#aesthetic

In the life of the individual, an aesthetic sensibility is both more authentic and more commendable than a political or religious one. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#life

Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness. ↗

— Harold Bloom

#humanity #literature #reading #age

Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion. Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art. ↗

— Remy de Gourmont

#aesthetic #art #away #emotion #favorable

The main reason why men and women make different aesthetic judgments is the fact that the latter, generally incapable of abstraction, only admire what meets their complete approval. ↗

— Franz Grillparzer

#admire #aesthetic #approval #complete #different

In addressing a task, one almost always has several possible options, sometimes only a few, and they may all be practical and functional. But they lack the aesthetic aspect that raises it to architecture. ↗

— Arne Jacobsen

#aesthetic #almost #always #architecture #aspect

Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic ↗

— James Branch Cabell

#cynicism #dead #death #death

A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant - rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance - but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself. ↗

— Roberto Burle Marx

#aesthetic #also #artist #color #complex

The aesthetic of architecture has to be rooted in a broader idea about human activities like walking, relaxing and communicating. Architecture thinks about how these activities can be given added value. ↗

— Thom Mayne

#activities #added #aesthetic #architecture #broader

Complexity is not an aesthetic criterion. It is a quality associated only with division and organization of labor. ↗

— Christopher Caudwell

#art #beauty #economics #poetry #truth

...But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative—the purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty. What aesthetic is adequate to the Holocaust, or to the recent tragedy in Haiti? Narrative is not exculpatory—it is in fact about culpability, about recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us. If we’re to say anything important, we require an art less facile, and editors willing to seek it. ↗

— Michael Copperman

#authority #culpability #race #representation #art