"Aesthetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Wendover's drawing-room conveyed to a stranger was a general idea of homeliness and comfort. It was not fine, it was not aesthetic, it was not even elegant. A great bay window opened upon the garden, a large old-fashioned fireplace, with carved wooden chimney-piece faced the bay. The floor was polished oak, with only an island of ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... he determined to erect a grist mill; but the stream that ran through the clayey channel of the Seine petite was too feeble to turn the ponderous wheels. So he was obliged to move twelve miles to the east, where flowed another small stream bearing the aesthetic name "Grease River." This was not large enough either for his purposes, so with stupendous enterprise he cut a canal nine miles long, and through it decoyed the waters of the little Seine into the arms of the "Greasy" paramour. At this mill ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... in the adult in these scientific times has been so much acted on and changed by dry light that it is scarcely recognizable in what is somewhat loosely or vaguely called a "feeling for nature": it has become intertwined with the aesthetic feeling and may be traced in a good deal of our poetic literature, particularly from the time of the first appearance of Lyrical Ballads, which put an end to the eighteenth-century poetic convention and made the poet free to express what he really felt. But the feeling, whether expressed ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... Christendom dearer to Heaven, and more conducive to Heaven's design in rendering earth the wrestling-ground and not the resting-place of man, than is that of the Brahmin, ever seeking to abstract himself from the Christian's conflicts of action and desire, and to carry into its extremest practice the aesthetic theory, of basking undisturbed in the contemplation of the most absolute beauty human thought can reflect from its ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... indignant if he had been asked to be satisfied with an Art Master, when he had advertised for a Master of Arts. His irritation would have increased if the Art Master had promised him a sea-piece and had brought him a piece of the sea; or if, during the decoration of his house, the same aesthetic humourist had undertaken to procure some Indian Red and had ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... filling of a sandwich. In meats, salted meat takes the lead in popular favor; when sliced the meat should be cut across the grain and as thin as possible, and several bits should be used in each sandwich, unless a very small, aesthetic sandwich be in order. Tongue and corned beef, whether they be used in slices or finely chopped, should be cooked until they are very tender. When corned beef or ham is chopped for a filling, the sandwich ...
— Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties - With Fifty Illustrations of Original Dishes • Janet McKenzie Hill
... graver 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 ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... about the stage in diaphanous costumes, with conventional mimicry and arm action, is classic or beautiful is a mistake; the term aesthetic may cover, but not redeem it. There is not even the art of the ordinary ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... 398; Whitlocke (ed. 1853), II. 115; Sir Thomas Herbert's Memoirs of the last Two Years of the Reign of King Charles I..(1813), 13-15. Herbert was a kinsman and protege of the Pembroke family, who had travelled much in the East, published an account of his travels, and had acquired quiet and aesthetic tastes. He had been in various posts of Parliamentary employment, procured for him by Philip, Earl of Pembroke; but, having accompanied that Earl when he went to Newcastle as one of the Commissioners to take charge of the King, he had attracted ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... "AEthiopica" of Heliodorus, were freaks of Nature, an odd growth rather than a distinct species, and are also to be contrasted rather than compared with the later novel. Such as they are, moreover, they were produced under Christian as much as classic influences. The aesthetic Hellenes admitted into their literature nothing so composite, so likely to be crude, as the romance. Their styles of art were all pure, their taste delighted in simplicity and unity, and they strictly forbade a medley, alike in architecture, sculpture, and letters. The history of their development ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... applauds all originality; but it helps no one, troubles itself for no one, bears no one's burden; in a word, it lacks charity, the great Christian virtue. To his mind perfection lies in personal nobility, and not in love. His keynote is aesthetic and not moral. He ignores sanctity, and has never so much as reflected on the terrible problem of evil. He believes in the opportunity of the individual, but neither in liberty nor in responsibility. He is a stranger to the social and political aspirations of the multitude; he has no more thought ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... earlier Victorian period, the more limited, partly educated, and still very homogeneous enfranchised class, had a certain habit of thinking; its tranquil assurance upon most theological and all moral and aesthetic points left political questions as the chief field of exercise for such thinking as it did, and, as a consequence, the dignified newspapers of that time were able to discuss, and indeed were required to discuss not only specific situations but general principles. ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... object of educational endeavor. Physical growth is an equally essential part of child life. Therefore the direction of physical growth becomes just as vital a part of the educational machinery. Aesthetic and spiritual growth require like emphasis. Each phase of child life receives ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... city was the capital did not produce the greatest names in Chinese history, but it witnessed the perfection of Chinese culture, and the background of impending doom heightens the brilliancy of this literary and aesthetic life. Such a society was naturally eclectic in religion but Buddhism of the Ch'an school enjoyed consideration and contributed many landscape painters to the roll of fame. But the most eminent and perhaps the most characteristic thinker of the period was Chu-Hsi ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... of decoration is superb, and adds beauty and distinction to every subtle line of the architecture. He pays attention, also, to the minor details of decorative effect, and takes pains with the ornaments and embroideries; while his use of gold, and embossing with gesso, add much to the aesthetic charm of his work, and proves that he could, when necessary, subordinate his love of realism ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... far from strong. Mentally, I worked indefatigably. The means of deciding the study question that, after long reflection, seemed to me most expedient, was this: I would compete for one of the University prizes, either the aesthetic or the philosophical, and then, if I won the gold medal, my parents and others would see that if I broke with the Law it was not from idleness, but because I really had ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... be dragged into this circle of dissipation. It is possible to go to church with substantially the same object with which one goes to a place of amusement—in the hope of being excited, of having the feelings stirred and the aesthetic sense gratified or, at the least, consuming an hour which might otherwise lie heavy on the hands. With shame be it said, there are churches enough and preachers enough ready to meet this state of mind half-way. With the fireworks of rhetoric or the witchery of music or ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... who are keenly susceptible to the aesthetic aspects of things but are not given to reflection stand in striking contrast to the epitome of the popular wisdom expressed in the skeptical adage that there is ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... See Les Arts a la Cour des Papes pendant le XV. et le XVI. Siecles, E. Muentz, Paris, Thorin, 2me Partie. M. Muentz has done good service to aesthetic archaeology by vindicating the fame of Paul II. as an employer of artists from the wholesale abuse heaped on him by Platina. It may here be conveniently noticed that even the fierce Sixtus IV. showed intelligence ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... simply, and to take pride in the simplicity. They considered the magnificence of modern camps and clubs vulgar, and as savoring somewhat of riches newly acquired; and they experienced an almost aesthetic satisfaction in the contrast between the rough cleanliness of certain little lodges along the Chesapeake and its tributary tide-water streams, and the elegance of the Charles Street mansions which they had, for ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... little who did errands, so only they were done. Generally, the one store-keeper bought our bonnets when he went to Boston for his yearly stock of goods, and our one bonnet lasted in those days a year, being retrimmed for winter weather. I remember, too, when our one store-keeper, mingling in the aesthetic conversation at one of our parties, where Art was on the tapis, made a comical mistake, but one natural enough, too,—stating that he could buy, and had bought, Vandykes for ten dollars. We were not thinking of exactly the same kind of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... their distinction again: The Vates Prophet, we might say, has seized that sacred mystery rather on the moral side, as Good and Evil, Duty and Prohibition; the Vates Poet on what the Germans call the aesthetic side, as Beautiful, and the like. The one we may call a revealer of what we are to do, the other of what we are to love. But indeed these two provinces run into one another, and cannot be disjoined. ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... again, my text suggests conduct, and not verbal worship. You and I, in our adherence to a simpler, less ornate and aesthetic form of devotion than prevails in the great Episcopal churches, are by no means free from the danger which, in a more acute form, besets them, of substituting participation in external acts of worship for daily righteousness of life Laborare est ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... order to keep the thing safe I knotted it up in the tail of my shirt, which waggled out of the seat of my breeches. It was given to me by a beautiful lady, who, I remember, smelled like all the perfumes of Araby. She awakened my aesthetic sense by the divine and intoxicating odour that emanated from her. Since then I have never met woman so—so like a scented garden of all the innocences. To me she was a goddess. I overheard her prophesy ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... gleeful satisfaction the overwhelming grandeur of the disaster that had happened to her father. The active old man, a continual figure of the streets, had been cut off in a moment from the world and condemned for life to a mattress. She sincerely imagined herself to be filled with proper grief; but an aesthetic appreciation of the theatrical effectiveness of the misfortune was certainly stronger in her than any other feeling. Observing that Mrs. Lessways wept, she also drew ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... show generally fenced fields, terrace farming on mountain sides, irrigation canals, fertilized soils, well trimmed shade trees and beautiful flower gardens,[968] proof that the cultivation of the ground has advanced to the aesthetic stage, as it has in insular Japan. In Tonga the coco-palm plantations are weeded and manured. Here, after a devastating war, the victorious chief devotes his attention to the cultivation of the land, which soon assumes a beautiful and flourishing appearance.[969] In Tongatabu, which is described ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... 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
... 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 ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... in the neighbourhood of City Hall Park and Broadway that evening, awoke with a start from his meditations to find himself being addressed by a young lady. The young lady had large grey eyes and a slim figure. She appealed to the aesthetic ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... men. "Art for art's sake" and "Art for subject's sake." There are these two extreme positions to consider, and it will depend on the individual on which side his work lies. His interest will be more on the aesthetic side, in the feelings directly concerned with form and colour; or on the side of the mental associations connected with appearances, according to his temperament. But neither position can neglect ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... my side (I am afraid I am a terribly candid friend) sometimes spoils its cause by going in for too much. There are other forms of culture beside physical science; and I should be profoundly sorry to see the fact forgotten, or even to observe a tendency to starve, or cripple, literary, or aesthetic, culture for the sake of science. Such a narrow view of the nature of education has nothing to do with my firm conviction that a complete and thorough scientific culture ought to be introduced into all schools. By this, however, I do not mean that every schoolboy ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 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 ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... of Dante? Little but bitter conflicts, racial and religious; faithless rebellions, both in states and in individuals, against the Christian regimen; worldliness in the church, barbarism in the people, and a dawning of all sorts of scientific and aesthetic passions, in themselves quite pagan and contrary to the spirit of the gospel. Christendom at that time was by no means a kingdom of God on earth; it was a conglomeration of incorrigible rascals, intellectually more or less Christian. We may see the same thing under different circumstances ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... glance, but 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... residence in Concord I had driven up with some friends to an aesthetic tea at Mr. Emerson's. It was in the winter, and a great wood-fire blazed upon the hospitable hearth. There were various men and women of note assembled, and I, who listened attentively to all the fine things that were said, was for some time scarcely aware of a man ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... claim the vague tribute of his spirit. Then fell the flash by which he saw, deeply concealed in his bosom and disguised with a host of spiritual wrappings, what he uncompromisingly identified as the artistic bias, the aesthetic point of view. The discovery worked upon him so that he spent three days without consummated prayer at all, occupied in the effort to find out whether he could yet indeed worship in purity of spirit, or how far the paralysis of the ideal of mere beauty had ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... 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 guided in the choice of an author, as he intimated, rather by her ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... 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 result: it is only when they are in some of their terms the ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... art-master, I of course accepted as from a highly cultured aesthetic source; but fear that, from want of true poetic light and art culture, I did not quite appreciate or realize it in the interior, though to me the exterior outline and architecture were always soft ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... the brief response, when she had suggested varying the colours in order to cultivate the aesthetic instinct ...
— A Princess in Calico • Edith Ferguson Black
... better. The Princess was reputed to be fond of music and literature, to be a patroness of actors and artists; and she really did take an interest in these "questions," even to an enthusiastic degree—and even to a pitch of rapture which was not altogether simulated. She indubitably did possess the aesthetic chord. Moreover, she was very accessible, amiable, devoid of pretensions, of affectation, and—a fact which many did not suspect—in reality extremely kind, tender-hearted and obliging.... Rare qualities, and therefore ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... suite, the glass bell shades, the round centre table, and all the other stuffy misconceptions so firmly established by the civilisation of the nineteenth century, I discovered the authentic marks of the old English aesthetic—whitewashed walls and black oak. And the dresser, the settles, the oblong table, the rush-bottomed chairs, the big chest by the side wall, all looked sturdily genuine; venerably conscious of the boast that they had defied the greedy collector and ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... from Boston was speedily checked. On the 6th Andrews was still in Boston, and making up his mind to stay on account of his property, but still anxious to secure a pass for his wife, whose personal fears—she was an aesthetic person, an amateur artist whose landscapes Lord Percy had admired—were greater than her interest in her husband's safety. She did safely get away, amid the miserable procession that her husband describes. ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... 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. We are confronted ...
— No Refuge but in Truth • Goldwin Smith
... enjoyed keenly the privilege of daily association with high-minded and refined women; their eager activity of intellect stimulated him, their exquisite ethereal grace and their delicately chiseled beauty satisfied his aesthetic cravings, and the responsive vivacity of their nature prepared him ever new surprises. He felt a strange fascination in the presence of these women, and the conviction grew upon him that their type of womanhood was superior to any he had hitherto known. ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... appointed Dora arrived, and was duly shown into the little cottage drawing-room, of which the decoration hovered between the avowedly devout and the economo-aesthetic. ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... simplicity in his creations, with the natural tendency of his clear intelligence toward the truth, and with the frankness of his observation, the great novelist was always disposed to pass over to realism with arms and munitions; but his aesthetic inclinations were idealistic, and only in his latest works has he adopted the method of the modern novel, fathomed more and more the human heart, and broken once for all with the picturesque and with the typical personages, to embrace the earth ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... which realism is making to-day against effete romanticism.... The romantic of that day and the real of this are in certain degree the same. Romanticism then sought, as realism seeks now, to widen the bounds of sympathy, to level every barrier against aesthetic freedom, to escape from the paralysis of tradition. It exhausted itself in this impulse; and it remained for realism to assert that fidelity to experience and probability of motive are essential conditions of a great ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... head just above it, now almost entirely concealed by a thick curtain of leaves, no longer poured forth the sparkling stream that used to fall into it with a musical murmur. This little grotto, with its fountain and statue, bore witness to former wealth; and also to the aesthetic taste of some long-dead owner of the domain. The marble goddess was in the Florentine style of the Renaissance, and probably the work of one of those Italian sculptors who followed in the train of ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... by Pater, a Watts portrait, or a Dulwich Cuyp, a feeling which I can only call a passionate intellectualism, a loosening of corporeal encumbrances. My friend will not carp because I seem to place my love for my mistress in a category with a Dutch landscape and an aesthetic ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... own 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
... gentlemen, I hope to attain the ideal of all true horticulturists, e. g., "To make our country more beautiful and fruitful and thereby help to serve the aesthetic and physical needs of ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... the turns; and red-nosed comedians were lauded to the skies for their sense of character; fat female singers, who had bawled obscurely for twenty years, were discovered to possess inimitable drollery; there were those who found an aesthetic delight in performing dogs; while others exhausted their vocabulary to extol the distinction of conjurers and trick-cyclists. The crowd too, under another influence, was become an object of sympathetic interest. With Hayward, Philip had disdained humanity in the mass; he adopted the attitude of ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... teachers, the government supervision extending only to the moral not to the scientific qualification of the schoolmaster. Grammar, music and gymnastics, to which Aristotle adds drawing, as a means of aesthetic cultivation, were the common subjects of education at schools and gymnasia; also reading, writing and arithmetic. The method of teaching how to write consisted in the master's forming the letters, which the pupils ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... about Mlle. Malo were equally unfruitful. I went to the address Rechamp had given me, somewhere off in Passy, among gardens, in what they call a "Square," no doubt because it's oblong: a kind of long narrow court with aesthetic-looking studio buildings round it. Mlle. Malo lived in one of them, on the top floor, the concierge said, and I looked up and saw a big studio window, and a roof-terrace with dead gourds dangling from a pergola. But she wasn't there, ...
— Coming Home - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... who had apparently been reading to her mother when the visitors arrived, was a tall girl with fair cendre hair. The simplicity of the cut of her dress and its pale green color showed artistic sympathies of the old aesthetic kind. The maintained amiability of her expression and manner indicated her life's task of smoothing down feelings ruffled by her mother's asperities, and of oiling the track ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... much to transform their mother's tedious task into a fine art and helped her to regard it with dignity. Certainly its influence on the characters of her children was inestimable. Not alone did it answer their craving for beauty, but far better than this aesthetic gratification was the education it gave them in thoughtfulness and unselfishness. Consideration for their mother, restraint, independence, all emerged out of the yards of foolish gauze and ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... track. I am lunching to-day with Nancy Smallwood, who has a new craze. You remember at one time it used to be keeping parrots—and then she went through a phase of distributing orchids through the slums of Whitechapel, to improve the recipients' aesthetic sense. She only gave that up, I have always understood, when she ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... its being Sunday and wet—would have been sufficient to detract from the attractive merits of any English town; how much more, therefore, from those possessed by the great cosmopolitan metropolis of Transatlantica? This city is in bad weather a hundred- fold more desolate than London, in an aesthetic sense, and that is saying a good deal; and, on a Sunday, through the absence of any Sabbatarian influences and the working of teetotal tastes, it is more outwardly dull and inwardly vicious than any spot ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... collectively planless and individually absorbing, it became apparent that there was in the vast mass of people a long, smothered passion to make things. The world broke out into making, and at first mainly into aesthetic making. This phase of history, which has been not inaptly termed the 'Efflorescence,' is still, to a large extent, with us. The majority of our population consists of artists, and the bulk of activity in the world lies no longer with ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... the hangings at the window were of most delicate and careful choice. No rich drawing-room could show more taste in its arrangements, or have a more soothing effect on a mind to which the sense of aesthetic fitness ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... 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 ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... edifice. The 'supremacy of conscience'[575] means with him that the 'moral sentiments' form a separate class. They are the feelings with which we contemplate voluntary actions in general, and therefore those aroused by the character and conduct of the agent. Mackintosh thus takes an aesthetic view of morality. We have a 'moral taste' or perception of beauty. The same qualities which make a horse beautiful make him also swift and safe, but we perceive the beauty without thinking of the utility, or rather ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... was the need for prettiness which brought them there. Rather the need for some thing to throw things to. No one of the initiate can sit in front of Nature's most wonderful effect, the sea, without wishing to throw stones into it, the physical pleasure of the effort and the aesthetic pleasure of the splash combining to produce perfect contentment. So by the margin of the pool the same desires stir within one, and because ants' eggs do not splash, and look untidy on the surface of the water, there must be a gleam of gold and silver to put the ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... Story, to Chief Justice Marshall and Justices Thompson, Duval, and McLean, and was invited to dine with them. It is not known whether Justice Story told him —as he told Edmund Quincy—that the Court was so aesthetic that they denied themselves wine, except in wet weather. "But," added the commentator on the Constitution, "what I say about wine, sir, gives you our rule, but it does sometimes happen that the Chief Justice will say to me, when the cloth is removed, 'Brother ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... future in the dry-goods business," Roger Button was saying. He was not a spiritual man—his aesthetic sense ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... 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 ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... dress, and my high black silk to fall back upon for another. Worn open in front, with a lace handkerchief and a locket, it does really very nicely. Then I've got three afternoon dresses, the grey you gave me, the sage-greeny aesthetic one, and the peacock-blue with the satin box-pleats. It's a charming dress, the peacock-blue; it looks as if it might have stepped straight out of a genuine Titian. It came home from Miss Wells's this morning. Wait five minutes, like a dear boy, and I'll run and put it on and ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... of silence. Each lady looked, without much interest, at the view. Mrs. Failing's attitude towards Nature was severely aesthetic—an attitude more sterile than the severely practical. She applied the test of beauty to shadow and odour and sound; they never filled her with reverence or excitement; she never knew them as a resistless trinity that may intoxicate the worshipper with joy. If she liked ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... work curious or intricate rather than beautiful. There is, nevertheless, beauty of a kind in Chinese bowls of jade, and there is dignity in some of the pieces of rock-crystal, but the bulk of the carving done in wood, horn and ivory does not deserve a moment's serious thought from the aesthetic point of view. The few fine specimens may be referred to the earlier part of the Ming dynasty when Chinese art in general was sincere and simple. After the middle of the 15th century there set in the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... advisable to reach the fairground thus early, to see the sheep before they are penned; they can be much better inspected in the open than when packed close together, and a more reliable opinion of their condition can be formed. From the aesthetic point of view the grand old shepherds interested me most, dignified, patriarchal men, with a reserve of strength of character evident in their rugged features, and the patience and hardihood that takes little heed of exposure to every variety ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... 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 it occupies. The idea would strike us at first as simply whimsical, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... of these higher alpine flowers is especially pleasing to our own aesthetic instincts, and markedly conspicuous to us as observers, why not also especially attractive and conspicuous to the insect whose mission it is to wander from flower to flower over the pastures? The answer to this question ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... the amber[3] of the truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free[4] and may call a spade a spade.[5] It cannot, even if it would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the contemporary groove into the open fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like schoolboys out of school. And it is in talk alone that we can ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... crispness. This effect of the volume, for the eye, 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 French authors. Nothing bad passed for ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... rather claimed, a comparative insensibility to excellence of that kind. Upon some faults, often combined with a literary temperament, he was perhaps inclined to be rather too severe. He could feel nothing but hearty contempt for a man who lapped himself in aesthetic indulgences, and boasted of luxurious indifference to the great problems of the day. Such an excess of sensibility, again, as makes a man nervously unwilling to reveal his real thoughts, or to take part in a frank discussion of principles, would be an obstacle ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Paris" with a curious whole-heartedness. Here and there we find evidence — for instance, in the first two sonnets—that he was not blind to its seamy side. But on the whole he appears to have seen beauty even in aspects of it for which it is almost as difficult to find aesthetic as moral justification. The truth is, no doubt, that the whole spectacle was plunged for him in the glamour of romance. Paris did not belong to the working-day world, but was like Baghdad or Samarcand, a city of the Arabian Nights. How his imagination transfigured it we ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... beautiful through these bars?" I reflected as I walked. "Is not this the effect of the aesthetic law of contrasts, according to which azure stands out prominently beside black? Or is it not, perhaps, a manifestation of some other, higher law, according to which the infinite may be conceived by the human mind only when ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... Protestant churches, to combine with poetry and music in expressing the religious life of man. For the intellect alone is inadequate either to express that life as it exists, or to call it into existence where it does not exist. The tendency to ritual in our time is a tendency not to substitute aesthetic for spiritual life, though there is probably always a danger that such a substitution may be unconsciously made, but to express a religious life which cannot be expressed without the aid of aesthetic symbols. The work of the ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... print the daily smatterings of commonplace people, are especially a cunning means for robbing from the aesthetic public the time which should be devoted to the genuine productions of art for ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... man's personal characteristics must contain some estimate of his aesthetic sense. This was not very strongly developed in Sydney Smith. He admired the beauties of a smiling landscape, such as he saw in the Vale of Taunton, and hated grimness and barrenness such as he remembered at Harrogate. "I thought it the most heaven-forgotten country under the sun ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... the Rue Balzac. The house was not large, it was what might now be described as a "bijou residence," but though out of repair, it had been decorated with the utmost magnificence by Beaujon, and Balzac's discriminating eye quickly discerned its aesthetic possibilities. ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... who, while not feeling that any moral principle is immediately involved in the matter of diet, yet would like to be relieved from the necessity of eating flesh, possibly on aesthetic grounds, or it may be from hygienic reasons, or in some cases, I hope, because they would willingly diminish the sufferings involved in the transport and slaughter of animals, inevitable as long as they are ...
— New Vegetarian Dishes • Mrs. Bowdich
... few years with the word 'Art' in its German sense; with 'High Art,' 'Symbolic Art,' 'Ecclesiastical Art,' 'Dramatic Art,' 'Tragic Art,' and so forth; and every well-educated person is expected, nowadays, to know something about Art. Yet in spite of all translations of German 'AEsthetic' treatises, and 'Kunstnovellen,' the mass of the British people cares very little about the matter, and sits contented under the imputation of 'bad taste.' Our stage, long since dead, does not revive; our poetry is dying; our music, like our architecture, only reproduces ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... inspire an average Russian more than the sincere democratic hand of an American. A dose of American optimism and active spirit is the best toxin for free Russia. On the other hand, the American needs just as much Russian emotionalism, aesthetic culture and mystic romanticism, as he can ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... Rome, he remains outside, while the form disappears within. He is able, however, to see all that goes on, in the crowded, hushed interior. It is high mass. He has been carried at once from the little chapel to the opposite aesthetic pole. From ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... inequality among plants of the same species, perfectly well defined, and never lost sight of by us juvenile connoisseurs. If we failed to find the same true of other vines and bushes, which for our purposes bore blossoms only, the explanation is not far to seek. Our perceptions, aesthetic and gastronomic, were unequally developed. We were in the case of the man to whom a poet is a poet, though he knows very well that there are ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... the Baptist Church." What an impracticable fellow! Art and literature, among the common people, only tends to cause mischief. They are to remain our privilege. We know the demands of good taste and we can afford to pay for the aesthetic pleasures of life. The majority is unable to do that; besides, to teach them the beauty of art only means to make them discontented and rebellious ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... of the first chapter—made a certain impression upon my imagination, and were (I think) my earliest initiation into the magic of literature. I was incapable of defining what I felt, but I certainly had a grip in the throat, which was in its essence a purely aesthetic emotion, when my Father read, in his pure, large, ringing voice, such passages as 'The heavens are the works of Thy hands. They shall perish, but Thou remainest, and they all shall wax old as doth a garment, and as a vesture shalt Thou fold them up, and they shall be changed; but ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... was unthinkable that any state of his own should ever remotely resemble. He read more vividly, more critically, as has been hinted, the appearances about him; and they did nothing so much as make him wonder at his aesthetic reaction. He hadn't known—and in spite of Kate's repeated reference to her own rebellions of taste—that he should "mind" so much how an independent lady might decorate her house. It was the language of the house itself that spoke to him, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... firm foothold upon the most essential branches of knowledge, from which he may advance steadily and securely when left to himself; frequently warning him that this is but the beginning of great things, and that the abstrusities of wisdom, wherein is all its aesthetic beauty and its holiness—all its moral good—lies far beyond, where it can only be reached by the most patient, persevering, and unremitting toil; not forgetting, at the same time, to point out the glorious ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Sunday at her place in the country, I broke an old habit and said I'd go. When last I had visited her house she worshipped success in the arts, and her recipe was to have a few successes to talk and a lot of us unsuccessful persons to listen. At that time her aesthetic was easy to understand. "Every great statue," she said, "is set up in a public place. Every great picture brings a high price. Every great book has a large sale. That is what greatness in art means." Her own brand of talk ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... emerges, from the patriarchal state: ethnology shows how he lived, grew, and improved in that state. The conclusive arguments against the imagined original civilisation are indeed plain to everyone. Nothing is more intelligible than a moral deterioration of mankind—nothing than an aesthetic degradation—nothing than a political degradation. But you cannot imagine mankind giving up the plain utensils of personal comfort, if they once knew them; still less can you imagine them giving up good weapons—say bows and arrows—if they ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... best modern taste. But the consequence was that if Sally happened to be irritable she saw the wallpaper, and the wallpaper drove her crazy. It was a constant exasperation to her. Her extremely good taste was beginning to bud, and wallpaper is as vital an aesthetic test as any other. She had not yet the power or the knowledge to dress effectively, but she was already learning intuitively such things as harmony and colour-values. She gave an eye to neatness and cleanliness, and knew how to riddle the costumes of girls of her own class, beginning with ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... a matter of congratulation to all but his creditors. He really is now in the only true Monastery of Thelema, and is simply dressed in an eye-glass and a cincture of pandanus flowers. The natives worship him, and he is the First AEsthetic Beach-comber. ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... tail (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 superabundant material which Darwin worked ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... but it will certainly tend to increase the number of marriages. Nor is it primarily for that sociological reason that I plead for a return to the old system of education. I plead for it, first and last, on aesthetic grounds. Let the Graces be cultivated for their own ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... read the bantling's dawning days?— Precocious shall he prove, and harass The world with inconvenient ways And lisped conundrums that embarrass? (Such as Impressionists delight To offer each aesthetic gaper, And faddists hyper-Ibsenite Rejoice to perpetrate ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... the capacity to handle things. Successful propagandists have succeeded because the doctrine they bring into form is that which their listeners have for some time felt without being able to shape. A man who advocates aesthetic effort and deprecates social effort is only likely to be understood by a class to which social effort has become a stale matter. To argue upon the possibility of culture before luxury to the bucolic world may be to argue truly, but it is an attempt ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... customs of mediaeval builders into consideration in any attempt to sift the evidence concerning their work—and they were before all things practical. The claims of structure, the motives of common-sense, rather than abstract and aesthetic ideals of beauty, were the prime causes at work in the evolution of their great art. Here they found themselves faced by a practical need—the rebuilding of a fallen tower. Its reconstruction was necessary to the completeness and stability of the building; so they put it up, applying ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Chichester (1901) - A Short History & Description Of Its Fabric With An Account Of The - Diocese And See • Hubert C. Corlette
... abomination. I quite understand it has points, and I do not attack from an aesthetic standpoint. It really looks well enough when it is painted white. There is, close to Christiansborg Castle, a patch of bungalows and offices for officialdom and wife that from a distance in the hard bright sunshine looks like an encampment of ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... from St. David's, was a man of great munificence, and of the best intentions, of whom it may be said he spent "not wisely but too well." He was entirely devoid of any aesthetic feeling or of architectural fitness, and in the most religious spirit committed acts of wholesale sacrilege. He employed, it is said, in the work of restoration in the palace, the stones of the chapter-house, at that ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... as welcome as in a club, and he could only be said to be out of place in his own country house, more especially at the time of an election for Gloucester. The modern love of landscape, of country life as an aesthetic pleasure, was unknown to him. Civilisation, refinement, seemed to him to be confined to London and Paris, to Bath or Tunbridge Wells. "Now sto per partire, and I ought in point of discretion to set out to-morrow, but I dare say 'twill be Friday evening before I'll have the courage ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... that end. It is the force of the persistent assertion of one's own existence, and a denial of death. It's the spirit of life, as the Scriptures call it, 'the river of living water,' the drying up of which is threatened in the Apocalypse. It's the aesthetic principle, as the philosophers call it, the ethical principle with which they identify it, 'the seeking for God,' as I call it more simply. The object of every national movement, in every people and at every period of its existence is only the seeking for its god, who must ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... spirituality of worship. Jeroboam's symbolism led straight to Ahab's unblushing pagan worship of the hideous Sidonian Baal. The craving for symbolical and sensuous accessories of worship, which is strong in most Churches in this aesthetic generation, is perilous. Material aids to worship there must be, so long as we are in the flesh, but the fewer and simpler they are the better, for they are aids which very swiftly ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... nature. To this man, who cared so much for the figure he cut, and so little for all the things which surrounded him, a life reduced to absolute monotony of grinding work was almost an object of aesthetic pleasure, almost an object of sensual delight: he enjoyed a dead level, an endless white-washed wall, as much as other men, and especially other poets, enjoy the ups and downs, the irregularities ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... 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 hope of prevailing on you ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... interesting; nor would I deny that the strange mixture of the problems of life and the problems of Mathematics, continually inducing conjecture and giving the opportunity of immediate verification, imparts to our existence a zest which you in Spaceland can hardly comprehend. I speak now from the aesthetic and artistic point of view when I say that life with us is dull; aesthetically and ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... that he possesses a rare faculty of assimilation and evolution which makes him a writer of the second Romantic generation, always a contemporary, a modern, without on this account having sacrificed anything to the latest literary fashion or copied some brand-new aesthetic, above all conserving his own distinct, singular personality ... is but to repeat what has been said many times already. All these judgments are confirmed by his latest book, wherein may be noted the same impeccable correctness ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... 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
... haughty mast, Or tear the fold that wears so foul a scar, And drive a bolt through every blackened star! Once more,—once only,—- we must stop so soon: What have we here? A GERMAN-SILVER SPOON; A cheap utensil, which we often see Used by the dabblers in aesthetic tea, Of slender fabric, somewhat light and thin, Made of mixed metal, chiefly lead and tin; The bowl is shallow, and the handle small, Marked in large letters with the name JEAN PAUL. Small as it is, its powers are passing strange, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 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, ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... if we had no souls—if, like the aesthetic reptilia, we knew that when our dust dissolved our existence would be over—we should realize the preciousness of what we hold so lightly now. Man and the spirits and angels are the only beings with souls, and in no place except on earth are new souls being created. This ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... returned to my apartment with such joy that if I arrived at night I did not go to bed lest I forget in sleep how overjoyed I was to get back to that stately and picturesque city, so prodigal with every form of artistic and aesthetic gratification. But that was just the trouble. For as long a time after my return as it took to write the book I had in mind I worked with the stored American energy I had within me; then for months ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... had long gone out of fashion, the weakness of the higher schools on the side of artistic training was recognized. But a corrective for this was sought in instruction about art, not (except so far as a little teaching of drawing went) in the practice of an art. An attempt was made to cultivate aesthetic appreciation by lessons which imparted knowledge but did not attempt to train the power of artistic production—an aim which was regarded as unrealizable, except in vocal music, and of course through literary composition, in a secondary school. Thus Humboldt's original purpose has ...
— The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze • Emile Jaques-Dalcroze
... Relatio ex Actis; been invited to a glass of Rhine-wine; and so, instead of returning dispirited and athirst to his dusty Town-home, is ushered into the Gardenhouse, where sit the choicest party of dames and cavaliers: if not engaged in AEsthetic Tea, yet in trustful evening conversation, and perhaps Musical Coffee, for we hear of 'harps and pure voices making the stillness live.' Scarcely, it would seem, is the Gardenhouse inferior in respectability to the noble Mansion itself. 'Embowered ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Indeed, considering the character of some of my own books, such an attempt would be gross inconsistency. But, while I appreciate its importance in a philological view, I am inclined to set little store on its aesthetic value, especially in poetry. Three parts of the emendations made upon poets are mere alterations, some of which, had they been suggested to the author by his Maecenas or Africanus, he would probably have adopted. Moreover, those who are most exact in laying down rules of verbal criticism ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... relations have subsisted for over five centuries. In the literary sphere the interchange of neighbourly civilities has known no interruption. The same literary forms have not appealed to the tastes of the two nations; but differences of aesthetic temperament have not prevented the literature of the one from levying substantial loans on the literature of the other, and that with a freedom and a frequency which were calculated to breed discontent between any but the most cordial of allies. While ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... either his girls had little character, or the standard of female beauty has altered. As to this latter change, there can be no doubt at all. Leech's girls are not like Thackeray's early pictures of women; and Mr. Du Maurier's are sometimes sicklied o'er with the pale cast of an aesthetic period. ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... which resembled his ideal. A small dry-goods establishment seemed to presuppose a female proprietor. A grocery store would give him many interesting customers; but he did not know much about groceries, and the business did not appear to him to possess any aesthetic features. ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... down into the hall, where, I take it, there was always a certain congregation of retainers, much lounging and waiting and passing to and fro, with a door open into the court. The court, as I said just now, was not the grassy, aesthetic spot which you may find it at present of a summer's day: there were beasts tethered in it, and hustling men-at-arms, and the earth was trampled into puddles. But my lord or my lady, looking down from the chamber-door, could pick out the man wanted and bawl down an order, with a threat ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... Mainly because collecting and collectors appeal to his sporting instinct. His knowledge about his collection will be precise and definite, whether it be postage stamps or pictures. He will know all about it, except its aesthetic value. That he cannot know, for he cannot see it. He has the flair of the dealer, not the perception of the amateur. And he does not know or believe that there is ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... young lady author had ever commented on 'the unaffected simplicity' with which Mr Pitman received her in the midst of his 'treasures'. It is an omission I would gladly supply, but our business is only with the backward parts and 'abject rear' of this aesthetic dwelling. ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... history of sculpture in its steady progress from its use as a chronicler of events to its employment in the production of the objects of idolatry, and thence to the mythological period, when it became the medium of aesthetic expression, attaining its highest perfection in the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... with a sense of harmony and peace. This method seems most applicable to the attainment of moral qualities. An evil passion can be quelled by the use of the word denoting the contrary virtue. The power of the word depends largely upon its aesthetic and moral associations. Words like joy, strength, love, purity, denoting the highest ideals of the human mind, possess great potency and are capable, thus used, of dispelling mental states in which their opposites predominate. The name ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... picturesque life of the French colonies of the Occident impresses the traveller on his first arrival more than the costumes of the women of color. They surprise the aesthetic sense agreeably;—they are local and special: you will see nothing resembling them among the populations of the British West Indies; they belong to Martinique, Guadeloupe, Dsirade, Marie-Galante, and Cayenne,—in each place differing sufficiently ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... I will tell what he is, and what he can best do. If a man desires above all things to conduit a great business, he is by nature qualified for trade; if he desires knowledge, he is designed for a scholar; if he is always observing form, rhyme, aesthetic beauty, and striving to produce verse, he is a born poet. But if the one thing that rules his dreams is the longing for spiritual power—the thought of impressing God upon his generation, and leading men ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... as he recalled the astonishing array of details surrounding the death of the aesthetic proprietor, "just enclose him a note with two words ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... reformers was sufficiently fervent, and had been proved by the 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 ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... red horse hair attached to the crown; wooden shot and powder pouches of the roughest and rudest make slung across the shoulders by a piece of thin cord? And such shot! irregular pellets of raw iron and lead, of which all I can say is that dying by such help would be far from an aesthetic operation. And yet these same soldiers, as a mere pastime, are employed in a service which requires no mean bravery. When not fighting the two-legged enemies of their country, they are engaged waging war against the four-legged ones, their land ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... man, who set no value on the external forms of life, was, I might say, "naturally" a very elegant woman, a native of Berlin, the widow of the Kriegsrath Hofmeister. She speedily opened Froebel's eyes to the aesthetic and artistic element in the lives of the boys entrusted to his care—the element to which Langethal, from the time of his entrance into the institution, had directed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... picture anything disorderly. I painted the picture as it seemed best to me and as my intellect could conceive of it." It meant that Veronese painted in the way that he considered most artistic, without even remembering questions of religion, and in this he summed up his whole aesthetic creed. He was set at liberty on condition that he took out one or two of the most offending figures. The "Feast in the House of Levi" (as he named it after the trial) is the finest of all his great scenic effects. The air circulates freely through the ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... as his face and figure were concerned, he might justly be called a remarkably handsome young fellow, and yet his noble features and majestic stature did not attain to full perfection until after he had reached a riper manhood. AEsthetic canons of the cathedral credited Johannes with having the head of an old Roman; a younger member of the same fraternity, who even in the severest winter was in the habit of going about dressed in black silk, and who had read Schiller's Fiesko, ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... was strongly felt in Milan, where he spent so many of the best years of his life and founded a School of painting. He was a close observer of the gradation and reflex of light, and was capable of giving to his discoveries a practical and aesthetic form. His strong personal character and the fascination of his genius enthralled his followers, who were satisfied to repeat his types, to perpetuate the "grey-hound eye," and to make use of his little devices. Among this group of painters may be ...
— Leonardo da Vinci • Maurice W. Brockwell
... of his whole career." The steps that lead irresistibly to this conclusion, are very clearly indicated in the course of this Discourse; and the more convincingly, because the speaker is himself so sympathetic to the religious inspiration of Italian art, on the one hand, and to its merely natural aesthetic growth ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... and without, the house seems like its mighty master—not pensive but rural; it does not even breathe the spirit of quiet. Its rooms look active and power-compelling, and we could not but feel that they were not indebted to any of the aesthetic inventions and elegancies of furniture for their charm. Thus we have heard of one visitor pathetically exclaiming, 'Not one dado adorns the walls!' Hawarden is called a Castle, but it has not, either in its exterior or interior, the aspect of a Castle. ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... has fingers unlike any of these. There is no fat to make them pudgy and no muscle to make them firm. Neither are there large joints to make them knotty. Their outlines therefore run in almost straight lines and the whole hand presents a more frail, aesthetic appearance. ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... archaeologist must have buried a fortune. He has, however, the compensation of feeling that he has erected a monument which, if it is never to stand a feudal siege, may encounter at least some critical over-hauling. It is a disinterested work of art and really a triumph of aesthetic culture. The author has reproduced with minute accuracy a sturdy home-fortress of the fourteenth century, and has kept throughout such rigid terms with his model that the result is literally uninhabitable to degenerate moderns. It is simply a massive facsimile, an elegant museum ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... conviction than when he bade me good-bye for Germany, which I thought was because be doubted whether I could succeed in Paris. From this final visit I carried away a depressing sense of the enervation, both moral and aesthetic, which had overcome one of the last great French musicians, while, on the other hand, I could not help feeling that a tendency to a hypocritical or frankly impudent exploitation of the universal degeneracy marked all who could be designated ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... the pleasure grounds at Holkham, and I had an aesthetic love for their gorgeous plumes. As I hunted under and amongst the shrubs, I secretly prayed that my search might be rewarded. Nor had I a doubt, when successful, that my prayer had been granted by a ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... sister's husband is one of the University trustees. But he lives miles from this spot and hardly ever sees it. Besides, his aesthetic endowments are not beyond those of the average university trustee. Sometimes they're as hard on Beauty as ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... prescribed books and lectures at defiance. What was worst to bear was that other classes of "men" made up to him, after the men of distinction, those whom the dons considered the best men, had withdrawn and left him to pursue his own way. The men who loafed considered him their natural prey; the aesthetic men who wrote bad verses opened their arms, and were ready to welcome him as their own. And perhaps among these classes he might have found disinterested friendship, for nobody any longer sought Warrender on account of what he could do. But he did not make the trial, wrapping himself up in ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... sculpture. Romanticism blossomed in 1830, and bore fruit for ten years. The religious reaction was a punier thing; the great Abbe, who was the Newman of France, was himself unable to remain within the fantastic church that he built out of medieval ruins. In England, and especially in Oxford, the aesthetic admiration of the Past was promptly transmuted into religion. Doctrines which men thought dead were resuscitated; and from Oxford came, not poetry or painting, but the sermons of Newman, the Tracts, the whole religious force which has ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... centre of the town is called, should be more popular with artists than it is. The wonderful colour of some of the Horsham roofs will be noticed; this is due to the local stone with which the older roofs are covered. It seems a pity from an aesthetic point of view that the quarries are no longer used. The great weight of the covering had another advantage, it made for sturdy building and honest workmanship. Horsham no longer has the artificial importance of returning members to Parliament (at one time, two; and as lately as 1885 ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes |
