"Esthetics" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... instincts. The mission recruiter should be allowed to do his work outside these halls, and everything in the way of infection and all that brings religion into conflict with good taste and good sense should be excluded, while esthetics should supplement, reenforce, and go hand in hand with piety. Religion is in its infancy; and woman, who has sustained it in the past, must be the chief agent in its further and higher development. ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... that we extend "imagination" to its full sense, without limiting it unduly to esthetics, there is, among the many forms of the emotional life, not one that may not stimulate invention. It remains to see this emotional factor at work,—to note how it can give rise to new combinations; and this brings us ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... Esthetics is the science of the beautiful, and treats of the feelings produced through the senses by objects of beauty. The most vile and dishonest admire honesty in others; thus gentleness, kindness, meekness, produce pleasant feelings and are called beautiful. God is the source ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... the revival of ancient art which arose with Winckelmann towards the close of the last century, a gospel of esthetics was preached. Its apostles were chiefly Germans, and among them Schiller and Goethe are not inconspicuous names. The latter, before his long life was closed, began to see the emptiness of such teachings, and the violence perpetrated on the ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... however, to religious expression, and it must also be admitted that the Realist-Impressionists served at least their conception of art logically and homogeneously. The criticism which may be levelled against them is that which Realism itself carries in its train, and we shall see that esthetics could never create classifications capable of defining and containing the infinite gradations of ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... various helpers, and arranged to give his lectures and conferences daily in certain porches or promenades. These lectures covered the whole range of human thought—logic, rhetoric, oratory, physics, ethics, politics, esthetics, and physical culture. These outdoor talks were called exoteric, and there gradually grew up esoteric lessons, which were for the rich or luxurious and the dainty. And there being money in the esoteric lessons, these gradually took the place of the exoteric, and so ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... also a roof; the laying of the stones or timbers for footing being pavior's or carpenter's work, rather than architect's; and, at all events, work respecting the well or ill doing of which we shall hardly find much difference of opinion, except in points of aesthetics. We shall therefore concern ourselves only with the construction of walls, roofs, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... all its difficult forms to awaken and enchain the interest, and to inspire the love of the man of genius or the ambitious student of aesthetics, has also those more simple ones for the delight of the humbler mind. Even the babe that lies in its mother's arms has within the yet narrow confines of its new-born soul the germ of musical sympathy. ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... worth as historical documents. Unquestionably, to the poetic artist, or even to the student of psychology, "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" may be better instructors than all the books of a wilderness of professors of aesthetics or of moral philosophy. But, as evidence of occurrences in Denmark, or in Scotland, at the times and places indicated, they are out of court; the profoundest admiration for them, the deepest gratitude for their ...
— The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science - Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... and a visit. The visit is to an extremely interesting, learned and distinguished man—Dr. Ambros, formerly Imperial Solicitor-General in Prague, now professor and referendary to the Officielle Zeitung in Vienna, always an eminent writer on aesthetics, history, the history of music, a polygraphist, composer—in fact, a good friend of mine. Be kind enough to tell him that I am awaiting his answer in the affirmative, respecting a lecture by him on Robert ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... roams among unbridled emotions; art becomes impressionism. What it then produces may indeed be picturesque, melodramatic, sensual, but it will not be beautiful because there will be no imaginative wholeness in it. In other words, the artist who divorces aesthetics from ethics does gain creative license, but he gains it at the expense of a balanced and harmonious expression. If you do not believe it, compare the Venus de Milo with the Venus de Medici or a Rubens fleshy, spilling-out-of-her-clothes Magdalen with a Donatello ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... professor of aesthetics, and afterwards of ethics at Geneva, who is known to the outside world solely by the publication of selections from his Journal in 1882-84, which teems with suggestive thoughts bearing on the great vital issues of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... That in as far as the prevailing taste has put these models before him, he is neither to take much blame to himself, nor to be in anywise disheartened for the future. That in as far as he shall utterly reverse his whole poetic method, whether in morals or in aesthetics, leave undone all that he has done, and do all that he has not done, he will become, what he evidently, by grace of God, can become if he will, namely, a lasting ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Intuition. Studies in psychology and aesthetics. Chap, iv, "Belief: Its Varieties and Its ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... subject, though not 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? Perhaps ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... life; even the nameless terror of dreams,—are all inexplicable upon the old-fashioned soul-hypothesis. How deeply-reaching into the life of the race some of these sensations are, such as the pleasure in odors and in colors, Grant Allen has most effectively suggested in his "Physiological Aesthetics," and in his charming treatise on the Color-Sense. But long before these were written, his teacher, the greatest of all psychologists, had clearly proven that the experience-hypothesis was utterly inadequate to account for many classes of psychological phenomena. "If possible," observes ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... mountains, geographical outlines and other horticultural allusions to their holy lands and spiritual history, seen beside so many houses, temples and monasteries in Japan. In their floral art, no people excels the Japanese in making leaf and bloom teach history, religion, philosophy, aesthetics ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... 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 partly on the senses, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... comes under the head of Aesthetics, which may be defined as the philosophy of taste, the science of ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... 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 measure ...
— A Jolly by Josh • "Josh"
... are looking at. Let us know the exact words an author uses. Let us get at the exact value of each word by that severe induction of which Buttmann and the great Germans have set such noble examples; and then, and not till then, we may begin to talk about philosophy, and aesthetics, and the rest. Very Probably Aristarchus was right in his dislike of Crates's preference of what he called criticism, to grammar. Very probably he connected it with the other object of his especial hatred, that fashion of interpreting ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... merely of the War trade House of Krupp. Out from the ruck of hack writers, there stands a single imposing figure, Maximilian Harden, the "poet of German politics," who "casts forth heroic gestures and thinks of politics in terms of aesthetics, the prophet of a great, strong and saber-rattling nation," whose force shall be felt ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... 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, covered with all ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... his work 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 ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... Medical School of Paris, delivered a discursive lecture not long ago, in which he soared from the region of drugs, his well-known special province, into the thin atmosphere of aesthetics. It is the influence that surrounds his fortunate fellow-citizens, he declares, which alone preserves their intellectual supremacy. If a Parisian milliner, he says, remove to New York, she will so degenerate in the course of a couple of years that the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... him any pronounced principles. His unerring feeling and cultured mind served him as a guide in morals as well as in aesthetics. His ideal was a kind of natural religion, in which God appears as the ultimate source of the beautiful and hardly as a being having any other relation to man. His conduct was most beautiful in all ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Mr. William Morris's wall papers. It existed ten or twelve years before the public "caught on," as they say, to these delights. But, except one or two of the masters, the school were only playing at aesthetics, and laughing at their own performances. There was more fun than fashion in the cult, which was later revived, developed, and gossiped about ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... wanted to convince the readers of The Times that the violation of the Adelphi was a thing to be prevented at all costs. Soberness of statement, a simple, direct, civic style, with only an underthrob of personal emotion, were what I must at all costs achieve. Not too much of mere aesthetics, either, nor of mere sentiment for the past. No more than a brief eulogy of 'those admirably proportioned streets so familiar to all students of eighteenth century architecture,' and perhaps a passing reference to ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... volumes on what he called psychophysics (many persons consider Fechner to have practically founded scientific psychology in the first of these books); a volume on organic evolution, and two works on experimental aesthetics, in which again Fechner is thought by some judges to have laid the foundations of a new science," are among his other performances.... "All Leipsic mourned him when he died, for he was the pattern of the ideal German scholar, as daringly original in his thought as he was homely ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... aesthetics of Harrow Chapel as originally constructed, but time and piety have completely changed it. In 1855, Dr. Vaughan added a Chancel with an apsidal end, designed by Sir Gilbert Scott. Next, the central passage of the Chapel became a Nave, with pillars and a ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... In aesthetics, the differences follow the same general law. Women express beauty in themselves; jewels are for their ornament; and rooms are furnished as a setting for themselves. The lives of millions of workers go to ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... had been surrounded with art-tinted hangings and photographs from Rossetti, and the austerity of her eighteenth-century reaction was now almost defiant. Her drawing-room, in its arid chastity, challenged you, as it were, to dare remember the aesthetics of South Kensington. ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... seeming 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 in ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... Think of a Texas legislature, composed chiefly of illiterate jabber- whacks who string out the sessions interminably for the sake of the $2 a day—imagine these fellows, each with a large pendulous ear to the earth, listening for the approach of some Pegasus to carry him to Congress—teaching the aesthetics of civilization to the divine philosophers of Greece and the god-like senators of Rome! Think of Perry J. Lewis pulling the Conscript Fathers over the coals—of Senator Bowser pointing out civic duties to ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... 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 ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... India-rubber tree. If that plant were destroyed, 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 using it for ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... 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 ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... difficulties, moral and 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 ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... 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
... 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 ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... are illustrated in the aesthetics of landscape gardening. It is the artist's one desire to make pictures in the landscape. This is done in two ways: by the form of plantations, and by the use of vistas. He will throw his plantations into such positions that open and yet more or less confined areas of greensward are presented ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... pleasantnesses, 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 their pleasantness. Thus it is the province ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... story hailing from Munich. During the past year the professor of Aesthetics in the University, whose lectures are proverbially wearisome, delivered his lectures (as usual) to a scanty audience. There were five students in all, who, week by week, melted and grew "beautifully less," until at last but one was left. This solitary individual, however, seemed to concentrate ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe
... the 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
... been true since the earliest days. Emerson himself, though a man of unusual discernment and a diligent drinker from German spigots, nevertheless remained a dilettante in both aesthetics and metaphysics to the end of his days, and the incompleteness of his equipment never showed more plainly than in his criticism of books. Lowell, if anything, was even worse; his aesthetic theory, first and last, was nebulous and superficial, and all that remains of his pleasant ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... the one philosophy of manhood in whose harness are no vulnerable parts. "The Palace of Art" presents the poet's perception of the failure of culture. Ethics, not aesthetics, compel manhood; and behind ethics, theology. God must live in life, if life shall put on goodness as ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... 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
... idealistic. He did not fight for ideas: he was of the spirit and he fought for the spirit. Quixotism is a madness descended from the madness of the cross; therefore it is despised by reason; Don Quixote will not resign himself to either the world or its truth, to science or logic, to art or aesthetics, to morals or ethics. And what did he leave behind him? one may ask. I reply that he left himself, and that a man, a man living and immortal, is worth all theories and all philosophies. Other countries have left us institutions and books: ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... soon time to 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 weight did it add to the strange ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... appreciation of the poet,) being debarred by their alienage from the tempting parliament of verbal commentary and conflict, have made themselves such ample amends by expatiations in the unfenced field of aesthetics and of that constructive criticism which is too often confined to the architecture of Castles in Spain, that we feel as if Dogberry had charged us in relation to them with that hopelessly bewildering commission to "comprehend all vagrom men" which we have hitherto considered applicable only ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... are hymns in "Prometheus", which seem to realize the miracle of making words, detached from meaning, the substance of a new ethereal music; and yet, although their verbal harmony is such, they are never devoid of definite significance for those who understand. Shelley scorned the aesthetics of a school which finds "sense swooning into nonsense" admirable. And if a critic is so dull as to ask what "Life of Life! thy lips enkindle" means, or to whom it is addressed, none can help him any more than one can help a man whose sense of hearing ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... excavating the table-lands, society might have been benefited. These monstrosities are decidedly useless, and therefore can neither be sublime nor beautiful, as has been unanswerably demonstrated by another recent writer on political aesthetics—See also a personal attack on Mont Blanc, in the second number of the ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... health, and ugliness of form is attained not only at the expense of aesthetics, but of comfort. The custom of fastening growing girls in tight corsets, of flattening their breasts with pads, of distorting their feet in small high-heeled shoes, and of teaching them to stoop and mince in gait, is calculated to disgust every observer of good sense and taste, and, ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... specific knowledge or aptitude to the new field for investigation, he should be made aware of some of the wider questions which the study of poetry involves. The first of these questions has to do with the relations of the study of poetry to the general field of Aesthetics. ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... it is a brave one. It does not fall back on weak substitutes for reality; it does not throw the glamor of history and the aesthetics of industry around trades with the poor hope that they make up for the content which is not there; it does not foster the assumption that training in technique of industry or physical science can enrich, under ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... teacher of the students of the Royal Academy, having been preceded by a clever, talkative, scientific expounder of aesthetics, who delighted to tell the young men how everything was done, how to copy this, and how to express that. A student came up to the new master, "How should I do this, sir?" "Suppose you try." Another, "What does ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... own art was the subject, Chopin did not take part in discussions. And Liszt tells us that Chopin not only, like most artists, lacked a generalising mind [esprit generalisateur], but showed hardly any inclination for aesthetics, of which he had not even heard much. We may be sure that to Chopin to whom discussions of any kind were distasteful, those of a circle in which, as in that of George Sand, democratic and socialistic, theistic ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... 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 ...
— The Gold Horns • Adam Gottlob Oehlenschlager
... his "Contemporary French Painters" and "Painting in France." Together with these works he had begun his first novel, "Wenderholme," and had been contemplating for some time the possibility of lecturing on aesthetics. I was adverse to this last plan on account of his nervous state, which did not seem to allow so great an excitement as that of appearing in public at stated times; I persuaded him at least to delay ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Regulative Science, pointing out the conditions of true inference (within its own sphere), Logic is co-ordinate with (i) Ethics, considered as assigning the conditions of right conduct, and with (ii) AEsthetics, considered as determining the principles of criticism ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... expression through tone 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 vocal art. ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... current. The only serious view of the poet's moral nature is that nurtured by the Platonism of every age. Milton gave it the formulation most familiar to English ears, but Milton by no means originated it. Not only from his Greek studies, but from his knowledge of contemporary Italian aesthetics, he derived the idea of the harmony between the poet's life and his creations which led him to maintain that it is the poet's privilege to make of his ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... bored or angry, as the succession of events or impressions might dictate. To collect beautiful things was a passion with him, and he was proud of the natural taste and instinct, which generally led him right. But for 'aesthetics'—the philosophy of art—he had nothing but contempt. The volatile, restless mind escaped at once from the concentration asked of it; and fell back on what the Buddhist calls 'Maia,' the gay and changing appearances of things, which were all he wanted. ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... promulgator, with living out of the world and knowing nothing of life and men. That great austere toiler, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, upbraids me,—but kindly, and more in sorrow than in anger,—for trifling with aesthetics and poetical fancies, while he himself, in that arsenal of his in Fleet Street, is bearing the burden and heat of the day. An intelligent American newspaper, the Nation, says that it is very easy to sit in one's study and find fault with the course of modern society, but the thing ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... 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 times since), and at another ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... beauty of clarity, order, refinement, and simplicity, he jumped to the conclusion that these were the characteristics of Nature herself, and that without them no beauty could exist. He was wrong. Nature is too large a thing to fit into a system of aesthetics; and beauty is often—perhaps more often than not—complex, obscure, fantastic, and strange. At the bottom of all Boileau's theories lay a hearty love of sound common sense. It was not, as has sometimes been asserted, imagination that ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... small 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
... 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 been judiciously treated from his youth; ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... him, but bow before the personality of Sophocles, whose perfect form enshrined a noble and highly educated soul, so we gratefully accept Correggio for his grace, while we approach the consummate art of Michelangelo with reverent awe. It is necessary in aesthetics as elsewhere to recognise a hierarchy of excellence, the grades of which are determined by the greater or less comprehensiveness of the artist's nature expressed in his work. At the same time, the calibre of the artist's genius ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... of them if we would; but civilization advances by building upon them, and to do away with these additions would be like destroying a city to get at its foundation, in the vain hope of securing some wide-reaching result in economics or aesthetics. Occupying a foremost place among these groupings is the large division embracing our educational activities. And these are social not only in the broad sense, but also in the narrower. The intercourse ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... 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, which so frequently ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... work of art; and not only did sculptors draw from it an inspiration such as has been felt by no later age, but to the combatants themselves, and the spectators, the plastic beauty of the human form grew to be more than its prowess or its strength, and gymnastic became a training in aesthetics as much as, or ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... a man well bred, He was up in Electricity, Fortification, Theology, aesthetics and Pugilicity; Celsus and Gregory he'd read; Knew every "dodge" of glove and fist; Was a capital curate, (I think I've said) And Transcendental Anatomist: Well up in Materia Medica, Right up in Toxicology, And Medical Jurisprudence, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... the direct results thereof. The trees are manifestly over-exerting themselves, in a witless competition with others which may never boast of painted, scented fruit. There is not a sufficient audience of aesthetics to tolerate the change of which ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... rooted in the intellectual pride of mediocrity; and is one of the many examples of a truth in the idea that extremes meet. Thus, to appreciate the virtues of the mob one must either be on a level with it (as I am) or be really high up, like the saints. It is roughly the same with aesthetics; slang and rude dialect can be relished by a really literary taste, but not by a merely bookish taste. And when these cultivated cranks say that rustics do not talk of Nature in an appreciative way, they really mean that they do ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... theorists have so thoroughly mapped out the legitimate resources of the composer, and have so prescribed his course in nearly every possible position, that music is made almost more of a mathematical problem than the free expression of emotions and aesthetics. "Correct" music has now hardly more liberty than Egyptian sculpture or Byzantine painting once had. Certain dissonances are permitted, and certain others, no more dissonant, forbidden, quite arbitrarily, or on hair-splitting theories. It is as if one should write down in a book a number of charts, ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... point and the matter in general, I might confine myself to referring those interested to the writings of Dr. Valfrid Vasenius, lecturer on Aesthetics at the University of Helsingfors. In the thesis which gained him his degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Henrik Ibsen's Dramatic Poetry in its First stage (1879), and also in Henrik Ibsen: The Portrait of a Skald ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... 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, so strong is the ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... good rank as a poet, and was one of the very foremost of our aesthetics, was much older than we. The tall young man, who often walked as if he were absorbed in thought, seemed to us a peculiar and unapproachable person. His younger brother, Rudolf, on the other hand, was a cheery fellow, whose ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... drapes!! Yellow, s'help 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 ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... know that without a finger-post. 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
... 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. This, the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... useful to our purpose here to confine the discussion to the neglected qualities. As a rule, a durable, useful, and comfortable article is a beautiful one. At least it has the beauty of "grace," by which terms the old writers on aesthetics characterized perfect adaptation to purpose, and the beauty of what they called "homeliness," or, as we would now say, since this term has been perverted, of "hominess," the suggestion of adding to the pleasure ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... 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 at the foliage. Nothing impresses the mind in war ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Orleans society—that lively, sparkling epitome and relic of the old regime. He has good letters and a fair name, and mingles in the Mystick Krewe, that curious club, possible nowhere else, that has raised mummery into the sphere of aesthetics. Perhaps he has worn the gray, perhaps the blue. It is only in the very arcana of exclusive passion it makes much difference. But gray or blue, or North or South in birth, he is in every essential a Southerner, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... Satire, and Fable; Fortiguerri, Passeroni, G. Gozzi, Parini, Ginsti, and others. —7. Romances; Verri, Manzoni, D'Azeglio, Cantu, Guerrazzi, and others. —8. History; Muratori, Vico, Giannone, Botta, Colletta, Tiraboschi, and others.—9. Aesthetics, Criticism, Philology, and Philosophy; Baretti, Parini, Giordani, Gioja, Romagnosi, Gallupi, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... 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 ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... gave either no reasons, or very superficial ones, for its new departure. The elegant dissertations of Hurd and Percy, and the Wartons, seem very dilettantish when set beside the imposing systems of aesthetics propounded by Kant, Fichte, and Schelling; or beside thorough-going Abhandlungen like the "Laocooen," the "Hamburgische Dramaturgie," Schiller's treatise "Ueber naive and sentimentalische Dichtung," or the analysis of Hamlet's character ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... such like, 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 ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... this distinction always in the case of Dickens. Dickens is the great Cockney, at once tragic and comic, who enters abruptly upon the Arcadian banquet of the aesthetics and says, "Forbear and eat no more," and tells them that they shall not eat "until necessity be served." If there was one thing he would have favoured instinctively it would have been the spreading of the town as meaning the spreading of civilisation. And we should (I hope) all ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... Aristotle and the late Greek, Longinus will take—a single hexameter to illustrate a minute trick of style or turn of phrase, as equally he will choose a long passage or the whole "Iliad," the whole "Odyssey," to illustrate a grand rule of poetic construction, a first principle of aesthetics. For an example—'Herein,' says Aristotle, starting to show that an Epic poem must have Unity of Subject—'Herein, to repeat what we have said before, we have a further proof of Homer's superiority to the rest. He did not attempt to deal even with the Trojan ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Eager for color, for beauty, soon discontented With a world of dust and stones and flesh too ailing: Even before the question grew to problem And drove you bickering into metaphysics, You met on lower planes the same great dragon, Seeking release, some fleeting satisfaction, In strange aesthetics . . . You tried, as I remember, One after one, strange cults, and some, too, morbid, The cruder first, more violent sensations, Gorgeously carnal things, conceived and acted With splendid animal thirst . . . Then, by degrees,— Savoring all ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... farmer or peasant whose enthusiasm for the 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 Debussy ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost entirely superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; and I will add (since there is an aesthetics in all things), is much more handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp. Hemp is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... problem of bordering, or page-edge, effects. Books and bound volumes that are placed on a photocopy machine or a scanner produce page-edge effects that are undesirable for two reasons: 1) the aesthetics of the image; after all, if the image is to be preserved, one does not necessarily want to keep all of its deficiencies; 2) compression (with the bordering problem THOMA illustrated, the compression ratio deteriorated tremendously). One way to eliminate this more serious ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... 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
... for nothing, has come to enjoy himself; he needs beauty, d'you see—aesthete that he is! But all these girls, these daughters of the simple, unpretentious, great Russian people—how do they regard aesthetics? 'What's sweet, that's tasty; what's red, that's handsome.' And so, there you are, receive, if you please, a beauty of ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... Chinese dragons or the Gothic gargoyles or the goblinish old women of Rembrandt were in the least intended to be comic. Their extravagance was not the extravagance of satire, but simply the extravagance of vitality; and here lies the whole key of the place of ugliness in aesthetics. We like to see a crag jut out in shameless decision from the cliff, we like to see the red pines stand up hardily upon a high cliff, we like to see a chasm cloven from end to end of a mountain. With equally noble enthusiasm we like to see a nose jut out decisively, ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... an essay on "Fatalism among the Ancients," which showed a surprising brilliancy of expression and maturity of thought; and soon after he passed his examination for the doctorate of philosophy with the highest distinction. It is told that the old poet Hauch, who was then Professor of AEsthetics at the University, was so much impressed by the young doctor's ability that he hoped to make him his successor. And toward this end Dr. Brandes began to bend his energies. During the next five or six years he travelled on the Continent, spending the winter of 1865 in Stockholm, that of 1866-67 ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... 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 ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... the society around him, was making a bold stroke—had persuaded his kind-hearted, simple friend to believe him a sincere penitent, and to introduce him as such to the ladies at Gothlands, from whom he caught the talk most pleasing to them. At present it was all ecclesiastical aesthetics, and discontent with the existing system, especially as regarded penitence; by and by, when his hold should be secure, he would persuade the heiress that she had been the prime instrument in his conversion, and that she had gained ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I first put it on, "It is plain to the veriest dunce That every beauty Will feel it her duty To yield to its glamor at once. They will see that I'm freely gold-laced In a uniform handsome and chaste— But the peripatetics Of long-haired aesthetics, Are very much more to their taste— Which I never counted upon When I first put this ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... questions which were lately declared out of date and closed; hence its taste for problems of aesthetics and morality, its close siege of social and religious problems, its homesickness for a faith harmonising the powers of action and the powers of thought; hence its restless desire to hark back to ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... in Germany. But the merely means that he has everything in common with the educated Londoner—and a little over. His traditions are ours, his standards are ours, his ideals are ours. He is busied with the same problems of ethics, of aesthetics, of style, even of grammar. I had not been three days in New York when I found myself plunged in a hot discussion of the "split infinitive," in which I was ranged with two Americans against a recreant Briton who defended the collocation. "It is a mistake to regard ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... and action—just as we did not admire a rose the less because it could not help being fragrant and beautiful. Here we have a very palpable, but all the more significant confusion between things totally different—aesthetics and ethics. Our admiration for a rose is aesthetic; our admiration for goodness is ethical, and we give it with the implicit understanding that the quality we admire is the result of voluntary acts and decisions. All moral judgments imply this; and in practice we know ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... 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
... profound study of Aesthetics has among the Germans, by nature a speculative rather than a practical people, led to this consequence, that works of art, and tragedies more especially, have been executed on abstract theories, more or less misunderstood. It was natural that ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... 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
... true position of aesthetics, and holding that while the cultivation of them should form a part of education from its commencement, such cultivation should be subsidiary; we have now to inquire what knowledge is of most use to this end—what ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... important question of the binding of books, I shall have nothing to say of the history of the art, and very little of its aesthetics. The plainest and most practical hints will be aimed at, and if my experience shall prove of value to any, I shall be well rewarded for giving it here. For other matters readers will naturally consult some of the numerous manuals of ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... 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 ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci
... insulting to the ghostly Toledoan to smooth him out into picturesque harmony with Castillian dances, Gothic cloisters and Moorish songs, it is still worse to transform him into a rampant Idealist of the conventional kind. He belongs neither to the Aesthetics nor to the Idealists. He belongs to every individual soul whose taste is sufficiently purged, sufficiently perverse and sufficiently passionate, to enter the enchanted circle of his ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... 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 ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... and names of branches of learning come from the Greek. In fact, nearly all the terms of learning and art, from the alphabet to the highest peaks of metaphysics and theology, come directly from the Greek— philosophy, logic, anthropology, psychology, aesthetics, grammar, rhetoric, history, philology, mathematics, arithmetic, astronomy, anatomy, geography, stenography, physiology, architecture, and hundreds more in similar domains; the subdivisions and ramifications of theology as exegesis, hermeneutics, apologetics, polemics, ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... 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 ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... to Church—then walk—have 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
... apt comparison raised no smile on his listeners' faces, only Nejdanov remarked that if young people were fools enough to interest themselves in aesthetics, they deserved no pity whatever, even if ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... successors the Jewish system, with its mixture of ethics and ritual, came in collision with the ideas and practice of degenerate Greek culture,—pleasure-loving, nature-worshiping, sensual, with gymnastics and aesthetics, tolerant and tyrannical. The two systems were hostile alike in their virtues and vices. The Greek ruler put down with a strong hand the religious and patriotic scruples of his Jewish subject. The Jew bore persecution with the tough endurance of his race, then rose in ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... heavier 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, that the high temperature of the mouth favors germ ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... noblest specimens of man. He that is fierce as a bull, and yet tender-hearted like a young child—the greatest blasphemer on earth, and yet the most religious, or even the most superstitious, of men—he is not to be tied down by the rules of aesthetics, like a land-crab. His home is on the sea, as somebody has said or sung; he has nobody there to see him but himself, (if we may be excused the bull.) What does he care for dress? Only look at him standing by his gun, when broadside after broadside is pouring into the timbers of some sanguinary ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... far from being effeminate. He was found of aesthetics and anaesthetics, and his chief interests in life were beauty and ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... to terms of normal individuality, of character and mind as we know them in life. When we read Coleridge, Schlegel, and Gervinus, or even the admirable essay of Charles Lamb, or the eloquent appreciations of Mr. Swinburne, or such eulogists as Hazlitt and Knight, we are in a world of abstract aesthetics or of abstract ethics; we are not within sight of the man Shakspere, who became an actor for a livelihood in an age when the best actors played in inn-yards for rude audiences, mostly illiterate and not a little ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... Lechlade in the bright farm-waggon, on that day of pitiless rain. For there was going on in the churchyard the only thing I saw that day that seemed to me to strike a false note; a silly posing of village girls, self-conscious and overdressed, before the camera of a photographer—a playing at aesthetics, bringing into the village life a touch of unwholesome vanity and the vulgar affectation of the world. That is the ugly shadow of fame; it makes conventional people curious about the details of a great man's life and ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... been discussed under the head of aesthetic emotions. As to what rightfully belongs under the head of aesthetics is in dispute—writers on the subject varying tremendously in their opinions. Most of the recent writers, however, agree that the stimulus for aesthetic appreciation must be a sense percept or an image of some ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... 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 of "the general," that ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... typifying quietude, repose, calm, solemnity); The curved line: variety, movement; Man with Stone—V. Spitzer (Transitional Line, Cohesion); The Dance—Rubens (The ellipse: line of continuity and unity); Swallows—From the Strand (The diagonal: line of action; speed)] [Aesthetics of Line, Continued, Where Line is the motive and Decoration is the Impulse; Winter Landscape—After Photograph (Line of grace, variety, facile sequence); Line Versus Space (The same impulse with angular energy, The line more attractive than the plane); Reconciliation—Glackens ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... of articles on literature was contributed to the Encyclopedie by JEAN-FRANCOIS MARMONTEL. As early as 1719 a remarkable study in aesthetics had appeared—the Reflexions Critiques sur la Poesie et la Peinture, by the Abbe Dubos. Art is conceived as a satisfaction of the craving for vivid sensations and emotions apart from the painful consequences which commonly attend these in actual life. That portion of Dubos' work which treats ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... all, even in England, even in Germany and Russia, there are more adults than adolescents. As for the artist, he is preoccupied with problems that are so utterly unlike those of the ordinary adult man—problems of pure aesthetics which don't so much as present themselves to people like myself—that a description of his mental processes is as boring to the ordinary reader as a piece of pure mathematics. A serious book about artists regarded as artists is unreadable; and a book about artists regarded as lovers, ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... garden health. Both depend on the presence of large enough quantities of organic material in the soil. This organic matter holds a massive reserve of nutrition built up over the years by the growing plants themselves. When, for reasons of momentary aesthetics, we bag up and remove clippings from our lawn, we prevent the grass from recycling ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... mistook shining sand for gold; but he had the great advantage of not feeling himself responsible for the manners of the inhabitants he found there, and not thinking it needful to make them square with any Westminster Catechism of aesthetics. Best of all, he did not feel compelled to compare them with the Greeks, about whom he knew little, and cared less. He took them as he found them, described them in a few pregnant sentences, and displayed his specimens of their growth, and manufacture. ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... and so moulded the historical aspirations of Rome that the great patrician came to pride himself on his own ancestral connection with Greece, and the descent of his founder from the race whom Greece had conquered. Her philosophers ruled the speculations, as her artists determined the aesthetics, of all Roman amateurs. Her physicians held for centuries the exclusive practice of scientific medicine; while in music, singing, dancing, to say nothing of the lighter or less reputable arts of ingratiation, ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... transmutation, literally be the man 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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Commonwealth; whose earnest teaching pointed out to many a man his civic duty; and whose personal life is an incentive to high intellectual morality. By a score of books covering the various fields of rhetoric, aesthetics, political economy, philosophy, and religion, he has moulded public opinion in his generation. The same undaunted ambition keeps his eye bright now as then; the same keen brain grapples with vital problems; the same magnetic personality ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... 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 show that they are not expatriated, ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... in 1872 to New York to draw for Harper's WEEKLY. Other views than this, 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 ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... been translated into Italian more than once. After his return to Macchia followed some years of apparent sterility, but later on, and especially during the last twenty years of his life, his literary activity became prodigious. Journalism, folklore, poetry, history, grammar, philology, ethnology, aesthetics, politics, morals—nothing came amiss to his gifted pen, and he was fruitful, say his admirers, even in his errors, Like other men inflamed with one single idea, he boldly ventured into domains of thought where specialists fear to tread. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... the unloading of these works. Editions de luxe ... were published and sold by the picture dealers; ...every crafty device known to the picture trade was resorted to in order to discredit and destroy the heretofore universally accepted standards of aesthetics."[756] ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... individual life cannot be very clear at this point, but that there are involved fundamental problems of psychology, and perhaps divergent ways of thinking of history and society, and of such principles of philosophy at least as are implicated in aesthetics, and finally of the practical questions that are of most interest in these fields to-day, ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... Coppee's work than in M. de Maupassant's or in M. Daudet's or in that of almost any other of the Parisian story-tellers of to-day. In his tales we breathe a purer moral atmosphere, more wholesome and more bracing. It is not that M. Coppee probably thinks of ethics rather than aesthetics; in this respect his attitude is undoubtedly that of the others; there is no sermon in his song—or at least none for those who will not seek it for themselves; there is never a hint of a preachment. But for all that I have found in his work a trace of the tonic morality which inheres in Moliere, ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... synonymous with detesting the dramas of Sardou, and to be a Wagnerite involved a horror of Mendelssohn. It was only the uncultured who held their artistic and political creeds with the narrowness of Little Bethel, importing into thought and aesthetics the zealotry they had lost in religion. The book of Experience, thought I, is not an Encyclopaedia, with every possible topic neatly ranged in alphabetical order; 'tis no A B C Time Table, with the trains docketed for the enlightenment of the simple,'t is rather an Encyclopaedia torn into ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... 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, ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... our ancestors for their enthusiasm and the reasons given by us, moderns, is easily explained by our intense self-consciousness. We are deeply interested in our own states of mind: we are all psychologists now. From psychology springs the modern interest in aesthetics; those who care for art and the processes of their own minds finding themselves aestheticians willy-nilly. Now, art-criticism and aesthetics are two things, though at the present moment the former is profoundly influenced by the latter. By works of art we are thrown ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell |
