164 Quotes About Aesthetics

What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant.

Experiments had shown that an atom is like a small solar system: the mass is concentrated in a heavy central nucleus, around which light electrons revolve, more or less like planets around the Sun.

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.

I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life.

God's pleasure--the beauty creation possesses in his regard--underlies the distinct being of creation, and so beauty is the first and truest word concerning all that appears within being; beauty is the showing of what is; God looked upon what he had wrought and saw that it was good.

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.

While we kept on dancingour souls delicately embraced.

We should worry again about the connection between play-starved education and eroded mechanisms for political debate, if worry can lead beyond deadlocks. Too often, academic essays pursue analysis and critique but stop short of speculation about remedies, as if intellectual work excluded an element of creativity. In fact, essays that remain risk-averse miss the potential of the genre to "assay," or try out, ideas.