"Aesthetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... they may have little of that wealthiness about them which gives power and position to many; but they are a class of earnest, useful, humble souls, drawing to them from the lowly walks of life men and women who would be repelled by the processes of a more aesthetic and learned creed. We have a considerable regard for Primitive Methodism; in some respects we admire its operations; and for the good it does we are quite willing to tolerate all the erratic earnestness, musical effervescence, and prayerful boisterousness it ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... an after-dinner discussion at the American Art Association of Paris over the expression "the rules of composition." A number of artists joined in the debate, all giving their opinion without premeditation. Some maintained that the principles of composition were nothing more than aesthetic taste and judgment, applied ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... rings the electric bell outside, then enters through the swing doors R.C. BETTY enters R. and moves up at back of settee R. to DEVENISH by the swing doors. He is carrying a large bunch of violets and adopts a very aesthetic attitude. ...
— Belinda • A. A. Milne
... the drowsy courtroom beginning to wake up. Even to the oldest hand on the bench there must have been a certain aesthetic relish in picturing the feelings of a woman on receiving such a message at night-fall from a man living twenty miles away, to whom she had no means ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... was not large, it was what might now be described as a "bijou residence," but though out of repair, it had been decorated with the utmost magnificence by Beaujon, and Balzac's discriminating eye quickly discerned its aesthetic possibilities. ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... Ruggedness is a form of beauty, but it is a beauty that is quite different from the commonly accepted grounds. A mountain is rugged and it is beautiful, a woman is beautiful; but the two features of the aesthetic are quite different. It is the same with poetry. There is (and Browning proved it) a 'beautifulness' in the rugged; it is a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... of this fact, Paolo 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 ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... the Asphalt A Circus in the Suburbs A She Hamlet The Midnight Platoon The Beach at Rockaway Sawdust in the Arena At a Dime Museum American Literature in Exile The Horse Show The Problem of the Summer Aesthetic New York Fifty-odd Years Ago From New York into New England The Art of the Adsmith The Psychology of Plagiarism Puritanism in American Fiction The What and How in Art Politics in American Authors Storage "Floating down ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of this make-believe consciousness is that it is considered by many to be an essential ingredient of AEsthetic feeling. A work of art is said to have its effect through its tendency to arouse in us a make-believe acceptance of the scene or motive presented, while it nevertheless remains contrasted with the realities of our lives. If this be true, the interesting question arises how ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... names, and discussed with parade of learning as revivals of Hellenic ideals. The young men in Strathcona's set referred to each other as their "lovers"; and if one showed any perplexity over this, he was regarded, not with contempt—for it was not aesthetic to feel contempt—but with a slight lifting of the ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... as they were the imaginative application of this great influx of new ideas, so they fitted in with the moods which those ideas had called up. 'My function,' she said (iii. 330), 'is that of the aesthetic, not the doctrinal teacher—the rousing of the nobler emotions which make mankind desire the social right, not the prescribing of special measures, concerning which the artistic mind, however strongly moved by social sympathy, is often not the best judge.' Her influence ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... various forms of composition, that is, their selection with a view to general fitness for the composer's object, is, primarily, simply a question of length. The higher aesthetic law of adjusting the design to the contents, of which we spoke in the preceding chapter, comes into action after the main choice has ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... sometimes wondered that some aesthetic philosopher has not analyzed the vital relation of the arts to each other and given a popular exposition of their mutual dependence. Drawing from the antique has long been an acknowledged initiation for the limner, and Campbell, in his terse description of the histrionic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... obviously have been possible.[1] Shakespeare, as the experience of three centuries has shown, did right in judging that the audience was already sufficiently intent on the coming ordeal, and would welcome an interlude of aesthetic theory. ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... interesting aesthetic study of a single Shakespearean character ever produced is Maurice Morgann's Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff, which was written in 1774, and first published in 1777. This excellent piece of criticism deserves a much wider cognizance than it has ever attained; only three ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... not a very aesthetic piece of art or ornamentation, being only composed of coloured flowers carefully cut out of a piece of chintz, before being gummed upon the inside of the glass tube. This was then filled up with salt, and ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... and for many weeks it meant simply that he pleased his aesthetic sense, as well as convinced himself that he was doing a good and righteous deed in making life brighter for an East End toiler. He had given her the premium, and Nelly, without any actual lie, had convinced her mother that the West End milliner was willing to take her for only two months of time ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... critic against the materialism and literalism of sacred verities. Nevertheless, such criticism does not go deep enough to affect the real truths of religion and the convictions of the human soul, any more than an aesthetic criticism on the shape of the Roman letters and Arabic figures can affect the truth of an algebraical formula. Rationalistic criticism may stir people from literalism and dogmatic crystallization, in fact it has done much in this way, but it does ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... interesting fact, though apart from my present consideration, that this philosophical fusion was paralleled in the same places and at the same time, by an aesthetic fusion that brought into existence the first great and consistent art of Christianity. This question is admirably dealt with in Lisle March Phillipps' "Form ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... work of these old peoples, whether in sculpture, painting or poetry, surpassed, if it did not eclipse, corresponding periods of modern times. In some of the practical arts the old races were proficient. In architecture, which combines the aesthetic and practical elements, the man of antiquity was at least the equal of the man of the present. In one particular art—a sort of humanitarian profession based on natural science and directed to the preservation of life—the ancients had ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... from seeking to despise. Indeed, 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 exact in laying down rules of verbal criticism and interpretation, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... The cry came from Millicent savagely. "I won't leave you, not until my will has subjected yours! Before I leave your camp you will have been my lover—mystic, aesthetic, ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... distasteful; Lois could have gone into that work again with all her heart, and thought it no hardship; it was the mental level at which the people lived; the social level, in houses, tables, dress, and amusements, and manner; the aesthetic level of beauty, and grace, and fitness, or at least the perception of them. Lois pondered and revolved this all till she began to grow rather dreary. Think of the Esterbrooke school, and of being alone there! Rough, rude, coarse boys and ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... done not for themselves alone but for all races in all times; and Greek 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 ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... beauties of the simpler forms of the floral and vegetable world; he delighted especially in displaying the acanthus in varied conventional forms. Every rug he designed bears witness to his enthusiasm for harmony. Too aesthetic, some critics declare him to have been; but no one can deny the importance of his creations, for England needed to be awakened to a knowledge of her own inability to appreciate artistic decoration of the home, especially by means of the productions of the loom. ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... holy men—what will she not do to please you, to take you, to intoxicate and enchant you? She will juggle for your soul equally well whether you are a country clown in a feeing-market or a fine lady of aesthetic tastes and religious sensibilities in the capital and the court. But I shall let Father Faber speak, who can speak on this subject both with authority and with attraction. "She can open churches, and light candles on the altar, and intone ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... of the precious metals, to satisfy certain wants of luxury in the most aesthetic and the most substantial manner, continues still; but with the advance of civilization, the employment of gold and silver for this purpose has fallen farther and farther behind the more recent employment of these metals as the best material ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... come and go at pleasure. He enjoyed keenly the privilege of daily association with high-minded and refined women; their eager activity of intellect stimulated him, their exquisite ethereal grace and their delicately chiseled beauty satisfied his aesthetic cravings, and the responsive vivacity of their nature prepared him ever new surprises. He felt a strange fascination in the presence of these women, and the conviction grew upon him that their type of womanhood ...
— A Good-For-Nothing - 1876 • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... of nothing higher than the word of God, and he whose fine feelings are shocked by Bible language, would find heaven not sufficiently aesthetic. May not such be said to count the blood of the covenant an unholy thing? When the destroyer is abroad, we shall be safe who hide behind the blood. We rejoice in the blood of sprinkling, when we ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... international hearts bound together! Two great nations have wrangled for a century; but they have a common property in Shakspeare and Tupper,—and—most precious of all joint-possessions—in the hand-books of Murray. We feel with one throb upon all aesthetic subjects. We admire the same great works of art. We drop a tear upon exactly the same spots, hallowed in ancient or modern history. The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... anywhere visible. Millions of francs must have been consumed in these creations, which have the rudeness of mediaevalism without its emotional sincerity, and which—amid the loveliness of tropic nature, the grace of palms, the many-colored fire of liana blossoms—jar on the aesthetic sense with an almost brutal violence. Yet there is a veiled poetry in these silent populations of plaster and wood and stone. They represent something older than the Middle Ages, older than Christianity,— something strangely distorted ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... exclusive property of the first chance lover. People flock to view nature as we do to see a play, and privacy is as impossible as it is unsought. Indeed, the aversion to publicity is simply a result of the sense of self, and therefore necessarily not a feature of so impersonal a civilization. Aesthetic guidebooks are written for the nature-enamoured, descriptive of these views which the Japanese translator quaintly calls "Sceneries," and which visitors come not only from near but from far to gaze upon. In front of the tea-house proper are rows of summer pavilions, ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... the very highest degree of aesthetic merit: every lover of the beautiful must wish it to be true. It gives a vast unified survey of the operations of nature, with a technical simplicity in the critical assumptions which makes the wealth of deductions astonishing. It is a case of an advance arrived at by pure ...
— The Einstein Theory of Relativity • H.A. Lorentz
... alarming to see the quantity that some of the Bretons managed to appropriate in an incredibly short space of time at the table d'hote. H.C., who was accustomed to the aesthetic table of his aunt, Lady Maria, more than once had to retire to his room, and recover his composure, and wonder whether his own appetite would ever return to him. And once or twice when I unfeelingly drew attention to an opposite neighbour and wondered ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... year's residence in Concord I had driven up with some friends to an aesthetic tea at Mr. Emerson's. It was in the winter, and a great wood-fire blazed upon the hospitable hearth. There were various men and women of note assembled, and I, who listened attentively to all the fine things that were said, was for some time scarcely ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... aesthetic, which is closely akin to religious feeling, the American Indian stands alone. In accord with his nature and beliefs, he does not pretend to imitate the inimitable, or to reproduce exactly the work of the Great Artist. That which is beautiful must not be ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... was, in fact, a sort of aesthetic drab, relieved with salmon, as Lemuel had time to notice before he was hustled into it with the other prisoners, and ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... 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. Kipling is preeminently the master here. It is a dangerous tool in lesser hands. Yet I have dared ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... spoke she took off her velvet cloak, put it carefully aside on a sofa, and sat down again, still in her bonnet, at the tea-table. Her dress was very different from Marcella's, which, when they were not in mourning, was in general of the ample "aesthetic" type, and gave her a good deal of trouble out of doors. Marcella wore "art serges" and velveteens; Mrs. Boyce attired herself in soft and costly silks, generally black, closely and fashionably made, and completed by various ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to the gallery of the theatre, and at Paragot's invitation sat one on each side of Blanquette, who, what with the unaccustomed bloodshed of the spectacle and the gallantry of her neighbours, passed an evening of delirious happiness. In those days I had an aesthetic soul above the 'Eventreurs de Paris,' and I made fun of it to Paragot, whose thoughts were far away. When I perceived this, I kept my withering sarcasm to myself, and realised that a flattened man cannot be blown like a bladder into permanent rotundity even by the ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... music; for it tended to "help the emotions of man across the immensity of the known into the boundaries of the Unknown." He would have composers to be ministers of religion. He could not understand the indifference of some leaders of orchestras, who could be satisfied with appealing to the aesthetic emotions of an audience, while they might "set the hearts of fifteen hundred people afire." The final meaning of music to him was that it created within man "a great, ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... outgrown the primitive terrorism of fetishistic belief. Save in cases of public distress, as in the mutilation of the Hermai, or in the refusal of Nikias to retreat from Syracuse because of an eclipse of the moon, they were no longer, like savages, afraid of the dark. Their keen aesthetic sense had prevailed to turn the horrors of a primeval nature-worship into beauties. Their springs and groves were peopled by their fancy with naiads and dryads, not with trolls and grotesque goblins. Their feelings toward the unseen powers at work about them were in the main ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... opinion, upon the strength of a colossal statue of which fragments have been found that might well have fitted the King of the Gods. Others think it the temple of Venus, the Venus Physica (the beautiful in nature, say aesthetic philosophers) being the patroness of Pompeii. We shall frequently, hereafter, meet with the name of this goddess. Several detached limbs in stone and in bronze, which are not broken at the extremity as though they belonged to a statue, but are polished on all sides and cut in such ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... value from this study, classes should be required to keep a notebook which should follow some uniform plan. I suggest the following as such outline: (1) historical and geographical; (2) home life; (3) physical, religious, and aesthetic education; (4) elementary and higher education; (5) summary of lessons taught; (6) educators: (a) life, (b) writings, (c) pedagogical teachings. Of course each teacher will modify this outline ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... conception of his duty. He seems to me not infrequently to place himself on the judgment-seat with a touch of his old confidence, and to sentence poor authors with sufficient airs of infallibility. Sometimes, indeed, the reflection that he is representing not an invariable tradition but the last new aesthetic doctrine, seems even to give additional keenness to his opinions and to suggest no doubts of his infallibility. And yet there is a change in his position. He admits, or at any rate is logically bound to admit, the code which he administers requires modification in different times and ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... the soul that desires to see beauty must begin by believing it to be there, must expect to see it, must watch for it, must not be discouraged by those who do not see it, and least of all give heed to those who would forbid one to discern it except in definite and approved forms. The worst of aesthetic prophets is that, like the Scribes, they make a fence about the law, and try to convert the search for principle into the accumulation ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of beauty, like all of our emotions, is certainly the inherited product of unimaginably countless experiences in an immeasurable past. In every aesthetic sensation is the stirring of trillions of trillions of ghostly memories buried in the magical soil of the brain. And each man carries within him an ideal of beauty which is but an infinite composite of dead perceptions of form, color, grace, once dear to look upon. It is dormant, this ideal,—potential ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... is an aesthetic work, pure and simple. What it may have demolished or built up is a matter of absolute indifference to me. It came into being as the result of something which I had not observed, but experienced; it was a necessity for me to free myself from ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... reached Venice (they had stopped at half a dozen little old romantic cities in the most frolicsome aesthetic way) she liked their companion better than she had ever liked him before. She did him the justice to recognise that if he was not quite honest with himself he was at least wholly honest with HER. She reckoned up everything ...
— The Chaperon • Henry James
... both instances. In the course of time this symbolism becomes conventionalized, and eventually it finds its way into primitive art. It then becomes the leading motive in primitive art and finally the religious motive is forgotten and the aesthetic motive alone remains. Were further proof necessary, these analogies alone would be sufficient to enable us to understand the meaning of ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... year 1862. Every distinguished visitor who came to Minnesota in the early days was entertained by Mr. Sibley in this hospitable old mansion, and, together with its genial, generous and refined proprietor, it contributed much towards planting the seeds of those aesthetic amenities of social life that have so generally flourished in the later days of Minnesota's history and given it its deserved prominence among the states of the West. The house still stands, and has been occupied at different times since its founder abandoned it as a Catholic ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... The aesthetic arts of the American aborigines cannot be studied apart from their languages, industries, social organizations, lore and worships. Art was limited most of all by poverty in technical appliances. There were just as good materials ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... braveries, of a really heroic effort of mind at a disadvantage. That rococo seventeenth-century French imitation of the true Renaissance, called out in Carl a boundless enthusiasm, as the Italian original had done two centuries before. He put into his reception of the aesthetic achievements of Lewis the Fourteenth what young France had felt when Francis the First brought home the great Da Vinci and his works. It was but himself truly, after all, that he had found, so fresh and real, among ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... Picture and Binding art; as seen in the bold clear type of its text, its striking and beautiful illustrations, its illuminating title heads of division and chapter; indicating at a glance the information to follow; the whole appealing to the aesthetic; the sticklers for the rare and beautiful; not overlooking its superb binding, it is most pleasing to the sight, and worthy ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... the familiar stories of Field's rollicking life in Denver was at the expense of Oscar Wilde, then on his widely advertised visit to America. As the reader may remember, this was when the aesthetic craze and the burlesques inseparable from it were at their height. Anticipating Wilde's appearance in Denver by one day, and making shrewdly worded announcements through the Tribune in keeping with his project, Field secured the finest landau ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... and applauds all originality; but it helps no one, troubles itself for no one, bears no one's burden; in a word, it lacks charity, the great Christian virtue. To his mind perfection lies in personal nobility, and not in love. His keynote is aesthetic and not moral. He ignores sanctity, and has never so much as reflected on the terrible problem of evil. He believes in the opportunity of the individual, but neither in liberty nor in responsibility. He is a stranger to the social and political aspirations of the multitude; ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... the foundations, and such the elements which shaped the growth, of Roman comedy. Originality was in its case excluded not merely by want of aesthetic freedom, but in the first instance, probably, by its subjection to police control. Among the considerable number of Latin comedies of this sort which are known to us, there is not one that did not announce itself as an imitation of a definite Greek ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... conceived, or born of admiration for Mr. Long's book as it was of despair wrought by the failure of another play written by Mr. Belasco. This play was a farce entitled "Naughty Anthony," created by Mr. Belasco in a moment of aesthetic aberration for production at the Herald Square Theatre, in New York, in the spring of 1900. Mr. Belasco doesn't think so now, but at the time he had a notion that the public would find something humorous and attractive in the spectacle of a popular actress's leg swathed in several layers ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... almost gone out of use during the first third of the century, were now getting to be somewhat in fashion again. Many people now appreciated the pleasure which these animals had given to the world since the beginning of history, and whose place, in an aesthetic sense, no inanimate machine could supply. As Roland Clewe swung himself from the saddle at the foot of a broad flight of steps, the house door was opened and ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... under an apple-tree, which had only just shed its blossoms on the turf below. She had hardly done so when one of the distant doors opening on the gravel path flew open, and another maiden, a slim creature garbed in aesthetic blue, a mass of reddish brown hair flying back from her face, also ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that rises in the east, throned like a queen above the silver Charles, many-towered and pinnacled, with clustering roof and taper spire? How proud she looks, yet modest, as one too sure of her innate nobility to need adventitious aid to impress others. Look at the aesthetic simplicity of her pose on the single hill, which is all the mistaken kindness of her children has left of the three mountains which were her birthright. Behold the stately avenues that stretch by bridge and road, radiating her lavish favors in every direction; look at the spreading ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... escaping from a little mediaeval birretta. In a tone of the most insinuating deference he asked me for my "impressions." He seemed picturesque, fantastic, slightly unreal. Hovering there in this consecrated neighbourhood, he might have passed for the genius of aesthetic hospitality—if the genius of aesthetic hospitality were not commonly some shabby little custode, flourishing a calico pocket-handkerchief and openly resentful of the divided franc. This analogy was made none the less complete by the brilliant tirade with which he ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... with these hidden faculties or susceptibilities of which I have been speaking. In the notes of witching music, in the numbers of poesy, in the sight of beauty, either of nature or of art, either aesthetic or moral, these silent powers recognize a faint approximation to that beauty with which they will have to do in that world where they shall be called into action: they too recognize the kindred spirit, and, springing ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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 ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... Molucca Islands. These pretty and interesting creatures are in point of fact parrots which have practically made themselves into humming-birds by long continuance in the poetical habit of visiting flowers for food. Like Mr. Oscar Wilde in his aesthetic days, they breakfast off a lily. Flitting about from tree to tree with great rapidity, they thrust their long extensible tongues, pencilled with honey-gathering hairs, into the tubes of many big tropical blossoms. The lories, indeed, live entirely on nectar, and they are so common in the ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... that merged into the mists on the horizon. It was a beautiful view, and on this hazy September afternoon, with the hidden sun sending long shafts of light from behind radiant masses of cloud, it formed a prospect that should have afforded keen aesthetic satisfaction to anybody who cared to look at it. Usually the girls appreciated its changeful glories, but to-day—this first day of a new term—they were too much taken up with their own grievances to think about scenery. In fact, they sat huddled ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... and what stood in those days for national 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 Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... two classes of phenomena of importance in the study of the evolution of aesthetic culture. These relate, first, to ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes
... as "dead game" and hung in oval medallions form suitable ornaments for the billiard-room or hall if treated in an aesthetic manner. Not, however, in the manner I lately saw perpetrated by a leading London taxidermist—a game bird hanging in a prominent position, as if dead, from a nail, enclosed in an elaborate mount, the bird so ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... must claim. If the poet will but take observations from real persons, however widely scattered, discretion may be exercised in the conjunction of those persons, and in the sequence of incidents by which they are affected. An aesthetic invention may be as natural as a mechanical one, although the materials for each are collected from a wide surface, and placed in new relations. Thus much we say as expressing dissent from objections which have been ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... find expression in the orderliness of his place. If he is intelligent and inventive it will show in the appointments and adaptations everywhere apparent, inside and outside the buildings. If the man and his family have a fine sense of beauty and propriety, an artistic or aesthetic sense, there will be evidences of cleanliness and simple beauty everywhere—in the architecture, in the painting, in the pictures, and the carpets, in the kinds and positions of the trees and shrubbery, and in the general neatness and cleanliness of the premises. ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... or else 'The Buried God,' and she thinks me an idealizing ignoramus upon whom she can impose. Her sepulchral name is at least not Italian; probably she is a sharp countrywoman of mine, turning, by means of the present aesthetic craze, an honest ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... the pattern of the late lamented master Charles Peace), crowbar, and wire coils, found himself welcomed with effusion and some curiosity by half-a-dozen other brethren of the brush. It rendered the disguise he had chosen unexpectedly plausible, but it inflicted upon him a considerable amount of aesthetic conversation for which he was ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... 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
... "New Saresbyri" as seen by the tourist, with a mind full of history, archaeology, and the aesthetic delight in cathedrals, that I desire to write, but of Salisbury as it appears to the dweller on the Plain. For Salisbury is the capital of the Plain, the head and heart of all those villages, too many to count, scattered far and wide over the surrounding country. It is the villager's ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... over the sun in a splendid effort painted such sublime sunsets above Mount Elgon as I had never dreamed of. And the music of hundreds of African birds along the river's edge greeted us with the cool, delightful dawn. Purely from an aesthetic standpoint, our days on the Nzoia were ones never to be forgotten, while from the standpoint of the man who loves to see wild game and doesn't care much about killing it, the bright, clear days on the Nzoia were memorable ones. The Roosevelt party went ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... disused withers in power. The fishes of the Mammoth Cave, having no use for their eyes, lose them. Mr. Darwin in an impressive passage of his biography testifies that he began life with a taste for poetry and music, but that by disuse this aesthetic taste grew atrophied so that at last he did not care to read a poem or to hear a musical note. So it is, says Jesus, with spiritual insight and power. Sometimes we see a man of intellectual {137} gifts lose his grasp on spiritual realities, and we ask: "How is it that so learned a man can find ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... certain Parisian levity by her neighbours,—to her just a little "precious" enunciation. In France, in the seventeenth century, she would almost certainly have been a visitor at the Hotel Rambouillet, and to-day she was mysteriously and disapprovingly spoken of as "aesthetic." She had a look as if she had tripped out of a Japanese fan, and slept at night in a pot-pourri jar. And she ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... eating; therefore, in all logic, one should eat if one feels like it at ten o'clock in the morning, or at three o'clock in the afternoon, a jar of Guava jelly, a pound of chocolates, a paper of ginger cookies, or whatever may appeal to one's aesthetic taste. This method of procedure, naturally, might necessitate recourse to the brown-wood family medicine closet. Certain discomfort might ensue. But was not the pleasure worth it? Again my mother arbitrarily took the matter into her own hands, disagreeing with me on fundamentals. She maintained ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston
... 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 fear it ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... relight his pipe. "There's one thing, Petrie, often proposed before, which now we must do without delay. The ivy must be stripped from the walls at the back. It's a pity, but we can not afford to sacrifice our lives to our sense of the aesthetic. What do you make of the sound like the cracking of ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... painting, and architecture, which one would have expected to find in so deep a religious nature, was wanting, warped, no doubt, by her early Quaker training. That her travels gave her more pain than pleasure was, perhaps, not so much that she had no appreciation of aesthetic beauty, but that she quickly grasped the infinitude of human misery; not because her soul did not feel the heights to which art had risen, but that it vibrated in every fiber to the depths to which mankind had fallen. ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... not so charming as I should get from Mrs. Paget Toynbee's many-volumed and grandiose edition, even aside from Mrs. Toynbee's erudite notes and the extra letters which she has been able to print. The same letter in Mrs. Toynbee's edition would have a higher aesthetic and moral value for me than in the "editionlet" of Messrs. Newnes. The one cheap series which satisfies my desire for size is Macmillan's "Library of English Classics," in which I have the "Travels" of that mythical personage, Sir John Mandeville. But ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... that tears were a mere aesthetic refreshment with Miss Caroline. I had never known her weaken to them when there seemed to be far better reasons for it ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... works of genius is their indifference to all man-made moral standards. They are beyond all that goes by the name of good and evil, in that the two are used indifferently for the furtherance of a purely aesthetic end. The Beyond-man discovers beauty in the abyss, and ugliness in mere worldly rectitude. Leonardo painted the Medusa head, with its charnel pallor and its crown of writhing snakes, no less lovingly than the sweet-tender face of the Christ of the Cenacolo, ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... 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 physical needs ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... such questions in books other than novels, but she had no idea how to search them out. The woman's club to which she belonged was occupied with the art of Masaccio, who was, so a visitor from Chicago's aesthetic circles informed them, the "latest thing" ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... 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 ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... ancient civilization. Taste has been slowly developed, artistic culture is of no mushroom growth. Alsace formed the highroad between Italy and Flanders. In M. Hallays' words, already during the Renaissance, aesthetic Alsace blended the lessons of north and south, her genius was a product of good sense, experience and a feeling of proportion. And he points out how in the eighteenth century French taste influenced Alsatian faence, woven stuffs, ironwork, sculpture, wood-carving and furniture, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... hardly earned for you! And we shall get on now without having to take everything." In the kindness of her heart she wanted him to be able to read his books, since he had a weakness for them. Her intention was good, but Pelle had no thought of becoming an aesthetic idler, who let his wife keep him while he posed as a learned man. There were enough of them in the neighborhood, and the inhabitants looked up to them; but they were not interesting. They were more or less another ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... by forbidding and preventing the growth of personal affection other than that of a spiritual character. And this, in fact, is not personal in the sense of individual, but ever a manifestation of universal affection. Spite of the speculations of hopeful bachelors and aesthetic spinsters, there is somewhat in the marriage bond which is found to counteract the universal nature of the affections to a degree tending at least to make considerable pause, before they can ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... States. She may have been successful in some little, out-of-the-way academy in a jerkwater town, but she's sadly out of place here. She has about as much tact as a rhinoceros, and possesses the aesthetic perceptions of a coal shoveler. I'm just waiting for these simple truths to dawn upon the intellects of our august Board. I understand that cadaverous-looking man with the wall eyes and the spade-shaped, ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... erect a grist mill; but the stream that ran through the clayey channel of the Seine petite was too feeble to turn the ponderous wheels. So he was obliged to move twelve miles to the east, where flowed another small stream bearing the aesthetic name "Grease River." This was not large enough either for his purposes, so with stupendous enterprise he cut a canal nine miles long, and through it decoyed the waters of the little Seine into the arms of the "Greasy" paramour. ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... of shopkeepers, as Napoleon styled the English, were outdone in the worship of Mammon by them; that we have rejected too much the higher branches of art and science, and the cultivation of the aesthetic faculty—what an abominable word aesthetic is! it always puts me in mind of asthmatic, for ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... is a preeminently common-sense woman, believing that sound theories can be put into practice. Although her tastes are decidedly literary and aesthetic, she is a radical reformer. Hence her services in the literary club and suffrage society are alike invaluable. And as chairman of the executive committee of the National Association, she is without her peer in planning and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... Mainly because collecting and collectors appeal to his sporting instinct. His knowledge about his collection will be precise and definite, whether it be postage stamps or pictures. He will know all about it, except its aesthetic value. That he cannot know, for he cannot see it. He has the flair of the dealer, not the perception of the amateur. And he does not know or believe that there ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... sunset is a grim, unsightly skeleton at breakfast-time. A couple of joiners' horses, a matrix or two, a pile of shavings and some sawed-off blocks scattered over the floor produce a matutinal conception of chaos that hangs over one like a pall until his aesthetic sense is beaten into subjection by the hammers of a million demons in the guise of carpenters. Morning in the midst of repairs is an awful thing! I looked, despaired and then dictated a letter to the Hazzards, urging them to come at once with ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... from gratifying their taste at the cost of the destruction of so loved a bird, that they should be made to content themselves with woodcock, and snipe on toast, and golden plover, and grouse and blackcock, and any other bird of delicate flavor which does not, living, appeal so strongly to the aesthetic feelings in us and is not ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... pass through, and then closed behind it with no laugh or ripple of water to speed it onward, breathlessly still nights of fathomless darkness. The ship's master, burdened with visions of coral reefs on a chartless coast, failed to appreciate the aesthetic beauty of sailing unknown seas in limitless darkness, and either anchored on such nights, or paced back and forth upon his bridge, longing for electric lighted heavens that would not play ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... an aesthetic nature beyond most of our modern raptures; but none the less, and at the very same time, Rome was for Milton the 'grim wolf' who, 'with privy paw, daily devours apace.' It is with a sigh of sad sincerity that Dr. Newman admits that Milton breathes through ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... subjects, I have found it most convenient to separate the historical and aesthetic questions from the technical rules, and the instruction which naturally belongs to a handbook, of which the purpose should be to teach the easiest and most orthodox manner of executing the simplest, and elaborating the finest ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... Saratoga and Charles Streets, which are always open for the use of its members, and there will be regular meetings every Thursday evening during the winter and spring. At these meetings various subjects of interest will occupy the attention of the members, both of a practical and aesthetic character. ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 1, No. 10, October 1895. - French Farmhouses. • Various
... of the thrust was unexpected. Kenny changed color and resented the hyper-critical word. To his mind it was neither filial nor aesthetic. ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... the days of the Christian Fathers. From Plato, to be sure, he got what all of us must get, but his real forefather was Heraclitus. It is in Heraclitus that one finds the germ of his primary view of the universe—a view, to wit, that sees it, not as moral phenomenon, but as mere aesthetic representation. The God that Nietzsche imagined, in the end, was not far from the God that such an artist as Joseph Conrad imagines—a supreme craftsman, ever experimenting, ever coming closer to an ideal balancing of lines and forces, and yet always failing ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... to his aesthetic faculties, for he was a keen admirer of the beautiful in every form. Poetry, music, the drama, all delighted him, but pictures more than all put together. I remember his once showing me "The Lady with the Lilacs," which Arthur Hughes had painted for him, and how ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... fact. But the king would not think of allowing any fact of this kind to interfere with the workings of the tribunal, in which he took such great delight and satisfaction. No matter how the affair turned out, the youth would be disposed of, and the king would take an aesthetic pleasure in watching the course of events which would determine whether or not the young man had done wrong in allowing himself ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... for the wider scope and almost unlimited resources of modern printing. The best use of those resources will be made by artists who have been trained under simpler conditions, and have found their way gradually to an understanding of the secrets of aesthetic economy in printing. One of the many paths to that experience is by way of the craft of the ...
— Wood-Block Printing - A Description of the Craft of Woodcutting and Colour Printing Based on the Japanese Practice • F. Morley Fletcher
... with verse that had exquisite melody and but little meaning. The "Airy, fairy Lilian" and "Sweet, pale Margaret" type of verse had charmed him overmuch. The volumes of 1830 and 1832 were severely criticized. Blackwood's Magazine called same of the lyrics "drivel," and Carlyle characterized the aesthetic verse as "lollipops." This adverse criticism and the shock from Hallam's death caused him to remain silent for nearly ten years. His son and biographer says that his father during this period "profited by friendly and unfriendly criticism, and in silence, obscurity, and solitude, ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... Newman, its one great literary man. But the movement as a whole had been of great significance in the very genesis and make up of the society: yet that significance is not quite easy immediately to define. It was certainly not aesthetic ritualism; scarcely one of the Oxford High Churchmen was what we should call a Ritualist. It was certainly not a conscious reaching out towards Rome: except on a Roman Catholic theory which might explain all our unrests ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... were all that Consul Hahn could collect for his monumental work,[78] though his researches, which lasted for years, took him all over the country. One of these love-songs, a piece of six lines, will give some idea of their aesthetic value; a lover, standing outside the house of his lady, invites her to come out to him immediately; he threatens that if she disobeys him he will have his hair cut in the Western style, nay more, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... actually pernicious when separated from the homely and useful things of daily life, and made so to overshadow these as to warp them into comparative insignificance. Here lay the evil. It was this elevation of her ideas above the region of use and duty into the mere aesthetic and reformatory that was hurtful to one like Irene—that is, in fact, hurtful to any woman, for it is always hurtful to take away from the mind its interest in common life—the life, we mean, of daily ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... was born. Our sympathetic critics, even when, like Dr. Furnivall, they know absolutely all the archaeological facts as to theatrical life in Shakspere's time, do not seem to bring those facts into vital touch with their aesthetic estimate of his product; they remain under the spell of Coleridge and Gervinus.[141] Emerson, it is true, protested at the close of his essay that he "could not marry this fact," of Shakspere's being a jovial actor and manager, ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... 'Art' in its German sense; with 'High Art,' 'Symbolic Art,' 'Ecclesiastical Art,' 'Dramatic Art,' 'Tragic Art,' and so forth; and every well-educated person is expected, nowadays, to know something about Art. Yet in spite of all translations of German 'AEsthetic' treatises, and 'Kunstnovellen,' the mass of the British people cares very little about the matter, and sits contented under the imputation of 'bad taste.' Our stage, long since dead, does not revive; our poetry is dying; our music, like our architecture, only ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley |
