#aesthetics

Never worry about the reader, what the reader can understand. When you are writing, glance over your shoulder, and you’ll find there is no reader. Just you and the page. Feel lonely? Good! Assuming you can write clear English (or Norwegian) sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone. To write a poem you have to have a streak of arrogance (…) when you are writing you must assume that the next thing you put down belongs not for reasons of logic, good sense, or narrative development, but because you put it there. You, the same person who said that, also said this. The adhesive force is your way of writing, not sensible connection. ↗

— Richard Hugo

#poetry #communication

Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and . . . it is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal. ↗

— Louis de Bernières

#art #beauty #fascism #art

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#appreciation #hidden-things #wild

In my box of sound bites there are no jackhammers, no snowmobiles, no Jet Skis, no children wailing. Music but no Muzak. It's my box. Put what you want in yours. ↗

— Joan Oliver Goldsmith

#art #art

All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war. ↗

— Walter Benjamin

#art #poltics #propaganda #war #art

Sometimes diaspora art expresses a longing for home, and frequently it tries to construct a collective identity out of its mostly heterogeneous reality. ↗

— Sieglinde Lemke

#mercer #art

Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition. ↗

— Rainer Maria Rilke

#art #creation #creativity #perception #self-knowledge

The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true. ↗

— Adam Phillips

#art #philosophy #secrets #truth #art

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

— Theodor W. Adorno

#philosophy #art

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. ↗

— Murray Gell-Mann

#beauty #physics #science #theory #beauty