"Aesthetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... artistic—Heaven—O Heaven forbid. My blood boils when I think of the affronts put by knock-kneed pictorial epicures on the strong, honest, ugly, patient shapes of necessary things: the brave old bones of life. There are aesthetic pottering prigs who can look on a saucepan without one tear of joy or sadness: mongrel decadents that can see no dignity in the honourable scars of a kettle. So they concentrate all their house decoration on coloured windows that nobody looks out of, and vases of lilies ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... tables, chairs, bedsteads or any such inconvenient and space-robbing thing. The tables upon which they ate, played chess or wrote were six inches or a foot high. A Japanese of the old style thinks the cumbrous furniture in our Western dwellings impertinent and unnecessary. In the eye of aesthetic Japanese a room crowded with luxurious upholstery is a specimen of barbaric pomp, delighting the savage and unrefined eye of the hairy foreigners, but shocking to the purged vision and the refined ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... ladies and gentlemen, I hope to attain the ideal of all true horticulturists, e. g., "To make our country more beautiful and fruitful and thereby help to serve the aesthetic and ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... Elena Nikolaevna on her name day. Do you see the allegory? We are not blind, we see what goes on about us, but we are gentlemen, my dear sir, and we take our revenge like gentlemen.... But here,' added Shubin, uncovering another figure, 'as the artist according to modern aesthetic principles enjoys the enviable privilege of embodying in himself every sort of baseness which he can turn into a gem of creative art, we in the production of this gem, number two, have taken vengeance not as ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... Offering love for all their lives; But for iron the Magnet felt no whim, Though he charmed iron, it charmed not him, From needles and nails and knives he'd turn, For he'd set his love on a Silver Churn! His most aesthetic, Very magnetic Fancy took this turn - "If I can wheedle A knife or needle, Why not a ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... upon sociology. That economics does rest upon sociology is shown by many considerations. The chief problem of theoretical economics is the problem of economic value. But economic value is but one sort of value which is recognized in society, moral and aesthetic values being other examples of the valuing process, and all values must express the collective judgment of some human group or other. The problem of economic value, in other words, reduces itself ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... only poetry, but every other channel of emotional expression and aesthetic culture, confessedly moves with the general march of the human mind, and art is only the transformation into ideal and imaginative shapes of a predominant system and philosophy of life. Minor verse-writers may fairly be consigned, without ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... because she submitted to it; Elizabeth was a young girl of artistic temperament, craving beauty, and longing for the companionship of those who talked in terms comprehensible to her at the same time that they advanced her aesthetic education and possibilities. In proportion as she valued this thing was she to pay ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... ideas without recognising or pursuing something material? Analytic reflection often ignores the essential energy of mind, which is originally more intelligent than sensuous, more appetitive and dogmatic than aesthetic. But the feelings and ideas of an active animal cannot help uniting internal moral intensity with external physical reference; and the natural conditions of sensibility require that perceptions should owe their existence and quality to the living organism with its moral bias, and that ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... as one found the gods of all nations in the Roman pantheon, so will one find the flaws of all State forms in the Holy Roman German Empire. That this eclecticism will reach a point hitherto unsuspected is guaranteed in particular by the politico-aesthetic gourmanderie of a German king, who thinks he can play all the parts of monarchy, both of the feudal and the bureaucratic, both of the absolute and the constitutional, of the autocratic as of the democratic, if not in the person of his people, then in his own person, if not ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... choice of this intellectual and kindly natured man, who set no value on the external forms of life, was, I might say, "naturally" a very elegant woman, a native of Berlin, the widow of the Kriegsrath Hofmeister. She speedily opened Froebel's eyes to the aesthetic and artistic element in the lives of the boys entrusted to his care—the element to which Langethal, from the time of his entrance into the institution, had directed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... sky so beautiful through these bars?" I reflected as I walked. "Is not this the effect of the aesthetic law of contrasts, according to which azure stands out prominently beside black? Or is it not, perhaps, a manifestation of some other, higher law, according to which the infinite may be conceived by the human mind only when it is brought within certain boundaries, for ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... [213] THE "aesthetic" poetry is neither a mere reproduction of Greek or medieval poetry, nor only an idealisation of modern life and sentiment. The atmosphere on which its effect depends belongs to no simple form of poetry, no actual form of life. Greek poetry, medieval ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... differences between the modern and the classical aesthetic mind is the greater precision and definiteness of the latter. The modern genius is Gothic, and demands in art a certain vagueness and spirituality like that of music, refusing to be grasped and formulated. Hence ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... not infrequently situated in the very midst of towns, or near the local supplies of drinking water. Conditions within their walls were often shocking from an aesthetic view point. As the area available for burials was limited, and the graves were usually unmarked, parts of decomposed bodies were constantly being dug up. It was the custom to throw such remains about the foot of the cross at ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... considering the character of some of my own books, such an attempt would be gross inconsistency. But, while I appreciate its importance in a philological view, I am inclined to set little store on its aesthetic value, especially in poetry. Three parts of the emendations made upon poets are mere alterations, some of which, had they been suggested to the author by his Maecenas or Africanus, he would probably have adopted. Moreover, those who are most ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... real, the less it invokes the aid of flesh and sense. To make the senses the ladder for the soul by which to climb to God is quite as likely to end in the soul's going down the ladder as up it. Aesthetic aids to worship are crutches which keep a lame soul lame all ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... relationship. Individual facts have to produce such passports to show that they are not expatriated, that they are not a break in the unity of the whole. The logical relationship present in an intellectual proposition, and the aesthetic relationship indicated in the proportions of a work of art, both agree in one thing. They affirm that truth consists, not in facts, but in harmony of facts. Of this fundamental note of reality it is that the poet has said, "Beauty is ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... remained the ideals of the Pompadour; and only by a stern and conscious effort have either women or men been able to escape from them. Everywhere there has spread a strange disease of romantic snobbery, the sufferers from which, in their efforts at aesthetic expression, always pretend to be what they are not. Excellent mothers of families, in their furniture and sometimes even in their clothes, pretend to be King's mistresses. Of course, if this pretence were put into ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... in order to keep the thing safe I knotted it up in the tail of my shirt, which waggled out of the seat of my breeches. It was given to me by a beautiful lady, who, I remember, smelled like all the perfumes of Araby. She awakened my aesthetic sense by the divine and intoxicating odour that emanated from her. Since then I have never met woman so—so like a scented garden of all the innocences. To me she was a goddess. I overheard her prophesy things ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... This childlike and prosaic mind is beginning to wane in the world of science. Men of science are beginning to see themselves, as the fine phrase is, in the part; they are beginning to be proud of their humility. They are beginning to be aesthetic, like the rest of the world, beginning to spell truth with a capital T, beginning to talk of the creeds they imagine themselves to have destroyed, of the discoveries that their forbears made. Like the modern English, they ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... aesthetic value there generally is in productions of this sort is well known; and yet it cannot be denied that many of them are interesting; or else how could they be ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... obvious error in the amber[3] of the truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free[4] and may call a spade a spade.[5] It cannot, even if it would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the contemporary groove into the open fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like schoolboys out of school. And it is in talk ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the early reformers was sufficiently fervent, and had been proved by the steadiness with which they confronted torture and death, but they knew no measure in the ridicule which they heaped upon the men by whom they were daily murdered in droves. The rhetoric comedies were not admirable in an aesthetic point of view, but they were wrathful and sincere. Therefore they cost many thousand lives, but they sowed the seed of resistance to religious tyranny, to spring up one day in a hundredfold harvest. It was natural that the authorities should have long sought to suppress ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... To use words is to think in step, and to beg our question. But Godwin is well aware that most men rarely reason. He is here framing an ideal, without realising its remoteness. The mischief of his faith in logic as a force, was that it led him to ignore the aesthetic and emotional influences, by which the mass of men can best be led to a virtuous ideal. Shelley, who was a thorough Platonist, supplements, as we shall see (p. 234), this characteristic defect in his master's teaching. The ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... and airy, rude sculpture became beautiful by conforming to natural forms, and hieroglyphics developed into the letters which Cadmus invented or improved. Schools were established, athletic sports were encouraged, aesthetic taste was developed, until in the arts, in philosophy, in science, and in literature the Greeks took the ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... simplifying principle,—physical or social,—which unifies his multitudinous experiences. So long as personification elucidates a true, a scientific principle, so long as it is not pressed to tortuous lengths which actually give false impressions, so long as it is kept within the bounds of aesthetic decency, so long as it is recognized as a play device and does not confuse a child's thinking,—so long as it is justified. No more. It is a useful intellectual tool and a charming device for play. ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... Art is the heirloom of the whole human race; and that work was to assert in drama, lyric, sculpture, music, gymnastic, the dignity of man—the dignity of man which they perceived for the most part with their intense aesthetic sense, through the beautiful in man. Man with them was divine, inasmuch as he could perceive beauty and be beautiful himself. Beauty might be physical, aesthetic, intellectual, moral. But in proportion as a thing was perfect it revealed its own perfection by its beauty. ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... made by casting them with much ceremony into the lake, from richly decorated boats. The building with the five golden domes was, of course, the temple, sacred to Kuhlacan, in which the god was daily worshipped. Earle, whose aesthetic sense was stirred by the beauty of the fountain and the wonderful workmanship of the figure surmounting it, directed Dick's particular attention to it and descanted at some length upon the taste of the design; and Dick, while listening to his companion, could not fail to observe ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... hoped that the town will never be inveigled into scrapping this memorial, which for quaintness and unconscious humour is almost unsurpassed. A subject of derisive merriment to the tripper and of shuddering aversion for those with any aesthetic sense, it is nevertheless an interesting link with another age and is not very much worse than some other specimens of the memorial type of a more recent date. It has lately received a coat of paint of an intense black and the cross-headed wand that the monarch holds is tipped with gold. The ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... that a comparison may be effective either for ornament or for use, there must be, between the two acts or objects, a similarity in some points, and a dissimilarity in others. The comparison for moral or aesthetic purposes is like an algebraic equation in mathematical science; if the two sides are in all their features the same, or in all their features different, you may manipulate the signs till the sun go down, but you will obtain no useful result: ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... outward appearance only, few would have given Villiers credit for being the man of penetrative and almost classic refinement he really was,—he looked far more athletic than aesthetic. Broad-shouldered and deep-chested, with a round, blunt head firmly set on a full, strong throat, he had, on the whole, a somewhat obstinate and pugilistic air which totally belied his nature. His features, open and ruddy, were, without being ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... pilgrimage, and each constantly developed occult beauties of design and subtle excellences of execution. On the whole we were greatly altered; and if the supply of contemporary fiction had been equal to the demand, the Camel, I fear, would not have been strong enough to contain the moral and aesthetic forces fired by the maceration of the brains of authors in the gastric juices ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... guavas, eatable beach-grapes and papaws. If you're fond of wild cassava and can prepare it so it won't poison you, you can make an eatable paste. If you like oily cabbage, the top of any palmetto will furnish it. But, my poor friend, there's little here to tempt one's appetite or satisfy one's aesthetic hunger for flowers. Our Northern meadows are far more gorgeous from June to October; and our wild fruits are far more delicious than what one finds growing wild in ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... definite limits within which that influence is confined. In the earlier Victorian period, the more limited, partly educated, and still very homogeneous enfranchised class, had a certain habit of thinking; its tranquil assurance upon most theological and all moral and aesthetic points left political questions as the chief field of exercise for such thinking as it did, and, as a consequence, the dignified newspapers of that time were able to discuss, and indeed were required to discuss not only specific situations but general principles. ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... Giovio, pursued the same end. He first attempted, not always successfully, but often with remarkable power and elegance, and at no small cost of effort, to reproduce in Latin a number of modern, particularly of aesthetic, ideas. His Latin characteristics of the great painters and sculptors of his time contain a mixture of the most intelligent and of the most blundering interpretation. Even Leo X, who placed his glory in the fact, 'ut lingua latina nostro pontificatu dicatur facta auctior,' ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... them in the mass. They give over to habits and pleasures like great boys. People talk about the extravagance of women. But men are equally so, only their extravagance takes a different turn. A woman's is aesthetic; a man's is gross. She buys fine clothes and furniture. He panders to his bodily appetites. Which is worse? Women love men, and wish to be loved by them, and are miserable if they are not. So the wife lets her husband do twenty things which he ought not to do, which it is rude and selfish and ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... may be improved by carvings, arrangements of beads or metal castings and inlays. Even the horses are decorated with artificial forelocks of hair and beads. Strings of bells surround their necks, while saddles and whips display the aesthetic ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... deeds I had done and the champions I had overthrown, but to a certain hogskin belt buckled next the skin. The sweat of months was upon it, toil had defaced it, and it was not a creation such as would appeal to the aesthetic mind; but it was plethoric. There was the arcanum; each yellow grain conduced to my exaltation, and the sum of these grains was the sum of my mightiness. Had they been less, just so would have been my stature; more, and I should have reached ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... account, and, as soon as he had gone, paraded at leisure, and con amore, and after the manner of an artist of aesthetic taste, before the mirror. Somehow he seemed to look better than ever in the suit, for his cheeks had now taken on a still more interesting air, and his chin an added seductiveness, while his white collar lent tone to his neck, the blue satin tie heightened the effect of the collar, the fashionable ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... classes of "men" made up to him, after the men of distinction, those whom the dons considered the best men, had withdrawn and left him to pursue his own way. The men who loafed considered him their natural prey; the aesthetic men who wrote bad verses opened their arms, and were ready to welcome him as their own. And perhaps among these classes he might have found disinterested friendship, for nobody any longer sought Warrender on account of ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... here, not merely or chiefly for the metre, but for the balance, for the aesthetic logic. Perhaps "golden" was the word which would ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... in order of development. Phonetic writing was a step in advance of the ideograph. The use of manuscripts and books made permanent records. Language is an instrument of culture. Art as a language of aesthetic ideas. Music is a form of language. The dance as a means of dramatic expression. The fine arts follow the development of language. The love of the beautiful ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... Hayne, "the exultation with which he showed me one morning his earliest consecutive attempt at verse- making. Our down-East schoolmaster, however, could boast of no turn for sentiment, and having remarked us hobnobbing, meanly assaulted us in the rear, effectually quenching for the time all aesthetic enthusiasm." ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... the Surveyor's intention. Afterwards, when Wren was compelled to raise the height of the exterior, he increased the interior. St. Sophia and the Invalides are both less than two diameters, and give the idea of greater area. While it is difficult to see what aesthetic advantage is gained by a roof and upper regions immersed in perpetual gloom, the acoustic properties and the light might both have been improved by a more modest elevation. Yet the advocates of a smaller ratio ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... far better to have fewer and better toys than more of an inferior quality. The thing to keep in mind is that a toy is neither an artistic model, an aesthetic ornament, nor a mechanical spectacle, but should be a stimulus to call forth self-activity, ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... author by the "Vindication of Natural Society," a satire upon Bolingbroke which many accepted as a genuine work of Bolingbroke's, and by the "Essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful," which is perhaps most valuable because we owe to it in some degree the later masterpiece of aesthetic criticism, the "Laocoon" of Lessing. From this time until his connection with public life began his career was linked with Fleet Street and its brotherhood of authors, and his pen was steadily employed. With that love for variety of subject which is characteristic of most of the authors of the eighteenth ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... cruises up and down Dutch canals, the Baltic, French, Flemish and Danish coasts and East Anglian estuaries with companions about whom he preserves an equally mysterious silence. (Was it secret service, I wonder?) A delightful book, produced with something like pre-war attention to aesthetic appearance—a pleasant quarto with roomy pages faithfully printed in a fair type. You ought to enjoy the owner's evident enjoyment (he was never bored and therefore never boring), his charmingly ingenuous pride of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... German auditorium or Hoersaal, as the lecture-rooms in the universities are called, will show much that is characteristic. But little care is bestowed on the decoration of the apartment. Whatever aesthetic culture the nation may have, it finds little manifestation in the things of daily life, and elegance seems little less than banished from the precincts of the learned world. The academic halls present to the view nothing but dingy walls, rough floors coated with the dust and mud of days ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... was this appeal to the aesthetic faculty which attracted me from the first, and not, as I had imagined, the mere curiosity of the naturalist interested mainly and always in the habits of living things, ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... the clear, restrained forms of chamber music; he studied with unwavering industry the old masters; he deduced from their works the right rules of composition; and he set these up before him like a dam against arbitrariness and aesthetic demoralisation. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... the advantages of solid education." That, however, the working-men appreciate solid education when they can get it unmixed with the interested cant of the bourgeoisie, the frequent lectures upon scientific, aesthetic, and economic subjects prove which are delivered especially in the Socialist institutes, and very well attended. I have often heard working-men, whose fustian jackets scarcely held together, speak upon geological, astronomical, ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... improved in that state. The conclusive arguments against the imagined original civilisation are indeed plain to everyone. Nothing is more intelligible than a moral deterioration of mankind—nothing than an aesthetic degradation—nothing than a political degradation. But you cannot imagine mankind giving up the plain utensils of personal comfort, if they once knew them; still less can you imagine them giving up good weapons—say bows and arrows—if they once knew them. Yet if there were a primitive civilisation ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... human skull. Its rim is rough and quite irregular, and there is no trace of ornamentation of any sort; a fact quite in accordance with all the other facts we know about the men of the newer Stone Age, who were far less artistic and aesthetic in every way than their ruder ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... the unaffected desire of the writer to awaken a kindly interest in the poor souls who have so twined themselves about her own best feelings, may be said to consecrate the work. In its character of aesthetic material for another age, it appeals to our nationality; while, as the effort of a reflecting and Christian mind to call public attention to the needs of an unhappy race, we may ask for it the approbation of all who acknowledge the ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... black from which something might be made up by an imaginative artist. I have judges, majors, and attorneys, all properly labelled, in the other room, who would be much improved by a slight dash of the aesthetic element; however, I suppose it can't be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... duties of a lawyer, but yet he considered that his most important pursuit was not the law but these novels. He believed that he had a subtle, aesthetic temperament, and he always had leanings towards art. He neither sang nor played on any musical instrument, and was absolutely without an ear for music, but he attended all the symphony and philharmonic concerts, got up ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... them snugly put away in mines below ground. A sheet of snow, and bitter white rain driving still. A huge building looming black, its many eyes staring into the dark—lidless, bilious, vacant. This is a hospital. Or is it a factory, disguised with a veneer of the Puginesque? Or an aesthetic barrack? Or an artistic workhouse? Visible yet, under falling snow which has not had time to cover them, are flower-beds, shrub-plots, meandering walks. Too genteel and ambitious for the most aesthetic of workhouses or advanced of hospitals, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... Oeser as one of his masters. "Voltaire," he wrote to Oeser, "has been able to do no harm to Shakespeare; no lesser spirit will prevail over a greater one."[60] The German writers who now stood highest in his esteem were Lessing and Wieland. Lessing's aesthetic teaching he accepted with some reserves, but this did not abate the admiration which he retained for him at every period of his life. "Lessing! Lessing!" he wrote in the same letter to Oeser; "if he were not Lessing, I might say something. Write against him I ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... a fantastic crag, with pinnacles of rock. Again it will loom a ghostly white against a thunder-laden sky. Grand and pathetic at once, for it stands for something that we have parted with. What was the outward and stately form of a mighty idea, a rich system, is now little more than an aesthetic symbol. It has lost heart, somehow, and its significance only exists for ecclesiastically or artistically minded persons; it represents a force no longer in the ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... conviction that he set out on his quest. His interest in vice—in malice, cruelty, ignorance, brutishness, meanness, the irrational perversity of a corrupt disposition, and the subtleties of philosophic and aesthetic falsehood—was no morbid curiosity. Browning was no "painter of dirt"; no artist can portray filth for filth's sake, and remain an artist. He crowds his pages with criminals, because he sees deeper than their crimes. ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... hand, our good opinion of ourselves had grown prodigiously. The other's dislike appeared to each an insane delusion, and we seriously questioned whether it could be right to mate longer with a being so destitute of true aesthetic feeling. We confided these scruples to each other, with the result ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... be dragged into this circle of dissipation. It is possible to go to church with substantially the same object with which one goes to a place of amusement—in the hope of being excited, of having the feelings stirred and the aesthetic sense gratified or, at the least, consuming an hour which might otherwise lie heavy on the hands. With shame be it said, there are churches enough and preachers enough ready to meet this state of mind half-way. With the fireworks of rhetoric or the witchery ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... all other furnishings, from the aesthetic point of view colour is the first thing to be considered. As a rule it should follow that of the walls, a continuous effect of colour with variation of form and surface being a valuable and beautiful thing to secure. To give ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... been the moving spirit in the bringing about of her niece Stella's engagement to the Bishop's junior chaplain, a young gentleman of aesthetic aspirations and eight hundred ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... local characteristics, while the manners and customs are equally individualized. The French women of all classes put on their attire with a dainty grace that contrasts strongly with the careless, though cleanly costume of their sisters over the border. Aesthetic taste, indeed, would seem almost out of place displayed upon the square, solidly-built women of Flanders. Is it imagination, or can one really trace somewhat of the same idea in Flora's kingdom? The Dutch roses, tulips, and other flowers, ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... in fact, a sort of aesthetic drab, relieved with salmon, as Lemuel had time to notice before he was hustled into it with the ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... was not pleased. The prospect of the glaring lights and soiled linen of the dining-room jarred on his aesthetic sense. He wanted a setting for himself, for the girl. Environment was vital to him. But when, in the full light of the moon, he saw the purplish shadows under her eyes, he forgot his resentment. She had had ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... embroidery something must be said to bridge over the time when Needlecraft as an Art was dead. During the earlier part of the century taste was bad, during the middle it was beyond criticism, and from then to the time of the "greenery-yallery" aesthetic revival all and everything made by woman's fingers ought to be buried, burnt, or otherwise destroyed. Indeed, if that drastic process could be carried out from the time good Queen Adelaide reigned to the early "eighties" we might not, now and ever, have to bow ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... of a graceful neck, and white, dimpled shoulders, at the Athenaeum; so accomplished a connoisseur as he must not let them pass unappreciated. So he hastened to discharge his duty to aesthetic society by honoring them with his admiration and exalting patronage. On any transparent pretext,—the more transparent the better, he thought, for the proprietress of the white shoulders and the bewitching shape, who "no doubt understood,"—he dropped in often at the little bookstore, to begin with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... results may be got on smallest grounds and with the least outlay. Its private educative value, too, is probably largest thus, because thus we disseminate as a home delight a practical knowledge of aesthetic principles among those who may at any time find it expedient to become wage-earning gardeners on the home ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... handicraft: how much these men and their co-workers have modified the appearance of our streets and houses, our materials, textiles, utensils, and all other useful things in which it is possible to shock or to please the aesthetic taste, without otherwise affecting the value of these articles for ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... to the whole Italian Renaissance was the worship of beauty. It was the aesthetic against the ascetic. In this exclusive study, that is, in art, the Italians speedily attained the highest perfection that has been reached by man. And it was reached almost simultaneously in many parts of Italy, Rome, Florence, Milan, and Venice. First, it ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... author whose writings are intended to please must be ethical as well as aesthetic, if he respects himself and his readers. He wishes the pleasure he can give to do good, not harm. The good he feels capable of producing may be limited to the physical or may extend beyond to the moral; but it will be found in his work ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... window!" sighed the Reverend 'Putty' with an air of aesthetic languor which was in comical contrast with his coarse and commonplace appearance; "That is a sad, sad flaw! A ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... they print the daily smatterings of commonplace people, are especially a cunning means for robbing from the aesthetic public the time which should be devoted to the genuine productions of art ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... pretty things, engravings, statuettes, vases, flowers, books, a piano; even the paper on the walls and the hangings at the window were of most delicate and careful choice. No rich drawing-room could show more taste in its arrangements, or have a more soothing effect on a mind to which the sense of aesthetic fitness is ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... is far reaching. The mind that loves this art and understands its language will more and more insist on a certain order and decorum in visual life. It opens an avenue for the expression of aesthetic enjoyment somewhere between poetry and music and akin ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... shutters between you and it. Here the dead languages, which are sure to be beaten by science in the purely intellectual fight, have an irresistible claim. They supplement the work of science by exalting and refining the aesthetic faculty, and must on this account be cherished by all who desire to see human culture complete. There must be a reason for the fascination which these languages have so long exercised upon powerful and ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... this contemplation as aesthetic, and make worship a higher form of delight. This appears to me a quite typical non-religious interpretation of a religious experience. There are four words which need explaining when we talk of worship. They are: wonder, admiration, awe, reverence. Wonder springs from the recognition ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... "Cosmos" Club, of Chicago women, for the purpose of discussing "aesthetic" business, ancient poetry and pottery ware, calls to mind the attempt to organize such a club here in Milwaukee. Our people here are too utterly full of business and domestic affairs to take to the "aesthetic" very generally, and the lady from Boston who tried to get up a class in the new wrinkle ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... his animal part at the most superficial glance, but must take time and a little pains to discover the intellectual. Comparing him with an American, I really thought that our national paleness and lean habit of flesh gave us greatly the advantage in an aesthetic point of view. It seemed to me, moreover, that the English tailor had not done so much as he might and ought for these heavy figures, but had gone on wilfully exaggerating their uncouthness by the roominess of their garments: he had evidently no idea of accuracy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... natural, and simple outpourings of his heart, delightfully recalling to our minds all the sweetness and pathos, the spirit and grace, which have a thousand times enchanted us in the music of Mozart. The accounts of his visit to Paris may, indeed, lay claim to a certain aesthetic value, for they are written throughout with visible zest in his own descriptions, and also with wit, and charm, and characteristic energy. As these combined merits can only become apparent by an ungarbled series of the letters, I have resolved, ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... somewhat surprised one day by the visit of Adolphe de Rothschild, who came to give me an order for his bust. I commenced the work immediately. But I had not properly considered this admirable man—he had nothing of the aesthetic, but the contrary. I tried nevertheless, and I brought all my will to bear in order to succeed in this first order, of which I was so proud. Twice I dashed the bust which I had commenced on the ground, and after a third attempt I definitely ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... memorial to G.B. Armstrong (1822-1871), a citizen of Chicago, who founded the railway mail service of the United States. A city art commission approves all works of art before they become the property of the city, and at the request of the mayor acts in various ways for the city's aesthetic betterment. The Architectural Club labours for the same end. A Municipal Art League (organized in 1899) has done good work in arousing civic pride; it has undertaken, among other things, campaigns against bill-board advertisements,[11] and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... as 'what follows from a true premiss must be true'. Memories have a diminishing self-evidence as they become remoter and fainter; the truths of logic and mathematics have (broadly speaking) less self-evidence as they become more complicated. Judgements of intrinsic ethical or aesthetic value are apt to have some self-evidence, ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... consciousness was obliterated. It is common knowledge, and most people are now reasonable enough to admit, that the Turks have many excellent qualities, religious fervour and military ardour amongst others; it is also undeniable that from an aesthetic point of view too much cannot be said in praise of Mohammedan civilization. Who does not prefer the minarets of Stambul and Edirne[1] to the architecture of Budapest, notoriously the ideal of Christian south-eastern Europe? On the other hand, it cannot be contended that the ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... to come to tea with him, usually in a pleasant tea-room over a fruit-shop in Tottenham Court Road, and he would discuss his own point of view and hint at a thousand devotions were she but to command him. And he would express various artistic sensibilities and aesthetic appreciations in carefully punctuated sentences and a large, clear voice. At Christmas he gave her a set of a small edition of Meredith's novels, very prettily bound in flexible leather, being guided in the choice ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... in the aesthetic room hung with tapestry, whereon citron-trees loaded with golden fruit formed a fairy forest, Therese, her head on the pillow, and her handsome bare arms folded under her head, was thinking, seeing float confusedly before her the images of her new life: Vivian Bell and her bells, ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... buildings, by some application or other, so as to contrast less glaringly with the painted portions? The latter supposition receives some confirmation from Vitruvius, a Roman writer on architecture of the age of Augustus, and seems to some modern writers to be demanded by aesthetic considerations. On the other hand, the evidence of the Olympia buildings points the other way. Perhaps the actual practice varied. As for the coloring of Ionic architecture, we know that the capital of the column was painted, but otherwise ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... ambitions I succeeded. For one of my age I had more than an average love of business. Indeed, I deliberately set about learning to play the guitar well enough to become eligible for membership in the Banjo Club—and this for no more aesthetic purpose than to place myself in line for the position of manager, to which I was ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... Princess was reputed to be fond of music and literature, to be a patroness of actors and artists; and she really did take an interest in these "questions," even to an enthusiastic degree—and even to a pitch of rapture which was not altogether simulated. She indubitably did possess the aesthetic chord. Moreover, she was very accessible, amiable, devoid of pretensions, of affectation, and—a fact which many did not suspect—in reality extremely kind, tender-hearted and obliging.... Rare qualities, and therefore all ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... conclusions, through the use of problems. This ability is a valuable asset whatever his life work may be. Also, if it is the right kind of a course, and well taught, it will enrich the life of the boy or girl through the aesthetic appeal of plants and animals, and so make possible a sincere appreciation and enjoyment of nature. In addition, the study of biology should make clear to the pupil the important part that the intensive study of the various biological sciences has played in the whole ...
— Adequate Preparation for the Teacher of Biological Sciences in Secondary Schools • James Daley McDonald
... seems like its mighty master—not pensive but rural; it does not even breathe the spirit of quiet. Its rooms look active and power-compelling, and we could not but feel that they were not indebted to any of the aesthetic inventions and elegancies of furniture for their charm. Thus we have heard of one visitor pathetically exclaiming, 'Not one dado adorns the walls!' Hawarden is called a Castle, but it has not, either in its exterior or interior, the aspect of a Castle. It is a home; it has a noble appearance as ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... But it is not enough to play an aesthetic game with them. The energetic English genius wishes that they should regulate our life; that we should act in accordance with them, so that no tragic complication should form itself, which could only be solved by the ruin and death of the innocent ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... to the aesthetic, but to see faith and righteousness thus smothered and buried under a godless Epicurean life was an offence to his honest German conscience. It looked to him as if the popes had reversed the Saviour's choice, ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... escape his pursuit, but he hunts them all down, and takes what is needful to him, out of them, as his trophy. Schiller is his king of singers, although he does not much admire his "Philosophical Letters," or his "Aesthetic Letters." But his grandest modern man is the calm and plastic Goethe, and the homage he renders him is worthy of a better and a holier idol. Goethe's "Autobiography," in so far as it relates to his early days, is a bad book; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... that this lady should be so wanting in the aesthetic instinct, for her garden is full of possibilities. It lies due south, sheltered on the north, east, and west by farm buildings, and is rich in those old fruit-trees and well-seasoned gooseberry bushes that make such a good basis for the formation of that most delightful type of little ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... old little urban and local governing bodies, we find, have long since been superseded by great provincial municipalities for all the more serious administrative purposes, but they still survive to discharge a number of curious minor functions, and not the least among these is this sort of aesthetic ostracism. Every year every minor local governing body pulls down a building selected by local plebiscite, and the greater Government pays a slight compensation to the owner, and resumes possession of the land ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... aesthetic qualities of our people become more highly developed, the business of raising flowers must become of increasing importance, and will readily reward any one who goes into it conscientiously. Flower growing is peculiarly adapted to women, since the work is light There are few ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... music. It is the only Pegasus which now carries me far up into the blue. Thank God for this blessing of mine." I should be glad if I had room for her account of an evening under the weird spell of Ole Bull. Her moral sense was keener than her aesthetic, but her aesthetic sense was for keener than that of the average mortal. Sometimes she felt, as Paul would have said, "in a strait betwixt two"; in 1847 she writes Mr. Francis G. Shaw: "I am now wholly in the dispensation of art, and therefore theologians and reformers ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... Joyfully then we raised our mast and sail. The boys curled up to sleep, except Beaulieu. He had his fiddle and now he proceeded to favour us with 'A Life on the Ocean Wave,' 'The Campbells are Coming,' etc., in a manner worthy of his social position and of his fiddle. When not in use this aesthetic instrument (in its box) knocks about on deck or underfoot, among pots and pans, exposed in all weather; no one seems to ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... songs of Uhland as they weave their graceful harmonies of line and color over the panels; and the sculptors who carve antique heads over the doorways of palace cars make the place merry with studio jokes from the Berlin Academy. It is evident that a community of artists like this, furnishing the aesthetic department to an immense manufactory, will also elevate the tone of the industrial society outside, if they can but be kept free from vice and supplied with means of culture; more of which anon. Meantime, as a kind of standard of what the manufacturers themselves arrive at in prosecuting ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various |
