Aesthetic Experience Quotes & Sayings

The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you're present in the current moment; when you're resonating with the excitement of this thing that you're experiencing; when you are fully alive. — Ken Robinson

What can a state institution teach us? In what way can I be reformed by a penal colony and you by, say, Russian TV Channel 1? In his Nobel lecture, Joseph Brodsky said, 'The more substantial an individual's aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer - though not necessarily the happier - he is.' We in Russia once again find ourselves in a situation where resistance, especially aesthetic resistance, becomes the only viable moral choice as well as a civic duty." Nadya — Masha Gessen

Keith Haring wrote " You see that's why I work like a dog and I worked like a dog all my life. I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my own transformation. Thats the reason also why, when people say. " Well you thought this a few years ago and now you say something else," my answer is[laughter]" well, do you think that I have worked like that all those years and not be changed?" This transformation of ones self by ones own knowledge is,I think something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting. — Keith Haring

Then there are the fully intentional pleasures, which, although in some way tied up with sensory or perceptual experience, are modes of exploration of the world. Aesthetic pleasures are like this. Aesthetic pleasures are contemplative - they involve studying an object OUTSIDE of the self, to which one is GIVING something (namely, attention and all that flows from it), and not TAKING, as in the pleasure that comes from drugs and drinks. Hence such pleasures are not addictive - there is no pathway to reward that can be short-circuited here, and a serotonin injection is not a cheap way of obtaining the experience of PARISFAL or THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. — Roger Scruton

Since most of our moral understanding comes, via metaphor, from a broad range of other domains of experience, and since we apply those metaphors to a number of different experiential domains, we should be wary of trying to compartmentalize ethics. The cross-domain mappings of the metaphors suggest the intricate web of connections that impose our moral ideas on other aspects of our lives, including considerations that are technical, scientific, political, aesthetic, religious, and social. — George Lakoff

I used to believe authenticity could be achieved solely by describing, in our own words, one's own fragment of experience. This was of course predicated on the complete intellectual and aesthetic independence of the "I". One eventually realizes such intellectual isolationism promotes style, ego, awards. But not change. — Miguel Syjuco

Why do you like show jumping?"
" ... Beauty and excitement. The elements of trust, talent, training, love, and danger make show jumping a thrilling and aesthetic experience. It's really the ultimate test of two nervous systems
the kinetic transfer of the rider's muscle to the horse's muscle enables them to clear those jumps. And there's nothing like it
horse and rider forming an arc of beauty, efficiency, and power, like a double helix."
"DNA,"
"Yes, DNA, the code to life. — Ainslie Sheridan

Technology is important to Art because it connects creativity with innovation and the spirit of inventiveness. Whether we are using technology to create our art, or to share our art, it challenges artists to explore new realms of aesthetic experience and cultural relevance. But, on the other hand, Art is important to Technology for the most important reason of all. Art gives Technology its humanity. And our humanity is the driving force behind every new technology we design and every product we manufacture. We are all makers. Without creativity, we don't make anything. If we don't make anything, we don't progress. — Kim Chestney

Espresso consumption is an aesthetic experience,like tasting a vintage wine or admiring a painting, — Andrea Illy

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

God, they will insist, is a spirit and is to be worshipped in spirit. Therefore an experience which is chemically conditioned cannot be an experience of the divine. But, in one way or another, all our experiences are chemically conditioned, and if we imagine that some of them are purely 'spiritual', purely 'intellectual', purely 'aesthetic', it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical environment at the moment of their occurrence. — Aldous Huxley

Art is the aesthetic ordering of experience to express meanings in symbolic terms. — Daniel Bell

I'm definitely incredibly attracted to the aesthetic of what is typically deemed goth stuff, but. A lot of my experience growing up was in being around that kind of thing, and it's just what sinks into a person's brain. — Jhonen Vasquez

I use music as something from which I obtain some form of - I hate to use the word spiritual - guidance, an awareness of something more than the day-to-day or the petty. I am not reading Emanuel Kant to try to embark on a task of seeing if I can understand myself, what the aesthetic experience is. But I wholeheartedly believe in it, even though I think not too many do nowadays. — Richard Meale

I am praising that famous individualism associated with Western and American myth ... Tightly knit communities in which members look to one another for identity, and to establish meaning and value, are disabled and often dangerous, however polished their veneer ... The cult of the individual is properly aesthetic and religious. The significance of every human destiny is absolute and equal ... Only lonesomeness allows one to experience this sort of radical singularity, one's greatest dignity and privilege. — Marilynne Robinson

Furthermore, the sense of passion or of power, of depth and vibrancy, feeling and vision, we take away from any work is the result of the intermingling, balance, play, and antagonism between these: it is the arrangement of blues, not any blue itself, which lets us see the mood it formulates, whether pensive melancholy or thoughtless delight, so that one to whom aesthetic experience comes easily will see, as Schopenhauer suggested, sadness in things as readily as smoky violet or moist verdigris. — William H Gass

In The Dynamics of Creation, Anthony Storr, the British psychiatrist, contends that an individual who "fears love almost as much as he fears hatred" may turn to creative activity not only out of an impulse to experience aesthetic pleasure, or the delight of exercising an active mind, but also to defend himself against anxiety stimulated by conflicting demands for detachment and human contact.21 — Sylvia Nasar

Somaaesthetics can be provisionally defined a the critical meliorative study of one's experience and use of one's body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning. It is therefore also devoted to the knowledge, discourses, and disciplines that structure such somatic care or can improve it. — Richard Shusterman

The scientific value of truth is not, however, ultimate or absolute. It rests partly on practical, partly on aesthetic interests. As our ideas are gradually brought into conformity with the facts by the painful process of selection,-for intuition runs equally into truth and into error, and can settle nothing if not controlled by experience,-we gain vastly in our command over our environment. This is the fundamental value of natural science — George Santayana

Beauty could be defined simply as 'that which pleases.' But there is another aspect to art, and that ... is the sublime. Like the mushroom cloud of the atom bomb, or the vastness of space as projected to us by satellite ... the greatness of the experience goes beyond your ethical and aesthetic judgment, cutting you free from the binding ego of yourself. With the diminishment of your ego, the less there is of you, the more you see the sublime. — Jen Wang

No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we'd rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn't know how to deal with women. — Milan Kundera

The foundations of the world are to be found, not in the cognitive experience of conscious thought, but in the aesthetic experience of everyday life. — Alfred North Whitehead

An old essay by John Updike begins, 'We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements.' That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion ? The answer is in his second sentence : 'Consider the beer can.' To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. 'Pop-top' and 'beer' are at the bottom of the ladder, 'aesthetic experience' at the top. — John Updike

The sense of beauty puts a brake upon destruction, by representing its object as irreplaceable. When the world looks back at me with my eyes, as it does in aesthetic experience, it is also addressing me in another way. Something is being revealed to me, and I am being made to stand still and absorb it. It is of course nonsense to suggest that there are naiads in the trees and dryads in the groves. What is revealed to me in the experience of beauty is a fundamental truth about being - the truth that being is a gift, and receiving it is a task. This is a truth of theology that demands exposition as such. — Roger Scruton

The critic can affect my aesthetic theories only by affecting my aesthetic experience. All systems of aesthetics must be based on personal experience--that is to say, they must be subjective. — Clive Bell

The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music. — Donald Knuth

In life, idea and emotion come separately. Mind and passions revolve in different spheres of our humanity, rarely coordinated, usually at odds. In fact, in life, moments that blaze with a fusion of idea and emotion are so rare, when they happen you think you're having a religious experience. But whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion. — Robert McKee

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

The danger of that - and there's a grave danger that I, myself, have to be very aware of - is that you become so involved and intrigued in the language that sometimes you lose track that that is only a means to an aesthetic experience that the listener has to get. — Leo Ornstein

The aesthetic construct, and nothing else, has taught us to expose ourselves to a non-enslaving experience of rank differences. The work of art is even allowed to 'tell' us, those who have run away from form, something, because it quite obviously does not embody the intention to confine us. 'La poesie ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose' Something that exposes itself and proves itself in this test gains unpresumed authority. In the space of aesthetic simulation, which is at once the emergency space for the success and failure of the artistic construct, the powerless superiority of the works can affect observers who otherwise take pains to ensure that they have no lord, old or new, above them. — Peter Sloterdijk

Mankind's self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. — Jerry Mander

The wine itself has aesthetic value; but what it is for a wine to have aesthetic value cannot be understood without making reference to the experience to tasting it — Tim Crane

Scientific understanding is often beautiful, a profoundly aesthetic experience which gives pleasure not unlike the reading of a great poem. — Paul Nurse

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

In the course of aesthetic experience, the perceiver may be overwhelmed by this 'mere object', overcome with emotion, altered to the very roots of his being.[ ... ] The experience of beauty involves an exchange of power, and as such, it is often disorienting, a mix of humility and exaltation, subjugation and liberation, awe and mystified pleasure.[ ... ] Many people, fearing a pleasure they cannot control, have vilified beauty as a siren or a whore. Since at one time or another though, everyone answers to 'her' call, it would be well if we could recognize the meaning of our succumbing as a valuable response, an opportunity for self-revelation rather than defeat.[ ... ] It entails a flexibility and empathy toward 'Others' in general and the capacity to see ourselves as both active and passive without fearing that we will be diminished in the process. — Wendy Steiner

Taste and smell are often the beggars among our five senses - they leave no written language and therefore no standards other than wholly personal ones. Tasting a superlative Moselle wine can be an aesthetic experience no less genuine than hearing a Mozart piano concerto or seeing for the first time an original Breughel painting. — Frank Schoonmaker

The asymmetry of power that cuteness revolves around is another compelling reminder of how aesthetic categories register social conflict. There can be no experience of any person or object as cute that does not somehow call up the subject's sense of power over those who are less powerful. But, as Lori Merish underscores, the fact that the cute object seems capable of making an affective demand on the subject - a demand for care that the subject is culturally as well as biologically compelled to fulfill - is already a sign that "cute" does not just denote a static power differential, but rather a dynamic and complex power struggle. — Sianne Ngai

So if you can look at all things without allowing pleasure to creep in - at a face, a bird, the colour of a sari, the beauty of a sheet of water shimmering in the sun, or anything that gives delight - if you can look at it without wanting the experience to be repeated, then there will be no pain, no fear, and therefore tremendous joy. It is the struggle to repeat and perpetuate pleasure which turns it into pain. Watch it in yourself. The very demand for the repetition of pleasure brings about pain, because it is not the same, as it was yesterday. You struggle to achieve the same delight, not only to your aesthetic sense but the same inward quality of the mind, and you are hurt and disappointed because it is denied to you. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

It's just plain learning something that you didn't know. There is a real aesthetic experience in being dumbfounded. — Lewis Thomas

I call this theory mystical pluralism because of its similarity to John Hick's pluralist interpretation of religion. The theory is essentialist in both the therapeutic and epistemological senses described above. Its thesis is that mystical traditions initiate common transformative processes in the consciousness of mystics. Though mystical doctrines and practices may be quite different across traditions, they nevertheless function in parallel ways - they disrupt the processes of mind that maintain ordinary, egocentric experience and induce a structural transformation of consciousness. The essential characteristic of this transformation is an increasingly sensitized awareness/knowledge of Reality that manifests as (among other things) an enhanced sense of emotional well-being, an expanded locus of concern engendering greater compassion for others, an enhanced capacity to creatively negotiate one's environment, and a greater capacity for aesthetic appreciation. — Randall Studstill

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

We learn to understand ourselves in and through it because the artwork is not a timeless present for a pure aesthetic consciousness (i.e., it is not an encounter with an object for which one can only express feelings of pleasure or displeasure), but rather, a real encounter with a world that presents itself historically. The self-understanding that occurs in relation to the experience of art, Gadamer tells us, is only possible when our experiencing is not discontinuous with "the unity and integrity of the other."17 — James Risser

Civic participation depends on creativity, an (aesthetic) knack for reframing experience, and on a corollary freedom to adjust laws and practices in light of ever-new challenges. Without art, citizenship would shrink to compliance, as if society were a closed text. Reading lessons would stop at the factual "what is," rather than continue to the speculative "what if. — Doris Sommer

Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations. — George Orwell

The principle objectives in life are love, the creation and enjoyment if aesthetic experience, the pursuit of knowledge. Love comes a long way first. — John Maynard Keynes

When history seems to offer no sanctuary for values (when history is assailed by wars and inhuman or immoral public actions), literature can provide a model, often as horrendous as that of history, but one which by virtue of its fictional nature is bound to keep an ironic, parodic, aesthetic or philosophical distance from what is at risk in immediate experience or direct reflection. — Beatriz Sarlo

I really can't claim ever to have had an exceptionally close relationship with a minister. I'm always there. I pay my pledge. I listen and observe with interest. I'm very sympathetic with the rigor and the aesthetic quality of what they do. Aside from that, I don't have a kind of personal experience with any of them that I could consider privileged, so to speak. — Marilynne Robinson

Worship in truth is worship that arises out of an actual encounter with God, a response to the experience of knowing God's real presence and activity in our daily lives. This has nothing to do with sentiment, thinking religious thoughts or having aesthetic experiences in church buildings; any religion can give you that sort of thing. — Graham Kendrick

A crucial point here is that understanding is not only a matter of reflection, using finitary propositions, on some preexistent, already determinate experience. Rather, understanding is the way we "have a world," the way we experience our world as a comprehensible reality. Such understanding, therefore, involves our whole being - our bodily capacities and skills, our values, our moods and attitudes, our entire cultural tradition, the way in which we are bound up with a linguistic community, our aesthetic sensibilities, and so forth. I short, our understanding is our mode of "being in the world." It is the way we are meaningfully situated in our world through our bodily interactions, our cultural institutions , our linguistic tradition, and our historical context. Our more abstract reflective acts of understanding (which may involve grasping of finitary propositions) are simply an extension of our understanding in this more basic sense of "having a world. — Mark Johnson

One of the threats to Christianity in the 21st century is this idea that religion is best understood as a kind of aesthetic experience, and that you can get all your morality from that. — John Cornwell

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. — Susan Sontag

Inner experience ... is not easily accessible and, viewed from the outside by intelligence, it would even be necessary to see in it a sum of distinct operations, some intellectual, others aesthetic, yet others moral ... It is only from within, lived to the point of terror, that it appears to unify that which discursive thought must separate. — Georges Bataille