"Aesthetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but rather that which is beautiful in itself irrespective of moral considerations. Ethics, on the other hand, is concerned with personal worth as expressed in perfection of will and action. Conduct may be beautiful and character may afford Aesthetic satisfaction, but Ethics, in so far as it is concerned with judgments of virtue, is independent of all thought of the mere beauty or utility of conduct. Aesthetic consideration may indeed aid practical morality, but it is not ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... the table or desk is one he can spread his legs under in natural fashion, and rest his elbows upon with ease; in short, that the furniture conforms to his bodily requirements, as the chair and bed of the "wee teenty bear" suited exactly the little old woman of Southey's tale. Last of all, the aesthetic pleasure, the appreciation of beauty by the mind, decides the choice in cases of equal utility and comfort. The artistic considerations are so many that furniture has become a branch of art, like sculpture or painting, with a large literature ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... 1819, and is described as a faithful untiring pastor to an evangelical congregation, who offered his life a willing sacrifice. "Duty" might be the watch-word of all who bear the name of Overbeck. Lastly, and not least, appears the pious, learned, and aesthetic father, Christian Adolph. Though not in holy orders, he concerned himself variously with religion in the wide and vital sense of the word, holding it a divine presence, the rule of life, and the ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... while such a contemplation of, or oscillation between, mutually destructive tenets may for a time minister to some kind of aesthetic enjoyment, the healthy mind cannot permanently find satisfaction while thus suspended in mid-air; nor are we appreciably advanced by the temper which, after pointing out some alleged fundamental antinomy, "quietly ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... Europe the first clear conception of religion, as implied in monotheism, and a rigidly defined moral law, founded upon the will of Jehovah. The basis of morals among the Latins was political, among the Greeks aesthetic, and among the Hebrews it was ...
— Hebrew Literature
... mercantile pursuits, Enoch sullenly forswore stock-jobbing and finance, and declared his intention of indulging his rural tastes and becoming a farmer. Fine cattle and poultry of all kinds, heavy wheat-crops, and well-stored corn-cribs engrossed his thoughts, to the entire exclusion of abstract aesthetic speculation, of operatic music, and Pre-Raphaelitism; while the sight of one of his silky short-horned Ayrshires yielded him infinitely more pleasure than the possession of all Rosa Bonheur's ideals could possibly have ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... worn. The more shapely men displayed their symmetry in trunk hose, and here were puffs and slashes, and there a cloak and there a robe. The fashions of the days of Leo the Tenth were perhaps the prevailing influence, but the aesthetic conceptions of the far east were also patent. Masculine embonpoint, which, in Victorian times, would have been subjected to the tightly buttoned perils, the ruthless exaggeration of tight-legged tight-armed evening dress, now formed but the basis ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... design made a grand and sombre background against which the maiden he had sketched that morning was all the more luminous. Hitherto everything connected with her change of character had been not only conventional, but had appealed to his aesthetic temperament as singularly beautiful. The quaint garden with its flowers, brook, and allegorical tree were associations that harmonized with Ida's loveliness, while Mr. Eltinge, who had rendered such an immeasurable ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... spend his last years in ease and quiet in the country town in which he was born. Our sympathetic critics, even when, like Dr. Furnivall, they know absolutely all the archaeological facts as to theatrical life in Shakspere's time, do not seem to bring those facts into vital touch with their aesthetic estimate of his product; they remain under the spell of Coleridge and Gervinus.[141] Emerson, it is true, protested at the close of his essay that he "could not marry this fact," of Shakspere's being a jovial actor and manager, "to his verse;" but that deliverance has ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... urban and local governing bodies, we find, have long since been superseded by great provincial municipalities for all the more serious administrative purposes, but they still survive to discharge a number of curious minor functions, and not the least among these is this sort of aesthetic ostracism. Every year every minor local governing body pulls down a building selected by local plebiscite, and the greater Government pays a slight compensation to the owner, and resumes possession of the land ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... gamut of promising tints is being run, he looks, and, lo! the grand tulip has shrivelled and faded. Again and again a fresh spray is fetched in, but when the blooming-season is over he is still balked and dissatisfied. The wild, Diana-like purity and the half-savage, half-aesthetic grace have not wholly escaped him, but the color,—ah I there is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... instincts. My most ambitious piece was a picture of General Winfield Scott standing beside his horse and some piece of artillery, which I copied from a print. It was of course an awful daub, but in connection with it I heard for the first time a new word,—the word "taste" used in its aesthetic sense. One of the neighbour women was calling at the house, and seeing my picture said to Mother, "What taste that boy has." That application of the word made an impression on me ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... certain point, a certain time, we are usefully employed in cultivating our tastes, in refining them, and in defining them. We cannot be too strenuous in defining them; and, as long as we are young, the catholicity of youth will preserve us from a bigoted narrowness. In aesthetic matters—and I imagine we both understand that we are dealing with these—the youngest youth has no tastes; it has merely appetites. All is fish that comes to its net; if anything, it prefers the gaudier of the finny tribes; it ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... together with abundant fighting and quite a phenomenal amount of swooning, which seem to reflect a strange medley of Celtic, pagan, and mythological traditions, and Christian legends and mysticism, alternate in a kaleidoscopic maze that defies the symmetry which modern aesthetic canons associate with every ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... to have fewer and better toys than more of an inferior quality. The thing to keep in mind is that a toy is neither an artistic model, an aesthetic ornament, nor a mechanical spectacle, but should be a stimulus to call forth self-activity, invention, ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... beautiful. The girl of the period, when she writes to her friend, usually dips the handle of her sunshade in a basin of ink, and scrawls characters monstrous in size and form, an insult to the paper-maker's art and shocking to man's aesthetic feelings. Now from the first Fan had spontaneously written a small hand, with fine web-like lines and flourishes, which gave it a very curious and delicate appearance; for, unlike the sloping prim Italian hand, it was all ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... opposition was apt to be found only among those whom Abraham Lincoln called the "silk stockings," and much of it excited almost as much derision among the plain people as the machine itself excited anger or dislike. Very many of Mr. Platt's opponents really disliked him and his methods, for aesthetic rather than for moral reasons, and the bulk of the people half-consciously felt this and refused to submit to their leadership. The men who opposed him in this manner were good citizens according to their lights, prominent in the social ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... world as decidedly in the direction of originality. But little attention is paid to the types of building drawn from the works of by-gone ages or to the mannerisms of the more recent past. Progress in the development of the elements of taste and beauty, and the concretion of 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 ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... the brief response, when she had suggested varying the colours in order to cultivate the aesthetic instinct in ...
— A Princess in Calico • Edith Ferguson Black
... men are with their tongues. Puns, quotations, conceits, critical estimates of the rarest insight and suggestiveness, chase each other over his pages like clouds over a summer sky; and the whole is leavened with the sterling ethical and aesthetic good sense that renders Charles Lamb one of ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... references to poetry and art in his philosophical writings, as, for example, in the opening paragraphs of the 'Prolegomena,' the essay on fiction here reprinted is Green's only venture in the field of aesthetic criticism. When we remember that it was one of his earliest productions, having been submitted for the Chancellor's prize in 1862, when Green was but 26 years of age, the maturity of both style and contents seems remarkable. It is in fact a monumental piece of literary criticism, sufficient to ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... stop to chat cheerily with the conductor? Does he dwell upon the luxurious aspect of his conveyance? Does the comfort which he has just secured fill his heart with gladness? Does the plush covering of the seat appeal to his aesthetic sense? No mere woman may ever hope to know, for he grudgingly gives the conductor five pennies, one of them badly battered and the date beaten out of it—and ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... original ballads of the Trojan War, but these ballads moulded together, and wrought into the forms of a more civilised and cultivated age. It is difficult to conjecture what the form of the old Roman ballad may have been, and certain, that whatever they were, they could no more satisfy the aesthetic requirements of modern culture, than an ear accustomed to the great organs of Freyburg or Harlem could relish Orpheus's hurdy-gurdy, although the airs which Orpheus played, if they could be recovered, might perhaps be executed with great effect on ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... strong supporter of the aesthetic dress movement," he said, doubtless alluding to the graceful freedom of her ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... some girl, her hair a touzled mop, Plain-featured, round in shoulder, unpoetic, With hygienic boots that flatly flop— Old style aesthetic. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 7, 1893 • Various
... pertaining to his wardrobe it is very evident that he has profited to no small extent by Afghanistan being adjacent territory to British India; but his semi-civilized ambition has not yet soared into the aesthetic realm of socks; doubtless he considers Northampton-made shoes sufficiently luxurious ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... of the hexagonal prism has anticipated all the geometers in the problem of the economy of space and matter; if the Epera and the mollusc have invented the logarithmic spiral and its transcendent properties; if all creatures "inspired by an aesthetic which nothing escapes, achieve the beautiful" (12/11.), surely human art, which can but imitate and remember, has only to employ to its profit and transfigure into ideal images the natural beauties so ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... was a competent official in the Bank and a successful business man, but his tastes were aesthetic and literary, and his leisure time was accordingly devoted to such pursuits as the collection of old books and manuscripts. He also read widely in both classic and modern literatures. The first book ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... perception, emotion, understanding, action, all elements of human life sublimed by thought, shall reappear in concrete forms as beauty. This being so, the logical criticism of art demands that we should not only estimate the technical skill of artists and their faculty for presenting beauty to the aesthetic sense, but that we should also ask ourselves what portion of the human spirit he has chosen to invest with form, and how he has conceived his subject. It is not necessary that the ideas embodied in a work ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... furnishings, from the aesthetic point of view colour is the first thing to be considered. As a rule it should follow that of the walls, a continuous effect of colour with variation of form and surface being a valuable and beautiful thing to secure. To give the full value of variation—where the walls are plain ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... under the inspiration of a sense of the beautiful. The enjoyment of a thought is partly an intellectual enjoyment; you may even reason yourself into it; but the enjoyment of style and language is purely an aesthetic enjoyment, susceptible, indeed, of culture, but springing from an inborn sense of harmony. To extend this enjoyment to a foreign language, you must bring that language close to you, and form with it those intimate relations between thought ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... history, he would be intolerable by any but such readers or spectators as those on whom the figments or the photographs of self-styled naturalism produce other than emetic emotions. Here again the noble instinct of the English poet has rectified the aesthetic unseemliness of an ignoble reality. This "Brachiano" is a far more living figure than the porcine paramour of the historic Accoramboni. I am not prepared to maintain that in one scene too much has not been sacrificed to immediate vehemence of effect. The devotion of the discarded wife, who ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... cowboys; when, on your way home, you have deliberately disobeyed orders and loafed a long way behind the other members of your group in order to watch the pretty sunset, and, as a punishment for this aesthetic indulgence, have been overtaken by darkness and compelled to land in strange country, only to have your machine immediately surrounded by German soldiers; then, having taken the desperate resolve that they shall not have possession of your old battle-scarred avion as well as of your person, ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... would say, "if I went away from a gallery without a crick in my back and a blinding headache that I had no realization of my aesthetic privileges. Now-a-days I am willing to confess that I find too much of everything. Besides, all these pictures have been so overpraised! Let us find some pleasure that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... Christianity will be found to have been Christian men. Religion is a form of consciousness. It will be those who have had experience to which that consciousness corresponds, whose judgments can be supposed to have weight. That remark is true, for example, of aesthetic matters as well. To be a good judge of music one must have musical feeling and experience. To speak with any deeper reasonableness concerning faith, one must have faith. To think profoundly concerning Christianity one needs to have had the Christian ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... long suspected that tears were a mere aesthetic refreshment with Miss Caroline. I had never known her weaken to them when there seemed to be far better reasons for it than the present ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... intellectual. Pluck is the first;—it always is the first quality. Then enthusiasm. Then patience. Then pertinacity. Then a fine aesthetic faculty,—in short, good taste. Then an orderly and submissive mind, that can consent to act in accordance with the laws of Art. Circumstances, too, must have been reasonably favorable. That well-known skeptic, the King of tropical Bantam, could ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... often is, this question becomes little more than a conflict between aesthetic preferences. Matter is gross, coarse, crass, muddy; spirit is pure, elevated, noble; and since it is more consonant with the dignity of the universe to give the primacy in it to what appears superior, spirit must be affirmed as the ruling principle. To treat abstract ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... Afrite-Chef of all delight— Of all delectables conglomerate That stay the starved brain and rejuvenate The Mental Man! The aesthetic appetite— So long enhungered that the "inards" fight And growl gutwise—its pangs thou dost abate And all so amiably alleviate, Joy pats his belly as a hobo might Who haply hath obtained a cherry pie With ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... not all. A certain buoyancy, hitherto unsuspected, crept into her manner, as the corpuscles multiplied in her veins—an archness. She talked more, and threw up a spray of playfulness. And, with a growing energy, she began to revise the exquisite aesthetic balance of Dunstone's house. She even ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... appalling to one's aesthetic sense was the clerk himself. Squatting behind his wretched desk, Elias Droom peered across the litter of papers and books with snaky but polite eyes, almost as inviting as the spider who, with wily but insidious decorum, draws ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... reasons why the motor-boat should be viewed by the city fathers with suspicion. One is purely aesthetic, yet not the less weighty for that, since the prosperity of Venice in her decay resides in her romantic beauty and associations. The symbol of these is the gondola and gondolier, indivisible, and the only conditions under which they can be preserved are quietude and leisure. ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... moderate share; and what we admire in their lives is a sort of apotheosis of ourselves. Almost everybody in our land, except humanitarians and a few persons whose youth has been depressed by exceptionally aesthetic surroundings, can understand and sympathise with an admiral or a prize-fighter. I do not wish to bracket Benbow and Tom Cribb; but, depend upon it, they are practically bracketed for admiration in the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "Girofle-Girofla" and "Fra Diavola." Better than that, these were the days of "Pinafore" and "The Pirates of Penzance" and of "Patience." This last was needed in the Midland town, as elsewhere, for the "aesthetic movement" had reached thus far from London, and terrible things were being done to honest old furniture. Maidens sawed what-nots in two, and gilded the remains. They took the rockers from rocking-chairs and gilded the ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... illogical—one result of the moral weakness which was allied with his aesthetic sensibility. Putting aside the worthlessness of current reviewing, the critic of an isolated book has of course nothing to do with its author's state of mind and body any more than with the condition of his purse. Reardon would have granted this, ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... way he spoke pleased her again for she smiled bewitchingly, effacing me completely. I think we're going to be very good friends,' she said, moving up on the divan a little nearer to him. 'Of course, it takes more than the aesthetic appeal to bring two sensible people together,' she murmured. 'It is not the eye which must catch the reflection, but the mind. You've thought a good deal—and studied? Men are so vapid nowadays.' She sighed. ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... imperfect word a value that it does not possess. When we do this our judgment of poetry is inert; we are not getting pleasure from his work because it is poetry, but for quite other reasons. It may be a quite wholesome pleasure, but it is not the high aesthetic pleasure which the people who experience it generally believe to be the richest and most vivid of all pleasures because it is experienced by a mental state that is more eager and masterful than any other. Nor is our judgment acute when we praise a poet's work because it chimes ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater
... to be good, partly as a matter of convenience for us, partly for morally aesthetic reasons, and partly because we want to be in a kind of world where what is good in ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... faith. The Protestant Churches proper, their spirit being more emotional, feel the doctrinal movement less. But they are not unmoved, as they show by relaxation of tests and inclination to informal if not formal union, as well as by increasing the aesthetic and social attractions of their cult. Wild theosophic sects are born and die. But marked is the increase of scepticism, avowed and unavowed. It advances probably everywhere in the track of physical science. ...
— No Refuge but in Truth • Goldwin Smith
... batsman made the match appear even more remote. It was like the comment of a passer-by upon a well-designed figure in a tapestry. It was an expression of his own aesthetic pleasure, and bore no relation to ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... windows of the inner room and crosses to the porch. He rings the electric bell outside, then enters through the swing doors R.C. BETTY enters R. and moves up at back of settee R. to DEVENISH by the swing doors. He is carrying a large bunch of violets and adopts a very aesthetic attitude. ...
— Belinda • A. A. Milne
... installation formed a striking feature in the case of many of the systems of public schools exhibited at St. Louis. The highest results were achieved where the plan of the exhibit had been carefully worked out with full regard to aesthetic effect and educational significance. In the formation of these plans women had very largely participated, and in one instance, namely, that of the Minnesota educational exhibit, the entire installation was ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... the crouching figure, then in the head of the triumphant youth above him, finally in his completed torso. But each stage is finished relatively. Completion is relative to distance; the Brutus is finished or unfinished according to our standpoint, physical or aesthetic. Moreover, the treatment is not partial or piecemeal; the statue was in the marble from the beginning, and is an entity from its initial stage: in many ways each stage is equally fine. The paradox of Michael Angelo's technique ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... make a better use of the opening you afford me if I were to direct your mind to a loftier theme than that of art. It would appear to be unseasonable to go in search of a code for the aesthetic world, when the moral world offers matter of so much higher interest, and when the spirit of philosophical inquiry is so stringently challenged by the circumstances of our times to occupy itself with the most perfect of all works of art—the establishment ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... kindergarten, and it is like a little piece of the millennium. "Everything is so very pretty and charming," says the visitor. Yes, so it is. But all this color, beauty, grace, symmetry, daintiness, delicacy, and refinement, though it seems to address and develop the aesthetic side of the child's nature, has in reality a very profound ethical significance. We have all seen the preternatural virtue of the child who wears her best dress, hat, and shoes on the same august occasion. Children are tidier and ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... replied; "and left you my museum, my shooting-box, all my unpublished MSS. and the care of my aesthetic aunt, Lady Maria. You will not find her troublesome; she lives on crystallised violets and ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... understand it, he wished to inculcate the idea that one generation lays the foundation for succeeding generations. The rough affairs of life very largely fall to the earlier generation, while the next one has the privilege of dealing with the higher and more aesthetic things of life. This is true of all generations, of all peoples; and, unless the foundation is deeply laid, it is impossible for the succeeding one to have a career in any way approaching success. As regards the coloured men of the South, as regards the coloured men of the United States, ...
— The Future of the American Negro • Booker T. Washington
... at Albano, and the society consisted chiefly of donkeys. But the ladies enjoyed themselves nevertheless, and felt better and better every day; for early hours, much exercise, and no aesthetic tea, soon set them up after the ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... long and low and rambling. In parts at least it must have been quite a hundred years old, and even the modern portion was not built according to the ideas of the present day, for in 1870 people were not so aesthetic as they are now, and the lines of beauty and grace were not ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... these hidden faculties or susceptibilities of which I have been speaking. In the notes of witching music, in the numbers of poesy, in the sight of beauty, either of nature or of art, either aesthetic or moral, these silent powers recognize a faint approximation to that beauty with which they will have to do in that world where they shall be called into action: they too recognize the kindred spirit, and, springing forward to meet ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was lost upon Florence. She sat upon the fence, her gaze unfavourably though wistfully fixed upon a sign of no special aesthetic merit ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... passages, every thing must be left to the suggestion of one's feelings. Perhaps another time I may make three bars, just as inspiration and genius may intimate. Those are aesthetic surprises. Henselt, Moscheles, Thalberg, and Clara Wieck do not execute in that manner, and consequently can produce no effect, and do ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... the purpose of this book, I shall not ask the reader to accompany me far afield in the region of aesthetic philosophy or musical metaphysics. A short excursion is all that is necessary to make plain what is meant by such terms as Absolute music, Programme music, Classical, Romantic, and Chamber music and the like, which not only confront us continually in discussion, but stand for things which we ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... (rudimentariness of the tail vertebrae) are next discussed. Darwin is inclined to attribute the nakedness of man, not to the action of natural selection on ancestors who originally inhabited a tropical land, but to sexual selection, which, for aesthetic reasons, brought about the loss of the hairy covering in man, or primarily in woman. An interesting discussion of the loss of the tail, which, however, man shares with the anthropoid apes, some other monkeys and lemurs, forms the conclusion of the almost ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... poetry, seems to point to a more constant study of our national literature. Byron was his chief master in those early poetic days. He never ceased to honour him as the one poet who combined a constructive imagination with the more technical qualities of his art; and the result of this period of aesthetic training was a volume of short poems produced, we are told, when he was only twelve, in which ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... of car to cause cardiac disturbance in a connoisseur. It was, in fact, of an early vintage, high-set, chunky, brassily aesthetic, and given to asthmatic choking on occasion; but Luke did not know this. He knew only that it spelled luxury beyond all dreams. It belonged, in short, to his Uncle Clem Cheesman, the rich butcher who lived in the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... with an audience like the Athenian, whose aesthetic sensitiveness was doubtless far greater than that of any modern assembly, delivery counted for much. Aeschines' fine voice was a real danger to Demosthenes, and Demosthenes himself spoke of delivery, or the skilled acting of his part, as the all-important condition ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... as in itself it really is," has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever, and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. The objects with which aesthetic criticism deals—music, poetry, artistic ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... be freely confessed that, from an aesthetic point of view, the Englishman, devoid of high lights and shadows, coated with drab, and super-humanly steady on his feet, is not too attractive. But for the wearing, tearing, slow, and dreadful business of this ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... head we shall have to examine the possible methods of obtaining pure food in such security and equality of supply as to avoid both waste and famine: then the economy of medicine and just range of sanitary law: finally the economy of luxury, partly an aesthetic and ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... great works! All, all were there, Each title that he knew, In vellum, in morocco rare Of deep aesthetic blue. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... those men thought about God. Whether either the hard blighting religion of Ann's father, or the aesthetic comfortable religion of her uncle "mattered" ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... or two purely Protestant books of missionary enterprise, found in a box in her dead mother's room, had had all the charms of poetry and adventure. It was all new, therefore all delightful, even when the Protestant sentiments shocked her as being not merely untrue, but hurting that aesthetic sense never remote from the mind of the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... awaited the result of his mission, he had time, on the way home, after abandoning himself to a general sense of triumph, to dwell specifically on the various aspects of his achievement. Viewed materially and practically, it was a thing to be proud of; yet it was chiefly on aesthetic grounds—because he had done so exactly what he had set out to do—that he glowed with pride at the afternoon's work. For, after all, any young man with the proper "pull" might have applied to Orlando G. Spence ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... walked excitedly up and down the dingy room, whose sole pretension in an aesthetic way was the breeze-blown "yachting girl" of a soap company's calendar, sailing her bounding craft ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... alarming to see the quantity that some of the Bretons managed to appropriate in an incredibly short space of time at the table d'hote. H.C., who was accustomed to the aesthetic table of his aunt, Lady Maria, more than once had to retire to his room, and recover his composure, and wonder whether his own appetite would ever return to him. And once or twice when I unfeelingly drew attention to an opposite neighbour and wondered what Lady Maria would ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... true, with the light of his torch now extinguished; But remember that death is not aesthetic, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... and their remembrance stinks in our nostrils! One thing only we know in their favour,—they dress all in one colour; their blueness alone makes them sufferable in this nineteenth century of ours, and whenever they depart from this great principle of aesthetic unity, we will bring in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... Young man, if this were a performance, you would be dealt with by our aesthetic policewoman. Vulgar comments made in public upon works of art ...
— The Harlequinade - An Excursion • Dion Clayton Calthrop and Granville Barker
... and showed himself an ardent student of reality in the service of some lofty intellectual ideal. Following and closely observing Nature, he was also sensitive to the light and guidance of the classic genius. Yet, at the same time, he violated the aesthetic laws obeyed by that genius, displaying his Tuscan proclivities by violent dramatic suggestions, and in loaded, overcomplicated composition. Thus, in this highly interesting essay, the horoscope of the mightiest Florentine artist was already ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... highest degree of aesthetic merit: every lover of the beautiful must wish it to be true. It gives a vast unified survey of the operations of nature, with a technical simplicity in the critical assumptions which makes the wealth of deductions ...
— The Einstein Theory of Relativity • H.A. Lorentz
... whatever about, and with whom he has no sympathy," interrupted Flavia. "Ah, my dear, you could not be expected to understand. You can't realize, knowing Arthur as you do, his entire lack of any aesthetic sense whatever. He is absolutely nil, stone deaf and stark blind, on that side. He doesn't mean to be brutal, it is just the brutality of utter ignorance. They always feel it—they are so sensitive to unsympathetic ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... must take time and a little pains to discover the intellectual. Comparing him with an American, I really thought that our national paleness and lean habit of flesh gave us greatly the advantage in an aesthetic point of view. It seemed to me, moreover, that the English tailor had not done so much as he might and ought for these heavy figures, but had gone on wilfully exaggerating their uncouthness by the roominess of their garments: he had evidently no idea of accuracy of fit, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... enjoyed the blue haze of the billiard-room at the Conservative Club. The interior of the drawing-room realized very well Peake's ideals. It was large, with two magnificent windows, practicably comfortable, and unpretentious. Peake despised, or rather he ignored, the aesthetic crazes which had run through fashionable Hillport like an infectious fever, ruthlessly decimating its turned and twisted mahogany and its floriferous carpets and wall-papers. That the soft thick pile under his feet would wear for twenty years, and that the Welsbach incandescent ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... we ever find a systematic idolizing of all that is classic merely. Far from it. Modern writers are not neglected. In this particular a genuine service is done to critical literature. It often seems as if literary lecturers and historians were attacked by an aesthetic presbyopy. For them the present age never produces anything worth even a passing remark. The masterpieces they notice must be old and time-honored. Not so in the present studies on the passions. Ponsard finds his place side by side with older names. After an appreciative notice ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... eccentric in 1856 because I was led into encamping; but it was an excellent thing for me in various ways. A young man given up to such pursuits as literature and art needs a closer contact with common realities than aesthetic studies can give. The physical work attendant upon encamping, and the constant attention that must be given to such pressing necessities as shelter and food, give exactly that contact with reality that educates us in readiness of resource, and they have the incalculable advantage of making one ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... incompetent criticism in matters artistic, and no one is too ignorant to volunteer an opinion. It is sufficient to have visited half-a-dozen Italian towns, and to have read a few pages of fashionable aesthetic literature—no other education is needed to fit the intelligent young critic for his easy task. The art of paradox can be learned in five minutes, and practised by any child; it consists chiefly in taking two ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... expression of a great nation's intellect, as insignificant. These fables of the Gods were the result of the universal sentiments of religion, aspiration, intellectual action, of a people, whose political and aesthetic life had become immortal; and we must leave off despising, if we would begin ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... classical poets and artists? This is a dark and thorny sphere, into which one cannot even bear a light without dread; but even here we shall conceal nothing from ourselves; for sooner or later the whole of it will have to be reformed. In the public school, the repulsive impress of our aesthetic journalism is stamped upon the still unformed minds of youths. Here, too, the teacher sows the seeds of that crude and wilful misinterpretation of the classics, which later on disports itself as art-criticism, and which is nothing but bumptious barbarity. Here ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... reveal the fact that this sensation is aroused always in the same place, and in the same manner. The beauty of the voice may be temporarily affected in the case of a singer, or an instrument of less aesthetic tone-quality be used by the instrumentalist, but the result is ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... unphilosophical, because it assumes a certain theory of beauty, which the most competent modern thinkers are too far from accepting, to allow its assumption to be quite judicious...Why should we only find the aesthetic quality in birds wonderful, when it happens to coincide with our own? In other words, why attribute to them conscious aesthetic qualities at all? There is no more positive reason for attributing aesthetic ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Lasca—they do not begin to be.' That pleased her again. All she was thinking of was the number of furs her aesthetic father took the trouble to keep on hand, not their value. I could have told her that those masses of rich furs constituted wealth—or would in my country—but she would not have understood that; those were not the kind of things that ranked as riches with her ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to be hoped that the town will never be inveigled into scrapping this memorial, which for quaintness and unconscious humour is almost unsurpassed. A subject of derisive merriment to the tripper and of shuddering aversion for those with any aesthetic sense, it is nevertheless an interesting link with another age and is not very much worse than some other specimens of the memorial type of a more recent date. It has lately received a coat of paint of an intense black and the cross-headed wand that the monarch ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... future, and what fortune I may find assigned me. I have bought the cottage, and intend to build a handsome house there some day, where you and Mr. Campbell and I can live peacefully. You shall twine your aesthetic fancies all about it, to make it picturesque enough to suit your fastidious artistic taste. Come and save me from what you consider my worse than vandalian proclivities. I came here simply and solely in the ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... of his art, Drer's personality is at once so imposing and so attractive, and has been so endeared to us by familiarity, that something of this personal attachment has been transferred to our aesthetic judgment. The letters from Venice and the Diary of his journey in the Netherlands, which form the contents of this volume, are indeed the singularly fortunate means for this pleasant intercourse with the man himself. They reveal Drer as one of the distinctively modern men of the Renaissance: ...
— Memoirs of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries - [This is our volunteer's translation of the title] • Albrecht Durer
... the invention of iron-smelting. Immense progress was now possible in the various arts of peace: house-building, road-making, construction of vehicles, the making of all sorts of tools. By these tools man was now able to express his aesthetic nature as never before. Implements of war also became more ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education
... In general, her aesthetic tastes had remained unchanged since the days of Mendelssohn, Landseer, and Lablache. She still delighted in the roulades of Italian opera; she still demanded a high standard in the execution of a pianoforte duet. Her views on painting were decided; ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... is an affectation of aesthetic and literary sympathies, combined with a proud disdain ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... to come to tea with him, usually in a pleasant tea-room over a fruit-shop in Tottenham Court Road, and he would discuss his own point of view and hint at a thousand devotions were she but to command him. And he would express various artistic sensibilities and aesthetic appreciations in carefully punctuated sentences and a large, clear voice. At Christmas he gave her a set of a small edition of Meredith's novels, very prettily bound in flexible leather, being ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... the hill travellers with even the merest embryonic aesthetic taste were forced to pause. For there the valley with its sweet loveliness lay in full view before them. Far away to the right, out of an angle in the woods, ran the Mill Creek to fill the pond which brimmed gleaming to the ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... over the sun in a splendid effort painted such sublime sunsets above Mount Elgon as I had never dreamed of. And the music of hundreds of African birds along the river's edge greeted us with the cool, delightful dawn. Purely from an aesthetic standpoint, our days on the Nzoia were ones never to be forgotten, while from the standpoint of the man who loves to see wild game and doesn't care much about killing it, the bright, clear days on the Nzoia were memorable ones. The Roosevelt party went its ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... turn the stomach of even the most romantic man, and force him, in sheer self-respect, to renounce kissing as he has renounced leap-frog and walking on stilts. Only a woman (for women are quite devoid of aesthetic feeling) could ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... Paragot's invitation sat one on each side of Blanquette, who, what with the unaccustomed bloodshed of the spectacle and the gallantry of her neighbours, passed an evening of delirious happiness. In those days I had an aesthetic soul above the 'Eventreurs de Paris,' and I made fun of it to Paragot, whose thoughts were far away. When I perceived this, I kept my withering sarcasm to myself, and realised that a flattened man cannot be blown like a bladder into permanent rotundity even by the ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... high idea by which plot, incident, and character are swayed. In one scene, however—the dialogue between Antonius and the Jew—we find a degree of historic truth, a reproduction in dramatic form of the sublime spirit of Hebrew poetry, and an aesthetic color which, had it been maintained throughout, would have neutralized our introductory remarks. This scene is of itself a real poem. Herodias is, we may add, consistent, and bravely accented in every thought ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... consumed with hunger, he might well have lingered in complacent admiration of himself. But hunger such as he had never felt before rose superior to his aesthetic sense, and he left his weed-shelter in ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... Morris excelled. He educated the popular taste by bringing forth the beauties of the simpler forms of the floral and vegetable world; he delighted especially in displaying the acanthus in varied conventional forms. Every rug he designed bears witness to his enthusiasm for harmony. Too aesthetic, some critics declare him to have been; but no one can deny the importance of his creations, for England needed to be awakened to a knowledge of her own inability to appreciate artistic decoration of the home, especially by means of the productions of the loom. It was this very ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... so it is in art; and at the sight of the beautiful remains of old classical times comes again over one the feeling that here too reigns an eternal law that is always true to itself, the law of beauty and harmony, of the aesthetic. This law is given expression to by the ancients in so surprising and overpowering a fashion, in so thoroughly complete a form that we, with all our modern sensibilities and with all our power, are still proud, when we have done any specially fine piece of work, to hear that it is almost ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... entertainment to generations of cultured refined persons, who have never paused in their reading to give a thought to the author of their enjoyment, the sagacious Prince to whose action they owe their emotional treat. His royal Highness's reward was his own aesthetic satisfaction. "By Heaven, this is more like," he rapturously exclaimed as he laid down the last volume of the collected works; "this verse has got some stuff in it." And on the occasion of his next birthday he conferred the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... for the most part the deliberate creations of scientific writers; while the very men who should concern themselves with this matter stand aloof, and leave it to those who by nature and profession are least sensitive to the aesthetic requirements. We would therefore encourage those who possess the word-making faculty to exercise it freely; and we hope in the future that suggestions from our members may help men of science and inventors in their search for new ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 1 (Oct 1919) • Society for Pure English
... of Ornament. The author was one of her friends, and the decorator of the rooms in which her Sunday receptions were held. She praised the book very highly. The first paragraph of this notice betrays her appreciation of the aesthetic movement in England, and her sympathy with its objects and spirit. The moral value of aesthetic influences is characteristically expressed. The influence of the environment, as she understood it, is here seen. The largeness ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... steadiness with which they confronted torture and death, but they knew no measure in the ridicule which they heaped upon the men by whom they were daily murdered in droves. The rhetoric comedies were not admirable in an aesthetic point of view, but they were wrathful and sincere. Therefore they cost many thousand lives, but they sowed the seed of resistance to religious tyranny, to spring up one day in a hundredfold harvest. It was natural that the authorities should ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... that a public school is not within reach of it. With generous help from the East, Western colleges are elevating and directing Western thought, and men busy making States yet find time to live manly lives and to lend a hand. All this may not be aesthetic, but it is virile, and it leads up and not down. Great poets, and those who so touch the hearts of men that the vibration goes down the ages, must often find their inspiration when wealth brings leisure to a class, or ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... little Frenchman—when they are nice they are charming—and a German doctor, a big blonde man, who looks like a great white bull; and two Americans, besides mother and me. One of them is a young man from Boston,—an aesthetic young man, who talks about its being "a real Corot day," etc., and a young woman—a girl, a female, I don't know what to call her—from Vermont, or Minnesota, or some such place. This young woman is the most extraordinary specimen of artless Yankeeism that I ever ...
— A Bundle of Letters • Henry James
... its mere classification of brute force, with the bold recognition of human equality which ended in the socialism of Wyclif and the Lollards. Tintoret found himself facing a new caste-spirit in the Renascence, a classification of mankind founded on aesthetic refinement and intellectual power; and it is hard not to see in the greatest of his works a protest as energetic as theirs for the common rights of men. Into the grandeur of the Venice about him, her fame, ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... to him (if you think it wise) when I send him this paper, saying that my writing is more a matter of God's disposition than of man's proposal; that I had from Roads upward ever intended to make a little budget of little papers all with this intention before them, call it ethical or aesthetic as you will; and thus I shall leave it to him (if he likes) to regard this little budget, as slowly they come forth, as a unity in its own small way. Twelve or twenty such essays, some of them mainly ethical and expository, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lasting, and when at length he found himself so far successful in his worldly aspirations as to be tolerably sure of their complete fulfilment; when at length he found time to examine spiritual matters apart from their direct bearing upon his social altitude, his aesthetic sense—which by this time had necessarily developed—he was struck by the exquisite beauty of Christianity, and thus, as a shallow philosophy had nearly induced him to become an atheist, a deep and sensual spirit of sentimentality nearly made ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... immensely. There was certainly a marble-like hue about the skin. The whites of my eyes were distinctly stained, but not so intensely as had been the case with Mr. Herbert Wain, showing that I had not suffered from the Blue Disease as long as he had. But when I began to study my reflection from the aesthetic point of view, ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... white against a thunder-laden sky. Grand and pathetic at once, for it stands for something that we have parted with. What was the outward and stately form of a mighty idea, a rich system, is now little more than an aesthetic symbol. It has lost heart, somehow, and its significance only exists for ecclesiastically or artistically minded persons; it represents a force no longer in the front ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... would have made it, as presumably the newest French novel—and evidently, from the attitude of the reader, "good"—consort happily with the special tone of the room, a consistent air of selection and suppression, one of the finer aesthetic evolutions. If Mrs. Dyott was fond of ancient French furniture and distinctly difficult about it, her inmates could be fond—with whatever critical cocks of charming dark-braided heads over slender sloping shoulders—of modern ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... 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 ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... merely entertain, or it may so distinctly attempt to set forth ideas clearly that the giving of pleasure is entirely neglected. In poetry the entertainment side is never thus subordinated. Poetry always aims to please by the presentation of that which is beautiful. All real poetry produces an aesthetic effect by appealing to our aesthetic sense; that is, to our ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... English language (English prose) was to me what French must be to the majority of English readers. I read for the sense and that was all; the language itself seemed to me coarse and plain, and awoke in me neither aesthetic emotion nor even interest. "Marius" was the stepping-stone that carried me across the channel into the genius of my own tongue. The translation was not too abrupt; I found a constant and careful invocation ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... Paris hospital; this, too, was projected on a greater scale than anything of the kind ever before known, and also required millions. But in the erection of these two buildings the emperor's determination was distinctly made known, that with the highest provision for aesthetic enjoyment there should be a similar provision, moving on parallel lines, for the relief of human suffering. This plan was carried out to the letter: the Palace of the Opera and the Hotel-Dieu went on with equal steps, and the former was not allowed ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... apple-tree, which had only just shed its blossoms on the turf below. She had hardly done so when one of the distant doors opening on the gravel path flew open, and another maiden, a slim creature garbed in aesthetic blue, a mass of reddish brown hair flying back from her face, also stepped out ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... qualities are the same, we are accustomed to speak of them not as similar but the same. In order that a comparison may be effective either for ornament or for use, there must be, between the two acts or objects, a similarity in some points, and a dissimilarity in others. The comparison for moral or aesthetic purposes is like an algebraic equation in mathematical science; if the two sides are in all their features the same, or in all their features different, you may manipulate the signs till the sun go down, but you will obtain no useful ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... less with the grandeur of the aspect of the material world. The modifications impressed upon the moral and intellectual character of man by the physical aspects of nature, is a theme more properly belonging to those who have cultivated the aesthetic side of humanity. The poet and the artist can alone appreciate, in the fullness of their humanizing influence, the potent effects of these aesthetic inspirations. The lake districts in all Alpine countries seem to impress ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... chooser and at the best he will dedicate himself to a joyless and unattractive puritanism, or surrender himself to a rudderless voyage across the ocean of life. Religion at school must touch with its refining power the impulses, aesthetic and intellectual, that become powerful in late boyhood and early manhood. If, as so often is the case, it ignores their existence, or endeavours to starve them, they may well assert themselves with fatal power, to coarsen and degrade the ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... most remarkable and interesting aesthetic study of a single Shakespearean character ever produced is Maurice Morgann's Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff, which was written in 1774, and first published in 1777. This excellent piece of criticism deserves ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... resources of her transcendent art were strained to keep up with the march of womanhood—that was all. If we may believe du Maurier's art, the note of beauty never entirely disappeared from fashion until the aesthetic women of the eighties seemed to take in hand their own clothes. The aesthetic ladies failed, as the movement to which they attached themselves did, for beauty is something attendant upon life, arriving when it likes, going away very often when everyone ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... Terry had so complained of when we first came—that they weren't "feminine," they lacked "charm," now became a great comfort. Their vigorous beauty was an aesthetic pleasure, not an irritant. Their dress and ornaments had not a ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... values; the romantic blur of his early poetic vision clarifying into the strong definiteness of the Real. Assuredly he could now no longer write those nebulous, elusive word-harmonies. Nor for him the mere aesthetic toying, the dainty piece of colour-work; but poetry that should throb with vitality and humanness. From dream poetry he had passed to dream life. Now that he had won his way to true life, was he not, too, to win his way to ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... elbow, he remarked the photograph of a jockey who was just then engrossing public affection. What did all this mean? Formerly, he had attributed every graceful feature of the room to Constance's choice. He had imagined that to her Mr. Palmer was indebted for guidance on points of aesthetic propriety. Could it ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... were not to study that they might develop their powers of reasoning, store their minds, and enlarge their horizons—but that they might pass some infernal examination or other, ad majorem Smelliae gloriam; they were not to practise the musical art that they might have a soul-developing aesthetic training, a means of solace, delight, and self-expression—but that they might "play their piece" to the casual visitor to the school-room with priggish pride, expectant of praise; they were not to be Christian for any other reason than ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... high dignity and purity and conscience that women have,—take them in the mass. They give over to habits and pleasures like great boys. People talk about the extravagance of women. But men are equally so, only their extravagance takes a different turn. A woman's is aesthetic; a man's is gross. She buys fine clothes and furniture. He panders to his bodily appetites. Which is worse? Women love men, and wish to be loved by them, and are miserable if they are not. So the wife lets her husband do twenty things which he ought not to do, which ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... greatest, a pottering and peddling fancy for discovering beauties in the most insignificant; that he lacks the exclusiveness and the fastidiousness of intellectual aristocracy, the fervour and rapture of aesthetic passion. To this, one can answer little more than, "It may be so." Certainly the critic of this kind will very rarely be able to indulge in the engouement which is the apparent delight of some ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... volumes must appear incommensurate. Nor can one forget, that, with respect to the detached pieces, they have mostly been called forth by special occasions, and reflect particular external objects, as well as distinct grades of inward culture; while it is equally clear, that temporary moral and aesthetic maxims and convictions prevail in them. As a whole, however, these productions remain without connection; nay, it is often difficult to believe that they emanate from ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... terrapin, is in as high favor for his culinary excellence, as are the women for beauty and hospitality. To gratify the healthy appetite of the human animal this bird was doubtless sent by a kind Providence, none the less mindful of the creature comforts and necessities of mankind than of the purely aesthetic senses. ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography [July 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... eccentric; severely practical, they become dreamers and loiterers upon the hillside. The sea, the wood, the meadow cannot compete with the mountain in egging on the mind of man to incredible efforts of expression. The songs, the rhapsodies, the poems, the aesthetic ravings of mountain worshippers have a dionysian flavour which no ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... upon which they ate, played chess or wrote were six inches or a foot high. A Japanese of the old style thinks the cumbrous furniture in our Western dwellings impertinent and unnecessary. In the eye of aesthetic Japanese a room crowded with luxurious upholstery is a specimen of barbaric pomp, delighting the savage and unrefined eye of the hairy foreigners, but shocking to the purged vision and the refined taste of one ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... position is not that of the writers on art most in view at the present day. It is the negation of the so-called scientific criticism, and also 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 ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... feeling,—except in so far as it might suit the wants of people who were not sufficiently educated to enjoy the higher tone, and more elaborate language of the Church of England services. It was thus that they spoke to each other, quite in an aesthetic manner. ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... right; and due reflection on his teachings, instead of diminishing our reverence and our wonder, adds all the force of intellectual sublimity to the mere aesthetic intuition of the ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... her silken hair was prettily waved by its so recent washing; and the excitement of this fateful meeting had flushed delicately her pale cheeks. She appealed alike to the Honourable John Ruffin's aesthetic and protective instinct. Only her strong London accent distressed him: he feared lest it might corrupt the speech of Pollyooly and the Lump, which, owing to the care of their Aunt Hannah, who had for many years been housekeeper for Lady Constantia ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... brother, Fichte. Nor does Hegel, or Schelling, or Schlegel, or Novalis escape his pursuit, but he hunts them all down, and takes what is needful to him, out of them, as his trophy. Schiller is his king of singers, although he does not much admire his "Philosophical Letters," or his "Aesthetic Letters." But his grandest modern man is the calm and plastic Goethe, and the homage he renders him is worthy of a better and a holier idol. Goethe's "Autobiography," in so far as it relates to his early days, is a bad ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... in its details, was too delicate to work up successfully the heavy material of the German importations. In a review of his 'Life of Jesus,' by A. P. Peabody, in the N. A. Review, after a merited tribute of praise and respect to the talented author, occurs the following: 'AEsthetic considerations weigh more with him than historical proofs, and vividness of conception than demonstration. So far is he from needing facts to verify his theories, that he is ready to reject the best authenticated facts, if they would not flow necessarily ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various |
