"Aesthetics" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... drive home, and she traversed the distance with a preoccupied mind. The idea of so modern a man in science and aesthetics as the young surgeon springing out of relics so ancient was a kind of novelty she had never before experienced. The combination lent him a social and intellectual interest which she dreaded, so much ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... Alumni Oxonienses, Oscar Wilde described himself on leaving Oxford as a "Professor of AEsthetics, and a Critic of Art"—an announcement to me at once infinitely ludicrous and pathetic. "Ludicrous" because it betrays such complete ignorance of life all given over to men industrious with muck-rakes: "Gadarene ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... H. Doyle thus continues his reference to Dr. Lorinser. "Even learned critics", he says, "highly cultivated in all the niceties of aesthetics, are deficient in the knowledge of Catholic faith and Catholic theology properly to understand Calderon" (Lectures, p. 110, taken from the Introduction to my volume, p. 3). "Old traditions", continues Dr. Lorinzer, "which twine round the dogma like a beautiful garland of legends, ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... people, thus Tolstoy is and remains the glorified Russian peasant uttering his heart to the world. The voice of this man alone is sufficient to tell the outside world that the Russian democracy is a creation not of form and economics but of spirit and aesthetics. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... of the physical sciences, with their infinite multiplicity and complexity, required more centuries of observation, collection and collation of facts, deductions from known phenomena, than the ancients had had to work with; while the more ethereal realms of philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, and religion, though needing keen study of Nature and of man, depended more upon inner spiritual forces, and less upon accumulated detail of external knowledge. Yet as there were some subjects which the Greeks and Romans seemed to exhaust, some fields ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... tasks heroically, but are not trained to teach the simple truths about dental hygiene. The far-reaching results of neglect of teeth will not be understood until greater emphasis is placed on the bacteriology, the economics, the sociology, and the aesthetics of clean, sound teeth. Whether or not there is at present a tendency to exaggerate the importance of sound teeth, there is no difference of opinion as to the fact that the teeth harbor virulent germs, ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... aesthetic principles with common sense in architectural design, are now everywhere apparent. The responsibilities of architects are greater than they have ever before been; the growing demand of the times calls for intelligent studies in all that relates to architecture, whether it be in the realm of aesthetics, in sciences that relate to construction, in the nature and properties of the materials used, in the atmosphere that surrounds us, or in the availability of the thousand-and-one useful and ingenious inventions that tend to promote the convenience ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... me! And those bisque figures that you get with every pound of tea you buy; and this, this, THIS," he whimpered, waving his hands at the decorated sewer-pipe with its gilded cat-tails. "Oh, speak to me of this; speak to me of art; speak to me of aesthetics. Cat-tails, GILDED. Of course, why not GILDED!" He wrung his hands. "'Somewhere people are happy. Somewhere little children ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... Remarks is both intrinsically and historically an important piece of criticism. It is still worth reading for more than one passage of discerning analysis and apt comment on scene, speech, or character, and for certain not unfruitful excursions into the field of general aesthetics; while historically it is a sort of landmark in Shakespearian literature. Standing chronologically almost midway between Dryden and Johnson, Kames, and Richardson, the Remarks shows decisively the direction in which criticism, under the steadily mounting pressure of liberal, ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... Those three words alone describe this figure of india-rubber that could still walk and talk and live and lust, and to whom slaying and torture were amongst the aesthetics of life. ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... learning of the Church was of pagan origin. St. Augustine was a professor of rhetoric and the author of a treatise on aesthetics before he wrote the City of God, and his Confessions. In fact, he never quite got over being a professor of rhetoric. Clement of Alexandria was a product of the same rhetoric schools and an excellent teacher of his subject before he recognized the divine ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... of Philosophy was designed as a contribution to the History of Modern Philosophy under the heads: first of Different Schools of Thought—Sensationalist, Realist, Idealist, Intuitivist; secondly of different Subjects—Psychology, Ethics, Aesthetics, Political Philosophy, Theology. While much had been done in England in tracing the course of evolution in nature, history, economics, morals and religion, little had been done in tracing the development ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... truth amidst the dross. He must construct anew. Wagner's theoretical edifice will not stand as it is; it is too loosely jointed; but the materials are valuable. That there will ever be a real science of aesthetics I do not believe; art would cease to be art if it lost its mystery. For the present at least we must be content to remain in darkness as to the precise conditions of musical expression, and eschew theory. That music does reveal the nature of things in a way different from words can ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... whether in space, number, or time, and whether of colors or sounds, form what we may properly term the musical or harmonic element in every art; and the study of them is an entirely separate science. It is the branch of art-philosophy to which the word 'aesthetics' should be strictly limited, being the inquiry into the nature of things that in themselves are pleasant to the human senses or instincts, though they represent nothing, and serve for nothing, their only service being ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... of the London policeman is not, as every one knows, founded on the principles of aesthetics. Neither has it been devised on utilitarian principles. Indeed we doubt whether the originator of it, (and we are happy to profess ignorance of his name), proceeded on any principle whatever, except the gratification of a wild and degraded fancy. ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the personal theory that reduces art to an expression of, and an appeal to, individual temperaments; it is the assertion of the sovereignty of the aesthetic conscience on exactly the same grounds as sovereignty is claimed for the moral conscience. AEsthetics deals with the morality of appeals addressed to the senses. That is, it estimates the success of such appeals in regard to the promotion of fuller and more ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... to wander off into the boundless domain of aesthetics, we must stop at this point for a moment to make sure that we are of one mind regarding the meaning of the phrase "artistic pleasure," in so far at least as it is used ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... affecting the degree of probability which may belong to this theory, seems to us to be very loose scientifically, and philosophically most misleading."—"Pall Mall Gazette.") This is not at all improbable, as it is almost a lifetime since I attended to the philosophy of aesthetics, and did not then think that I should ever make use of my conclusions. Can you refer me to any one or two books (for my power of reading is not great) which would illumine me? or can you explain in one or two sentences how I err? ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... that colonial girls are not of those who dress merely for themselves; they like to be admired, and they appreciate the value of dress from a flirtation point of view. Their taste is rather the outcome of a desire to please others than of a sense of aesthetics. It is relative, and not absolute. When once the finery has served its purpose, they are ready to renounce all the pomps and vanities of this wicked world. And if the moralist says that this argues some laxness of ideas before marriage, let him remember that it is equally indicative of ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... warned on high authority that no man can serve two masters. The caution should obtain in aesthetics as well as in ethics. As a general rule, the painter must stick to his easel, the sculptor must carve, the musician must score or play or sing, the actor must act,—each with no more than the merest coquettings with sister arts. Otherwise his genius is apt to suffer from what ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... slowly. Then she looked at him with her slow, heavy gaze. 'Barnes is starting his school of aesthetics, and Olandese is going to give a set of discourses on ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... an elegant shape; he decorates it with rosettes, with twists, with scrolls. Phanaeus Milon is no stranger to these culinary aesthetics. She turns the crust of her meat-pie into a splendid gourd, with ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... beauty in Nature finds outward expression to compare with that of the city-man who comes out for a Sunday in the country, but Thoreau is that rare country-man and Debussy the city-man with his weekend flights into country-aesthetics. We would be inclined to say that Thoreau leaned towards substance and ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... man than talk like a kid. You desecrate the hour of meditation with rhapsodies on nature when your aesthetics ain't honed up to ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... The souls which he cherished in them had risen above the flood of time. They were inscrutable, fixed for eternity in the love they inspired and seemed to feel, and gave forth once more to those who loved them. He was Professor of AEsthetics and the History of Music, and he was like an old wood quivering with the songs of birds. Some of these songs sounded very far away. They came from the depths of the ages. But they were not the least sweet and mysterious of all.—Others were familiar and ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... relates at the conclusion of the 'historical' part of his Farbenlehre,4 he was drawn to study colour by his wish to gain some knowledge of the objective laws of aesthetics. He felt too close to poetry to be able to study it with sufficient detachment, so he turned to painting - an art with which he felt sufficiently familiar without being connected with it creatively - hoping that ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... cannot be helped: the sentiment of surrender, of sacrifice for one's neighbour, and all self-renunciation-morality, must be mercilessly called to account, and brought to judgment; just as the aesthetics of "disinterested contemplation," under which the emasculation of art nowadays seeks insidiously enough to create itself a good conscience. There is far too much witchery and sugar in the sentiments "for others" and "NOT for myself," for one ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... bunk and spent a moment analyzing the aesthetics of the layout. It had a certain pleasing severity, the unconscious balance of complete functionalism. Soon Dalgetty went ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... no idea, he said, of the wit of the Egyptian women, and their skill in double entendre; nor, I presume, did we lose much by our ignorance. What I would urge, humbly, however, is this—Do not let us be led away by German writers and aesthetics, Semilassoisms, Hahnhahnisms, and the like. The life of the East is a life of brutes. The much maligned Orient, I am confident, has not been maligned near enough; for the good reason that none of us can tell the amount ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... on this theme, fell into a reverie over Rembrandt's strange conception of Christian aesthetics. It is evident that in his mode of depicting Gospel scenes this painter still exhales a breath of the Old Testament; his church, even if he had meant to paint it as it was in his day, would still be a synagogue, ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... novels, our serious books will all be consigned to the garret or be used for old paper and manure! O posterity, above all things do not forget our gothic salons, our Renaissance furniture, M. Pasquier's discourses, the shape of our hats, and the aesthetics of La Revue des ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... same time as my legal studies were thus beginning, I planned out a study of Philosophy and Aesthetics on a large scale as well. My day was systematically filled up from early morning till late at night, and there was time for everything, for ancient and modern languages, for law lessons with the coach, for the lectures in philosophy ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... civilization would be left gasping, helpless and crippled; and of late years, not content with making it serviceable in every department of practical life, men have brought the shrub into the domain of aesthetics by ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... is specially adapted to the conditions of a community like ours. Its title might have been "Rural AEsthetics for Men of Limited Means, or the Laws of Beauty considered in their Application to Small Estates." It is a volume happily conceived and happily executed, and meets a palpable and increasing want ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... their aversion to crude technique and barbarism, closer to truth's natural probabilities. Their literatures show fewer obvious falsities and monstrosities than that of Germany. Think of the german literature of aesthetics, with the preposterousness of such an unaesthetic personage as Immanuel Kant enthroned in its centre! Think of german books on religions-philosophie, with the heart's battles translated into conceptual jargon and made dialectic. The most persistent setter of questions, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... fenceless prairies and the Homeric grandeur of the mountains. Why are quiet rural beauty and illimitable freedom and lofty splendor not reflected in poem and novel and ballad and picture? The Canadian may answer—We go in more for athletics than aesthetics: we are living literature, not writing it. In our snow-covered prairies edged by the violet mist, lined in silver and pricked at night by the diamond light of a million stars, we are living art, not painting it. That our mountains ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... but the sanctified flounces of your churches. No, these are not wholly adventitious sanctities; not empty, superfluous growths. They are incorporated into Life by Time, and they grow in importance as our AEsthetics become more inutile, as our Religions begin to exude gum and pitch for commerce, instead of bearing fruits of Faith and Love ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... go over and see Bewell. He'll be glad to see us and give us the whole town. He was in New York this spring, and we had a good time together studying up art. After he had once seen the game piece in Stewart's it was impossible to keep him away from it. I never saw men so devoted to aesthetics as he and Joe Gildersleeve were. He said the best way to see the picture was through a glass of rum and molasses, and he looked at it in that light about thirteen ...
— A Man of Samples • Wm. H. Maher
... tea at six, and pass rather a dull evening, because of no picquet. You will be sauntering in St. Peter's perhaps, or standing on the Capitol while the sun sets. I should like to see Rome after all. Livy's lies (as the aesthetics prove them to be) do at least animate one so far—how far?—so far as to wish, and not to do, having perfect ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... having no misgivings that they are right," and "if a book is bad, feel it is bad," without being able to refer to a critical principle in proof, but that many who write reviews have not formed opinions and have not felt at all, and have rather proceeded upon a prejudice, a supposed law of aesthetics applicable to every exigency of literary development. A sense of the inadequacy of criticism must trouble every honest man who sits down to examine a new book; and it might almost be said, that no books can be justly estimated by the critic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... splendidly belegged and coquettishly beautified with what, had he been a lady, he might have described as an insertion of lace. At last came the boot-blacking parlor, late nineteenth century, commercial, practical, convenient, and an important factor in civic aesthetics. Not that the parlor is beautiful in itself. It is a cave without architectural pretensions, but it accomplishes unwittingly an important mission: it removes from public view the man who is having his ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... that in his failure he does not fall flat upon the compassion of his reader, as Mr. Dickens does with his "Golden Dustman." But it is a failure, nevertheless; and it must become a serious question in aesthetics how far the spellbound reader may be tortured with an interest which the power awakening it is not adequate to gratify. Is it generous, is it just in a novelist, to lift us up to a pitch of tragic frenzy, and then drop us down into the last scene of a comic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... previous occasions that he found Ann Veronica interesting and that he wished to interest her. He was a civil servant of some standing, and after a previous conversation upon aesthetics of a sententious, nebulous, and sympathetic character, he had sent her a small volume, which he described as the fruits of his leisure and which was as a matter of fact rather carefully finished verse. It dealt with fine aspects of Mr. Manning's ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... or the absolute mind. This last manifests itself again under three forms, representing the three degrees of the self-consciousness of the Spirit, as the eternal truth. These are, first, art, or the representation of beauty (aesthetics); secondly, religion, in the general acceptation of the term (philosophy of religion); and, thirdly, philosophy itself, as the purest and most perfect form of the scientific knowledge of truth. All historical religions, the Oriental, the Jewish, the Greek, the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Addison Aesthetics Aigremont Albert Hall, the Albertus Magnus Andersen, Hendrik Angels and poets Animals and Man Anti-Militarism Apple, symbolism of the Architecture, Norman and Burgundian; Spanish; English Aristotle Arnold, Matthew Art Artists as writers ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... our weak force still more available, we barricaded the approaches to the chief streets by constructing barriers or felling trees. It went to my heart to sacrifice, for this purpose, several of my beautiful lindens; but it was no time for aesthetics. As the giants lay on the ground, still scenting the air with their abundant bloom, I used to rein up my horse and watch the children playing hide-and-seek amongst their branches, or some quiet cow grazing ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... gentlemen, in perfectly new clothes, lounge in stage attitudes on the one side, and an equal number of equally beautiful young butlers, coachmen, grooms and pages, in equally perfect liveries, appear to be discussing the aesthetics of an ideal and highly salaried service, at the other end of the same room. In the comparison there is all the brutal profanity of truth that shocks the reverence of romance; but in the respective relations of ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... own taste and fancy. All was on the basis of personal preference. His chiefs learned early that so rare an organism was best left alone to function in harmony with its own nature. The Column had not only its own philosophy and its own aesthetics, but its own politics: if it seemed to contravene other and more representative departments of the paper, never mind. Its conductor had such confidence in the validity of his personal predilections and in their identity with those ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... Sometimes he and I sat and wrangled on the edge of a crevasse while I denied that there was anything to admire at all. Indeed, he and I have often quarrelled on the edge of a precipice about matters of mountain aesthetics. ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... produced the artists, the poets, and their ideals. We shall perceive the difference between these two hemispheres of the Beautiful better if we think of Homer's "Helena" and Dante's "Beatrice," if we look at the "Venus of Milo" and a "Madonna" of Francia, than in reading the profoundest systems of aesthetics. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... its buildings, has its own architectural rules, rules as unchangeable as anatomical peculiarities. Each group builds according to the same set of principles, conforming to the laws of a very elementary system of aesthetics; but often circumstances beyond the architect's control—the space at her disposal, the unevenness of the site, the nature of the material and other accidental causes—interfere with the worker's plans and disturb the structure. ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... has been made the Sphinx of this particular occasion. Every one has determined to put you off the scent. The word, among other acceptations, has that of mal [evil], a substantive that signifies, in aesthetics, the opposite of good; of mal [pain, disease, complaint], a substantive that enters into a thousand pathological expressions; then malle [a mail-bag], and finally malle [a trunk], that box of various forms, ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... works. And the biographer adds: "This term (i.e. poetic idea) belongs to Beethoven's epoch, and was used by him as frequently as was, for example, the expression 'poetic contents' by others—in opposition to works which only offer an harmonic and rhythmic play of tones. Writers on aesthetics of our day declaim against the latter term; with good reason, if it refer to programme-music; without reason, if they extend their negation to all Beethoven's music, and deny its poetic contents. Whence that tendency, ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... struggle up and get his head on her breast! How he used to lie there when he was a big boy, listening to the same old stories night after night,—the same old stories! Something homely and warm and true was waking in him to-night that had been dead for years and years; this was no matter of aesthetics or taste, it was real, real. He wondered if people felt in this way who had homes, or those simple ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... theme of western writers also but with them the idea of love is entirely free from divine signification. (As a corollary), the more the divine background disappears, the more the prudishness of the police becomes the standard of ethics and aesthetics alike. Under such an aegis the arts are necessarily degraded to the level of the merely sentimental or the merely sensual and while the sentimental is everywhere applauded, the sensual is ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... progress is not a mere growth of the animal race. It has its total meaning in the understanding of man as a soul, determined by purposes and ideals. Not the laws of physiology, but the demands of logic, ethics, aesthetics, and religion control the man who makes history and who serves civilization. He who says that the child's questions ought to be answered truthfully means in this connection that lowest truth of all, the truth of physiology, and forgets ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... that Wordsworth declares poetry to be "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge." The student of poetry may doubtless be studying aesthetics, but he is not merely dallying with aesthetics. If he is communing thoughtfully with mighty spirits like these—the penetrators to the central deep—is he not gaining, by the most royal road known to humanity, the most liberal education for the ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... notably fine transcriptions. And it is a subject on which he has well-defined opinions and regarding which he makes certain distinctions: "An 'arrangement,'" he said, "as a rule, is a purely commercial affair, into which neither art nor aesthetics enter. It usually consists in writing off the melody of a song—in other words, playing the 'tune' on an instrument instead of hearing it sung with words—or in the case of a piano composition, in writing off the upper ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... included in my plan of proofs and illustrations I have been obliged to leave out for lack of space. Such are: Demonism, Primitive Religion, and Witchcraft; The Status of Women; War; Evolution and the Mores; Usury; Gambling; Societal Organization and Classes; Mortuary Usages; Oaths; Taboos; Ethics; AEsthetics; and Democracy. The first four of these are written. I may be able to publish them soon, separately. My next task is to ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... gasping system of aesthetics, soi-disant 'Religion of the Beautiful,' is the curse of the age,—is a vast, universal vampire sucking the life from humanity. Like other idolatries it may arrogate the name of 'Religion,' but it ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... memorability. The twenty years which follow from 1798 to 1818 may with equal accuracy be styled the "critical period." It was during these years that he did his best work as a journalist, and all his work as a public lecturer on aesthetics. It was during them that he said his say, and even his final say, so far as any public modes of expression were concerned, on politics and on art. From 1818 to his death his life was devoted entirely to metaphysics ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... an end. I had long felt a deep desire to visit Munich, to study art, and to investigate fundamentally the wonderful and mysterious science of AEsthetics, of which I had heard so much. So I packed up and paid my bills, and passing through one town where there was in the hotel where I stopped, the last wolf ever killed in Germany, and freshly killed (I believe he has been slain two or three ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... co-operative housing of New York is making a like history. It is true that the Philistines do not come in and dispossess the autochthonic groups; these will not sell to them; but they have imagined doing on a sophisticated and expensive scale what the aesthetics have done simply and cheaply. They are buying the pleasanter sites, and are building co-operatively; though they have already eliminated the studio and the central principle, and they build for the sole ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... if I have been correctly Informed, had been entertained for his future—a fact that provokes a smile now that his manifest destiny has been, or is in course of being, so very neatly accomplished. The spirit of modern aesthetics did not, at any rate, as I understand the matter, smile upon his cradle, and the circumstance only increases the interest of his having had from the earliest moment the ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... democrats of history—the real-idealists—the men who love the crowd and the beautiful too, and who can have no honest or human pleasure in either of them except as they are being drawn together, are obliged to admit that living in a democratic country, a country where politics and aesthetics can no longer be kept apart, is an ordeal that can only be faced a large part of the time with heavy hearts. We are obliged to admit that it is a country where paintings have little but the Constitution of the United States wrought into ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... intelligence, of the same nature as the sphere-movers, but individuated by mutable matter in the form of a body, matter being in all cases the principle of individuation. As intelligence, he becomes free; takes the guidance of his life into his own hand; and, first through ethics, politics, and aesthetics, the forms of his sensible or practical activity, and second through logic, science, and philosophy, the forms of his intellectual activity, he rises to divine heights and "plays the immortal." His supreme activity is contemplation. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... essays of M. de Laprade, they may be read both with more pleasure and more profit than those in which he attempts to discuss the principles of aesthetics. "French Tradition in Literature," and "Poetry, and Industrialism," are full of suggestive thoughts, and, coming in the latter half of the volume, make us forget the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... must be done to stem the tide, and again she fell back upon luncheon. They had bought some provisions on their way to the station in Paris. He might subsist on scenery and aesthetics if he pleased—as for her, she was a common person with common ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... by seeming to hint a promise that my desire should be satisfied. And for all that the motive force of my exaltation was a longing for aesthetic enjoyments, the guide-books ministered even more to it than books on aesthetics, and, more again than the guide-books, the railway time-tables. What moved me was the thought that this Florence which I could see, so near and yet inaccessible, in my imagination, if the tract ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... was the rate of his walking. Differences in politics, in ethics and even in aesthetics need not arouse angry antagonism. One's opinion may change; one's tastes may alter—in fact they do. One's very conception of virtue is at the mercy of some felicitous temptation which may be sprung on one any day. All these things are perpetually on the swing. But a temperamental ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... truth and an announcement of them. It does not care twopence whether the method of their revelation is new or old, academic or futuristic. It only asks that the revelation shall be genuine. It is concerned with form, because beauty and truth demand perfect expression. But it is a mere heresy in aesthetics to say that perfect expression is the whole of art that matters. It is the spirit that breaks through the form that is the main interest of criticism. Form, we know, has a permanence of its own: so much so that it has again and again been worshipped by the idolators of art as being in itself more ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... his return—Hazlehurst gave himself very much to the study of aesthetics. The beautiful, the harmonious, alone attracted him; he could not endure anything approaching to coarseness. He wandered up and down the galleries of the Louvre, delighting more in the beautiful faces of the Italian masters, in the Nymphs ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... were three chief schools of thought, the Sensational, the Catholic, and the Eclectic; or as it may be put in other terms, the Materialist, the Theological, and the Spiritualist. The first looked for the sources of knowledge, the sanction of morals, the inspiring fountain and standard of aesthetics, to the outside of men, to matter, and the impressions made by matter on the corporeal senses. The second looked to divine revelation, authority and the traditions of the Church. The third, steering a middle course, looked partly within and partly without, relied ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... engaged, as we have seen, in occasional lecturing, but began (1861) to add a prolific series of brochures—many of them with quaint but significant titles—to his already stupendous mass of writing. Their subjects were not alone aesthetics, but now treated of ethical, social, and political questions, the prophetic declarations and earnest appeals of a man of wide and varied culture, deep thought, and large experience. The attempted alliance of political economy with art was a novel undertaking in that ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... the soul of him who gives it form. In writing, as in painting, it reveals to us the character and the conception of its author. Placed at the service of certain philosophical ideas, which will be set forth later on, this technique was bound to lead to a special code of Aesthetics. The painter seeks to suggest with an unbroken line the fundamental character of a form. His endeavor, in this respect, is to simplify the objective images of the world to the extreme, replacing them with ideal images, which prolonged meditation shall have freed from every non-essential. ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci
... Aesthetics,' 'The Color Sense,' 'The Color of Flowers,' and 'Flowers and their Pedigrees'; and still deeper is 'Force and Energy' (1888), a theory of dynamics in which he expresses original views. In 'Psychological Aesthetics' ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... cannot fail to have a persuasive force for those who have faith in the instinctive utterances of the human soul: and the reliance upon it is not more extraordinary than that on which we depend in cognate subjects like aesthetics, where the taste of practical skill is trusted. Christian consciousness thus becomes a new source of facts in theological study; the living voice of the church for illustrating and confirming in some degree the utterance ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... group of early eighteenth-century critics who tended to reject the aesthetics based upon authority and pre-established definitions of the genres, and to evolve one logically from the nature of the human mind and the sources of its enjoyment; in other words, who turned attention from the objective ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... 1901, p. 11) lays it down that psychology has nothing to do with good or bad taste. "The distinction between good and bad taste has no meaning for psychology. On this account, the fundamental conceptions of aesthetics cannot arise from psychology." It may be a question whether this view can be ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... classico-sentimental manner of the late 18th century, when, in the summer of 1802, the young Norwegian philosopher, Henrik Steffens, arrived in Copenhagen from Germany, where he had imbibed the new romantic ideas. He began to give lectures on aesthetics, and these awakened a turmoil of opposition. Among those who heard him, no one was more scandalised than Oehlenschlager, then in his twenty-third year. He was not acquainted with Steffens, but in the course of the autumn they happened to meet at a restaurant in Copenhagen, when ...
— The Gold Horns • Adam Gottlob Oehlenschlager
... photographs of the salon pictures, and was stricken by the art of Jules Lefevre. True it is that I saw it was wanting in that tender grace which I am forced to admit even now, saturated though I now am with the aesthetics of different schools, is inherent in Cabanel's work; but at the time I am writing of, my nature was too young and mobile to resist the conventional attractiveness of nude figures, indolent attitudes, long hair, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... note how very small a proportion of the whole is devoted to that most admirable achievement; and to reflect how little life there is in much that in kindness of feeling and grace of style is equally charming. One cause is obvious. When Addison talks of psychology or aesthetics or ethics (not to speak of his criticism of epic poetry or the drama), he must of course be obsolete in substance; but, moreover, he is obviously superficial. A man who would speak upon such topics now must be a grave philosopher, who has digested libraries of philosophy. ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... color and tone character is so great, so important, that it is impossible to do it justice in this little work. I have written more fully on this and kindred subjects in my other works, therefore I shall here touch but lightly upon the aesthetics of the ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... as a student of aesthetics Duerer was also the northern Leonardo. His theory of art reveals the secret of his genius: "What beauty is, I know not; but for myself I take that which at all times has been considered beautiful by the greater number." This ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... scenes, lay their own plots, and when all has been thus prepared, the right word is born in the purple, an inheritor of great opportunities, all its virtues magnified by the glamour of its high estate. Writers on philosophy, morals, or aesthetics, critics, essayists, and dealers in soliloquy generally, cannot hope, with their slighter means, to attain to comparable effects. They work at two removes from life; the terms that they handle are surrounded by the vapours of discussion, ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... beauty and knowledge. The apparition was very like his present self, and, as he regarded it, he noted the student-lamp by which it was illuminated, and the book over which it pored. He glanced at the title and read, "The Science of AEsthetics." Next, he entered into the apparition, trimmed the student-lamp, and himself went on reading ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... if Shakespeare could have been at his highest level all through, and if every element of strength in him had been purified from every weakness? What would it have been, shall we say, if he could have had the advantage of reading a few modern lectures on aesthetics? We may, perhaps, be content with Shakespeare as circumstances left him; but in reading our modern poets, the sentiment of regret is stronger. If Byron had not been driven into his wild revolt against the world; if Shelley had ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... direction before the work is complete. A flood of light has been thrown on the dark and nebulous places of the instrumental classics by various distinguished and highly competent musicians. It is sincerely to be hoped, in the interests of this branch of the aesthetics of vocal art, that those competent to speak with authority will do so, in order that in this direction also "the crooked shall be made straight, and the ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... allowance to be made for some rather indefinite objects, which are none the less important, and which, for want of a better name, I shall call the Discard. Among these can be named the education of the imagination, having a good time generally, foolishness, mysticism, good fellowship, aesthetics, humanity, and humanities in general. The fact that many a man has thrown himself away by putting all his time into these things, and lived solely for good fellowship, for foolishness, or for imagination without attainment, is no reason why you should not partake in a small ...
— A Jolly by Josh • "Josh"
... ambition that about the same time he wrote a book on aesthetics called Upon the Beautiful and the Fit, which he dedicated to a famous colleague, the Syrian Hierius, "orator to the City of Rome," one of the professors of the official education appointed either by the Roman municipality or the Imperial treasury. This Levantine ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... you ever reflected on that which does not change in man's life, but for ever remains the same? No, no, wait!... There have been hundreds of religions, ethics, aesthetics, sciences, philosophical systems: they have all changed and are still changing— only one law remains unaltered, that all living things—whether men, mice, or rye—are born, breed, ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... physical, of its surprising turns, of its unexpected contacts, of the choice and rare personalities that drift on it as if on the sea; of the distinction that letters and art gave to it, the nobility and consolations there are in aesthetics, of the privileges they confer on individuals and (this was the first connected statement I caught) that Mills agreed with her in the general point of view as to the inner worth of individualities and in the particular instance of it on which she had opened to him her innermost heart. ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... and Intuition. Studies in psychology and aesthetics. Chap, iv, "Belief: Its Varieties and Its Conditions." ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... evening he had all but succumbed to a terrible temptation. It was so long since he had been alone with Lucia, and there was something in her face, her dress, her attitude, that appealed to the authority on AEsthetics. He found himself wondering how it would be if he got up and kissed her. But just then Lucia leaned back in her chair, and there was that tired look in her face which he had come to dread. He thought ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... word Pram[a]n[a]ni, which in a book of aesthetics means proportions, in a book of logic means the proofs by which the truth of a proposition is ascertained. All proofs of truth are credentials of relationship. Individual facts have to produce such passports to ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... times during that period he was tortured to the verge of dying; and at last he was released, while quite an old man, at the urgent request of the French Court. Not many years after his liberation Campanella died. The numerous philosophical works on metaphysics, mathematics, politics, and aesthetics which Campanella gave to the press, were composed during his long imprisonment. How they came to be printed, I do not know; but it is obvious that he cannot have been strictly debarred from writing by his jailors. In prison, too, he made both friends and converts. We have ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... only sees how labour can be freed from its present fetters, and organized unwastefully, so as to produce the greatest possible amount of wealth for the community and for every member of it, but which bears with it its own ethics and religion and aesthetics: that is the hope and promise of a new and higher life in all ways. So that even if those unforeseen economical events above spoken of were to happen, and put off for a while the end of our Capitalist system, the latter would ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... most golden of all, as men commonly discover after babbling. Mr. Milburn, in one of his chapters, gives an account of his passage through what he is pleased to call neology and rationalism. He represents himself as having sounded the depths of German metaphysics, criticism, and aesthetics. But a man who is able to write a sentence in which Lessing's Works are spoken of as if the reading of them tended to make men "transcendentalists of the supra-nebulous order" no more deserves a scourging by angels for his devotion to German literature than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... loveliness, fairness, elegance, comeliness, pulchritude, grace, exquisiteness, charm, attraction. Associated Words: aesthetics, aesthetician, aestheticism, aesthete, aesthetic, esthetology, Apollo, Adonis, Venus, Hebe, Hyperion, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... that modern critics of the Greeks have not called attention to the aesthetic obtuseness which showed itself in the defective reaction of the ancients against cruelty. It was not that they excluded beautiful actions from the sphere of aesthetics; they never thought of separating the beautiful from the good in this way. But they were not disgusted at the torture of slaves, the exposure of new-born children, or the massacre of the population of ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... Perish my theatrical advertising columns when I cease to tell the truth! There is the sum twice told: I pays my money and I takes my choice. Never mind the change." And with these words Mr. BEZZLE stalked off, his face crimson with a rush of aesthetics to the head. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II. No. 38, Saturday, December 17, 1870. • Various
... she was to marry. She preferred to be herself, with the egoism of women. She said it: she said: "I must be myself to be of any value to you, Willoughby." He was indefatigable in his lectures on the aesthetics of love. Frequently, for an indemnification to her (he had no desire that she should be a loser by ceasing to admire the world), he dwelt on his own youthful ideas; and his original fancies about the world were presented to her as a substitute for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... reserves we may utter concerning the Transfiguration. If we are honest, we more or less own what our impressions really are from those other famous works, concerning which our impressions are otherwise altogether and inexpressibly unimportant; it is a question of ethics and not aesthetics, as most of our simple-hearted company suppose it to be; and, if we are dishonest, we pretend to have felt and thought things at first-hand from them which we have learned at second-hand from our reading. I will confess, for my small part, that I had more pleasure in the coloring ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... used to harry the peaceful farmers long ago. We learn that these rapacious gentlemen were above all things "deep-thoughted," and that they had rather fine notions about poetry and the future life. They were, in short, a species of bloodthirsty AEsthetics. Instead of devoting themselves to intense amours and sonnets, they were the Don Juans of Death, but in no other point did they differ materially from the cultured creature who lives up ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman |
