"AEstheticism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was Oscar Wilde who led the men of the now famous 'nineties toward an aesthetic freedom, to champion a beauty whose existence was its "own excuse for being." Wilde's was, in the most outspoken manner, the first use of aestheticism as a slogan; the battle-cry of the group was actually the now outworn but then revolutionary "Art for Art's sake"! And, so sick were people of the shoddy ornaments and drab ugliness of the immediate past, that the slogan won. At ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... cynical Paganism had been to make her dread more acutely any infringement upon moral laws. She had been constantly learning, however, the enjoyment and appreciation of beauty, not merely in a conventional and Philistine sense, but as a pure Pagan aestheticism. The change showed itself chiefly in her increased tolerance of views less rigid than her own, which made possible the perfecting of the intimacy with Helen, which had begun simply from her sense of pity for the sadness ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... they seem always in the sight of Christian bigotry—only monstrous. But when the knowledge of their meaning comes to one who feels the divine in all religions, then they will be found to make appeal to the higher aestheticism, to the sense of moral beauty, with a force never to be divined by minds knowing nothing of the Orient and its thought. To me the image of Kwannon of the Thousand Hands is not less admirable than any other representation of human loveliness idealised bearing her ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... confidence and intimacy! He was again surprised to find her sympathetic, not towards his literary attempts, certainly, but to the moral weakness he was suffering from, a weakness with which she, too, was somewhat familiar. Mariana's contempt for aestheticism was no less strong than his, but for all that the main reason why she did not accept Markelov was because there was not the slightest trace of the ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... earlier part of the book we showed that the artist exposed "aestheticism" from the inside. He hardly draws any figures so happily as those of bored, poetic youths. In Sic Transit Gloria Mundi he does not depict "The Duke" of the scene half so convincingly as the young gossip talking to the Duchess. ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... to paint in tone the poetic heroes of the past century, himself included, was laudable; but Don Juan, Macbeth, quaint Till Eulenspiegel, fantastic Don Quixote were, after all, chiefly concerned with a moribund aestheticism. Illowski best liked the Strauss setting of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" because it approached his own darling project, though it neither touched the stars nor reached the earth. Besides, this music was too complicated. A new art must be evolved, not a synthesis of the old arts dreamed ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... I am afraid I am too matter-of-fact to sympathise very clearly with this form of aestheticism; but here is a charming bit of forest scenery. Look at that old oak with the deer under it; the long and deep range of fern running up from it to that beech-grove on the upland, the lights and shadows on the projections and recesses ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... he was always oppressed by miseries foreign to normal men. For instance, he fluctuated between the ardors of a pagan and an anchorite, at one hour reembracing aestheticism, at another fleeing back to a bleak sanctuary where he hoped to escape some vague, immense reproach. Too complex for an irrevocable decision, too weak to stand firm against the pressure either of pantheism or an absolutely spiritual idea, he was ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... the murmurous trouble of the world,—this is to have inward fitness for the high work of the Kingdom. Yes, and it is the pledge that this work shall be done. There is such a thing as artistic grief. There is the vain and languorous pity of aestheticism. Its robe of sympathy is wrapped about itself and bejewelled with its own tears. And it never goes forth. You never meet it in 'the darkness of ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... The unexpected aestheticism of the remark robbed him of speech. Ho had looked for mutterings or execrations but instead here was amiability and appreciation overriding adversity. A powerful desire possessed him to shake hands with his new acquaintance, but he did not risk it, being unacquainted with the ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... loveliness, fairness, elegance, comeliness, pulchritude, grace, exquisiteness, charm, attraction. Associated Words: aesthetics, aesthetician, aestheticism, aesthete, aesthetic, esthetology, Apollo, Adonis, Venus, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... a certain charm in the exterior of this old house—solid and aggressively respectable—its interior gave most visitors at first a nervous shock. Aunt William still firmly believed aestheticism to be fashionable, and a fad that should be discouraged. Through every varying whim of the mode she had stuck, with a praiseworthy persistence, to the wax flowers under glass, Indian chessmen, circular tables in the centre ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... the method chosen for the punishment of these saintly innocents Nero gave one more proof of the close connection between effeminate aestheticism and sanguinary callousness. As in old days, "on that opprobrious hill," the temple of Chemosh had stood close by that of Moloch, so now we find the spoliarium beside the fornices—Lust hard by Hate. The carnificina of Tiberius, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... hand, one may be drawn, through the love of moral beauty in creatures, of justice, and mercy, and liberality, and truthfulness, to the love of God as their archetype, and yet be perfectly obtuse to aesthetic beauty; and thus again we see that high aestheticism is compatible with low morality, and conversely. Doubtless when produced to infinity, all perfections are seen to converge and unite in God, but short of this, they retain their distinctness and opposition. At the same time, ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... imagination had run riot through past, present, and future. Audrey had been sweet and confiding from the first; she had believed in him with childlike simplicity, and when she had trusted to his guidance in her innocent aestheticism, he, like the coarse-minded villain that he was, had made fun of all her dear little arrangements, those pathetic efforts to make her life beautiful. He had made her cry, and then taken a brutal advantage of her tears. To Ted's conscience, in the white-heat of his ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... fury of our gunners at the enemy's unprincipled use of the cathedral of Rheims as a means of defence, was doubtless mingled with indignation and disgust at being compelled to do injury to a priceless work of art. But no phrase-making aestheticism, thank God, such as our neighbours cultivate, rendered us untrue to the conviction that, when all is said and done, every drop of blood of the meanest of our brave soldiers is worth more than any ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... hand in her pocket and fingered a silver coin, but poverty is a grim, tyrannous stepmother to tender aestheticism, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson |
