is simultaneously the same as and different from the person concerned with it—or considering it—aesthetics is there.

...fiction is as useful as truth, for giving us matter, upon which to exercise the judgment of value.

....it seems to me that a pleasurable Contemplation of Beauty has certainly an immeasurably greater value than mere Consciousness of Pleasure.

Everything good is good because of the love it contains.