#esthetics

Aesthetics have substantial political consequences. How one views oneself as beautiful or not beautiful or desirable or not desirable has deep consequences in terms of one’s feelings of self-worth and one’s capacity to be a political agent. ↗

— Cornel West

#beauty

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

It was one of God's jokes that such a dumb mind had been put in such an eloquent body. ↗

— Charlaine Harris

#beauty #lust #male-beauty #beauty

Christ is a persuasion, a form evoking desire, and the whole force of the gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also peace: that the desire awakened by the shape of Christ and his church is one truly reborn as agape, rather than merely the way in which a lesser force succumbs to a greater, as an episode in the endless epic of power. (3) ↗

— David Bentley Hart

#christianity #eastern-orthodox #beauty

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