Aesthetic Sense Quotes & Sayings

I always just been a fan of the music ... and the aesthetic only in an abstract sense. — Colin Marston

I want big ideas to have aesthetic relevance. I want to tickle people's intellectual sensibilities and instill a sense of wonder. — Jason Silva

And if, as all philosophers on the subject have noted, art is a human activity that relies on the senses to reach the soul, did it not also stand to reason that dogs
at least dogs of Mr. Bones' caliber
would have it in them to feel a similar aesthetic impulse? Would they not, in other words, be able to appreciate art? As far as Willy knew, no one had ever thought of this before. Did that make him the first man in recorded history to believe such a thing was possible? No matter. It was an idea whose time had come. If dogs were beyond the pull of oil paintings and string quartets, who was to say they wouldn't respond to an art based on the sense of smell? Why not an olfactory art? Why not an art for dogs that dealt with the world as dogs knew it? — Paul Auster

The Tyr had tried. It had really tried. It must have gone over every element of human psychology, tried desperately to understand the nature of human aesthetic sense ... and then failed, miserably, in every regard. — C.S. Friedman

There's no specific aesthetic other than a sense of the beautiful itself, I suppose. — Kristoffer Rygg

Sometimes gaining and losing are more intimately related than we like to think. And some things cannot be moved or owned. Some light does not make it all the way through the atmosphere, but scatters ... The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel. If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not ... abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway ... Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant. — Rebecca Solnit

If all feeling for grace and beauty were not extinguished in the mass of mankind at the actual moment, such a method of locomotion as cycling could never have found acceptance; no man or woman with the slightest aesthetic sense could assume the ludicrous position necessary for it. — Ouida

Wallace would have none of it. In reviewing The Descent of Man he wrote, 'Are we to believe that the actions of an ever varying fancy for a slight change of colour could produce and fix the definite colours and markings which actually characterise species?' Furthermore, he said, it was unacceptable to suggest that birds had an aesthetic sense. That would be crediting a bird with a human characteristic for which there was no evidence. It would be anthropomorphism at its most unjustified. — David Attenborough

Beauty in the European sense has always had a premeditated quality to it. We've always had an aesthetic intention and a long-range plan. That's what enabled western man to spend decades building a Gothic cathedral or a Renaissance piazza. The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human designt, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with with a sudden wondrous poetry ... Sabina was very much attracted by the alien quality of New York's beauty. Fran found it intriguing but frightening; it made him feel homesick for Europe. — Milan Kundera

We are devastated to learn of the death of Alexander McQueen, one of the greatest talents of his generation. He brought a uniquely British sense of daring and aesthetic fearlessness to the global stage of fashion. In such a short career, Alexander McQueen's influence was astonishing - from street style, to music culture and the world's museums. His passing marks an insurmountable loss. — Anna Wintour

Without the Indian Subcontinent, in other words, there could not have been a Vietnam in any cultural or aesthetic sense. — Robert D. Kaplan

Of course one's sense of identification with the nation is inflected by all kinds of particulars, including one's class, race, gender, and sexual identification. ... But [regarding] national character ... , aside from references to a national aesthetic - literary, musical, and choreographic, there are two poles I reference: minimalist and maximalist. I love them both - the cryptic poems of Emily Dickinson folded up in tiny packets and hidden away in a box, the sparse, understated choreographies of Merce; but also the "trashy, profane and obscene" poems of Whitman and Ginsberg, [and] Martha Graham's expressionism. I am, myself, a minimalist. But I love distortion guitar and the wild exhibitionism of so many American artists. Also, these divisions are false. Emily Dickinson, in fact, can be as trashy and obscene as the best of them! Anyway, Dickinson and Whitman are at the heart of this narrative. They are the Dancing Queen and the Guitar Hero. — Barbara Browning

Theory is relevant to you because it shows you a new, simpler, and more elegant side of computers, which we normally consider to be complicated machines. The best computer designs and applications are conceived with elegance in mind. A theoretical course can heighten your aesthetic sense and help you build more beautiful systems. — Michael Sipser

I know it's a cliche, but I see myself as a citizen of the world. I was brought up in Switzerland by German and Turkish parents but I've very much grown up in San Francisco. I have a European sense of aesthetic, but I'm also deeply steeped in the notion of change and entrepreneurship that is associated with Silicon Valley. — Yves Behar

I always loved fashion and clothes. Not because I think that's a woman's place, but because I care about aesthetics. I like art; I like going to art museums, and to me, these things are just manifestations of one's aesthetic sense. — Leila Janah

The lure in art collecting and its financial rewards, not counting for a moment its aesthetic, cultural and intellectual rewards, is like the trust in paper money: it makes no sense when you really think about it. New artistic images are so vulnerable to opinion that it wouldn't take much more than a whim for a small group of collectors to decide that a contemporary artist was not so wonderful anymore, was so last year. — Steve Martin

Even as a child I was fascinated by death, not in a spiritual sense, but in an aesthetic one. A hamster or guinea pig would pass away, and, after burying the body, I'd dig it back up: over and over, until all that remained was a shoddy pelt. It earned me a certain reputation, especially when I moved on to other people's pets. "Igor," they called me. "Wicked, spooky." But I think my interest was actually fairly common, at least among adolescent boys. At that age, death is something that happens only to animals and grandparents, and studying it is like a science project. — David Sedaris

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

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 laws against public nudity make no sense. The idea that Jerry Falwell can go topless while Cindy Crawford cannot is an absolute affront to logic, common sense and the 5000 year human struggle for aesthetic taste. — Peter McWilliams

To respect the cat is the beginning of the aesthetic sense. — Erasmus Darwin

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

We are beginning to play with ideas of ecology, and although we immediately trivialize these into commerce or politics, there is at least an impulse still in the human breast to unify and thereby sanctify the total natural world, of which we are ... There have been, and still are, in the world many different and even contrasting epistemologies which have been alike in stressing an ultimate unity, and, although this is less sure, which have also stressed the notion that ultimate unity is aesthetic. The uniformity of these views gives hope that perhaps the great authority of quantitative science may be insufficient to deny an ultimate unifying beauty.
I hold to the presupposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply, an epistemological mistake. — Gregory Bateson

Every person writes his or her life story similar to how a musician composes music. Author Milan Kundera noted, 'Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress.' Guided by their aesthetic sense of beauty, a person transforms the intentional and fortuitous events of their life into an expressive episodic motif, which artistic creation assumes a permanent place in the composition of his or her conscious mind. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The changing styles are the expression of a restless search for something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic sense; but as each innovation is subject to the selective action of the norm of conspicuous waste, the range within which innovation can take place is somewhat restricted. The innovation must not only be more beautiful, or perhaps oftener less offensive, than that which it displaces, but it must also come up to the accepted standard of expensiveness. — Thorstein Veblen

For the same uprush of fancy which had shown him with all the force of mathematical demonstration that life had no meaning, brought with it another idea; and that was why Cronshaw, he imagined, had given him the Persian rug. As the weaver elaborated his pattern for no end but the pleasure of his aesthetic sense, so might a man live his life, or if one was forced to believe that his actions were outside his choosing, so might a man look at his life, that it made a pattern. There was as little need to do this as there was use. It was merely something he did for his own pleasure. — W. Somerset Maugham

IT IS WITH OUR FACES that we face the world, from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Our age and our sex are printed on our faces. Our emotions, the open and instinctive emotions which Darwin wrote about, as well as the hidden or repressed ones which Freud wrote about, are displayed on our faces, along with our thoughts and intentions. Though we may admire arms and legs, breasts and buttocks, it is the face, first and last, which is judged "beautiful" in an aesthetic sense, "fine" or "distinguished" in a moral or intellectual sense. And, crucially, it is by our faces that we can be recognized as individuals. Our faces bear the stamp of our experiences and character; at forty, it is said, a man has the face he deserves. At — Oliver Sacks

A word that turns up in TNR's literary pieces is "tasteless. " They use it in the same way you might reprove a toilet joke at the dinner table or around relatives. But with them it takes on moral weight. It's a very damaging mistake: the idea that sniffing out the tasteless is the same as taste itself. It confuses censoriousness with a faculty of judgment that links the aesthetic to the moral sense. — N+ 1 Magazine

She could afford anything, she could give anything, but she could not share a moment of her life with anybody. She
was a beautiful and a glamorous diamond with an astronomical price tag, but to a crude reality - she was still a stone, a living stone. Nothing else but a stone in an aesthetic sense. — Ravindra Shukla

High modernism is numinous through and through, as the work of art provides one of the last outposts of enchantment in a spiritually degenerate world. Postmodernism, with its notorious absence of affect, is post-numinous. It is also in a sense post-aesthetic, since the aestheticisation of everyday life extends to the point where it undermines the very idea of a special phenomenon known as art. Stretched far enough, the category of the aesthetic cancels itself out. — Terry Eagleton

My paintings and sculptures, at first glance, may appear to be purely aesthetic; closer up, they are not. They hold a feeling of tentativeness, combined with a sense of arrival. — Budd Hopkins

What liberates the imagination is the sense that work in its theory and practice holds aesthetic possibilities, that jobs can be elegantly conceived and gracefully done. This sense of beauty unlocks feelings of pleasure and love and breaks down the barrier between worker and work and commit to work not merely the "thinking" consciousness but the full resources of mind. — Robert Grudin

Of one thing we can be sure: our own future is inseparable from the larger community that brought us into being and which sustains us in every expression of our human quality of life, in our aesthetic and emotional sensitivities, our intellectual perceptions, our sense of the divine, as well as in our physical nourishment and bodily healing. — Thomas Berry

Deconstruction seeks neither to reframe art with some perfect, apt and truthful new frame, nor simply to maintain the illusion of some pure and simple absence of a frame. Rather it shows that the frame is, in a sense, also inside the painting. For the frame is what "produces" the object of art, is what sets it off as an object of art - an aesthetic object. Thus the frame is essential to the work of art; in the work of art. Paint a $5,000 abstract painting on a railroad boxcar and nobody will pay a cent for it. Take a torch, remove the panel of the boxcar, install it in a gallery, and it will be worth $5,000. It will be art because it is now framed by the gallery. But at the same moment that the frame encloses the work in its own protected enclosure, making it a work of art, it becomes merely ornamental - external to the work of art. Thus is the frame central or marginal? Is the frame inside the work of art, essential to it, or outside the work of art, extrinsic to it? — James N. Powell

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note. — Seamus Heaney

The most extensive and sustained exploration of the world, and the mightiest monument of collective wondering, is, of course, science. Richard Dawkins speaks of 'the feeling of awed wonder' that science can give us and asserts that 'it is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest music and poetry can deliver'. Anyone who is not acquainted with science - its questions, its answers, the limits to its answers, and honesty about those limits, the brilliance of its methodologies and instruments, its sense of the unanswerable - is denying herself a great opening, a dormer window, in conciousness. — Raymond Tallis

Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes, but this is not the worst of it. Wyman's slum of possibles is a breeding ground for disorderly elements. — Willard Van Orman Quine

My manager got the script for 'Under the Dome,' and I read it and just fell in love with the character. I grew up on Stephen King, and I love his whole aesthetic of the classic American story with supernatural events happening, so it just made sense. — Alexander Koch

If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway. — Rebecca Solnit

I think if you are writing an instrumental you are dealing with more of an aesthetic in a sense but a lyric is more of a putting yourself on the line and a much more expensive exercise. — Leo Kottke

My aesthetic sense was formed at a young age by what surrounded me: the narrow residential spaces of Japan and the mental escapes from those spaces that took the forms of manga and anime. — Takashi Murakami

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

Physical separateness can never be overcome by electronics, but only by 'conviviality,' by 'living together' in the most literal physical sense. The physically divided are also the conquered and the controlled. 'True desires' - erotic, gustatory, olfactory, musical, aesthetic, psychic, & spiritual - are best attained in a context of freedom of self and other in physical proximity & mutual aid. Everything else is at best a sort of representation. — Hakim Bey

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

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

If they're beautiful I don't much mind if they're not true. It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as to your sense of the aesthetic. I wanted Betty to become a Roman Catholic, I should have liked to see her converted in a crown of paper flowers, but she's hopelessly Protestant. Besides, religion is a matter of temperament; you will believe anything if you have the religious turn of mind, and if you haven't it doesn't matter what beliefs were instilled into you, you will grow out of them. Perhaps religion is the best school of morality. It is like one of those drugs you gentlemen use in medicine which carries another in solution: it is of no efficacy in itself, but enables the other to be absorbed. You take your morality because it is combined with religion; you lose the religion and the morality stays behind. A man is more likely to be a good man if he has learned goodness through the love of God than through a perusal of Herbert Spencer." This — William Somerset Maugham

The talent of the people in Brazil was extraordinary. I thought all of the hair and make-up was really fantastic. The aesthetic there is really something to behold. They just have such a great sense of taste. — Miranda Otto

There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction ... For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. — Vladimir Nabokov

A lover of comfort might shrug after looking at the whole apparent jumble of furniture, old paintings, statues with missing arms and legs, engravings that were sometimes bad but precious in memory, and bric-a-brac. Only the eye of a connoisseur would have blazed with eagerness at the sight of this painting or that, some book yellowed with age, a piece of old porcelain, or stones and coins.
But the furniture and paintings of different ages, the bric-a-brac that meant nothing to anyone but had been marked for them both by a happy hour or memorable moment, and the ocean of books and sheet music breathed a warm life that oddly stimulated the mind and aesthetic sense. Present everywhere was vigilant thought. The beauty of human effort shone here, just as the eternal beauty of nature shone all around.
pp. 492-493 — Ivan Goncharov

It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle. — John Updike

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

Photography's central sense of purpose and aesthetic: the precise and lucid description of significant fact. — John Szarkowski

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

The fact that the colors in the flower have evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; that means insects can see the colors. That adds a question: does this aesthetic sense we have also exist in lower forms of life? — Richard P. Feynman

A designer is a planner with an aesthetic sense. — Bruno Munari

The failure of art is, as we have said, not a complete failure. Substantial truth is revealed to us, we are not cheated of that; but it is revealed only in the equivocal form of beauty, submerged, so to speak, in the flood of aesthetic emotion. It is only because truth is revealed in it that the emotion is aesthetic; but emotional truth, truth in the guise of beauty, is not truth at all in the formal sense Art asserts nothing; and truth as such is matter of assertion. To be itself, it demands logical form. Art fails us because it does not assert. It is pregnant with a message that it cannot deliver. To — R.G. Collingwood

There is none more beautiful than the lover of beauty. — Raheel Farooq

Aesthetic and utilitarian considerations aside," I said, "Those mittens don't particularly make sense. Why would you want to hitchhike to the North Pole? Isn't the whole gimmick of Christmas that there's home delivery? You get up there, all you're going to find is a bunch of exhausted, grumpy elves. Assuming, of course, that you accept the mythical presence of a workshop up there, when we all know there isn't even a pole at the North Pole, and if global warming continues, there won't be any ice, either."
"Why don't you just fuck off?" the woman replied. Then she took her mittens and got out of there. — Rachel Cohn

Good design for the home should be universal. A house should be like old shoes, comfortable, like a good friend ... The Japanese aesthetic is important to me. Very organic. They have a sense of the weight of the thing: very balanced. — Elsa Peretti

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

Calcutta is like a work of modern art that neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason. — Amit Chaudhuri

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann. — Vladimir Nabokov

Like Jean Genet, Robert was a terrible thief. Genet was caught and imprisoned for stealing rare volumes of Proust and rolls of silk from a shirt maker. Aesthetic thieves. I imagined his sense of horror and triumph as bits of Blake swirled into the sewers of New York City. — Patti Smith

I spent a lot of time on farms when I was growing up, and I've been obsessed with the practical logic of farmyards - the turning radius of tractors, where the chickens and ducks might go. It's not a place where stand-alone aesthetic decisions make a lot of sense. — Jaquelin T. Robertson

Nowhere does Niemeyer set out a specific aesthetic. In "The Autonomous Man" he notes that the imagination can be used for good or ill. In the broadest sense, he believed that the imagination could move either in the direction of autonomy, creating self-enclosed systems, or in the direction of participation, that is, a deepening of our sense of the mystery that surrounds our existence. — Gregory Wolfe

When you're talking about Tim Burton, you're talking about a guy that has such a visual sense, an aesthetic, a storytelling style. It's like he's got his own genre. — Jackie Earle Haley

But as men grow more industrialised and regimented, the kind of delight that is common in children becomes impossible to adults because they are always thinking of the next thing and cannot let themselves be absorbed in the moment. This habit of thinking of the 'next thing' is more fatal to any kind of aesthetic excellence than any other habit of mind that can be imagined, and if art, in any important sense, is to survive it will not be by the foundation of solemn academies, but by recapturing the capacity for wholehearted joys and sorrows which prudence and foresight have all but destroyed. — Bertrand Russell

I certainly think there are things that impressed me as a child about the church. The smells and the sounds and the pagaentry of it remained with me. The aesthetic I really love. I think a lot of my sense of melody comes from singing those hymns and doing the renaissance music and stuff. — Jonathan Meiburg

The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgement go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases. But the moment the patient begins to assimilate contents that were previously unconscious, its danger diminishes. The dissociation of personality, the anxious division of the day-time and the night-time sides of the psyche, cease with progressive assimilation. — C. G. Jung

In humans, smell is often viewed as an aesthetic sense, as a sense capable of eliciting enduring thoughts and memories. Smell, however, is the primal sense. It is the sense that affords most organisms the ability to detect food, predators, and mates. — Richard Axel

The artist, painter, poet, or musician, by his decoration, sublime or beautiful, satisfies the aesthetic sense; but that is akin to the sexual instinct, and shares its barbarity: he lays before you also the greater gift of himself. — W. Somerset Maugham

A rich poet from Harvard has no sense in his mind, except the aesthetic. — Beatrice Wood

Much has been said of the aesthetic values of chanoyu- the love of the subdued and austere- most commonly characterized by the term, wabi. Wabi originally suggested an atmosphere of desolation, both in the sense of solitariness and in the sense of the poverty of things. In the long history of various Japanese arts, the sense of wabi gradually came to take on a positive meaning to be recognized for its profound religious sense ... the related term, sabi, ... It was mid-winter, and the water's surface was covered with the withered leaves of the of the lotuses. Suddenly I realized that the flowers had not simply dried up, but that they embodied, in their decomposition, the fullness of life that would emerge again in their natural beauty. — Okakura Kakuzo

The beautiful is and remains beautiful though it arouse no emotion whatever, and though there be no one to look at it. In other words, although the beautiful exists for the gratification of an observer, it is independent of him. In this sense music, too, has no aim (object), and the mere fact that this particular art is so closely bound up with our feelings by no means justifies the assumption that its aesthetic principles depend on this union. — Eduard Hanslick

To speak of sparing anything because it is beautiful is to waste one's breath and incur ridicule in the bargain. The aesthetic sense- the power to enjoy through the eye, and the ear, and the imagination- is just as important a factor in the scheme of human happiness as the corporeal sense of eating and drinking; but there has never been a time when the world would admit it. — John Van Dyke

I felt like no one was really looking out for me, that I was marginal and incidental. I compensated by being spongelike, impressionable, and available to whatever and whoever provided the most comfort, the most sense of belonging. I was learning two sets of skills simultaneously: adaptation - linguistic and aesthetic - in order to fit in, but also, how to survive on my own. — Carrie Brownstein