"Aesthetics" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the country was sustained by Grotius, Vossius and the elder Heinsius. And yet, though Rembrandt's "Nightwatch" is dated the very year after the publication of the Meditations, not a word in Descartes breathes of any work of art or historical learning. The contempt of aesthetics and erudition is characteristic of the most typical members of what is known as the Cartesian school, especially Malebranche. Descartes was not in any strict sense a reader. His wisdom grew mainly out of his own reflections ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... into this new work with great ardor and entire devotion. With the founding of the department there were two distinct ideas to be carried out. First, to train musicians who would be able to teach and compose. Second, to teach musical history and aesthetics. ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... general, of its difficulties, moral and physical, of its surprising turns, of its unexpected contacts, of the choice and rare personalities that drift on it as if on the sea; of the distinction that letters and art gave to it, the nobility and consolations there are in aesthetics, of the privileges they confer on individuals and (this was the first connected statement I caught) that Mills agreed with her in the general point of view as to the inner worth of individualities and in the particular ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... volumes on what he called psychophysics (many persons consider Fechner to have practically founded scientific psychology in the first of these books); a volume on organic evolution, and two works on experimental aesthetics, in which again Fechner is thought by some judges to have laid the foundations of a new science," are among his other performances.... "All Leipsic mourned him when he died, for he was the pattern of the ideal German scholar, as daringly original in his thought ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... report of the following experimental study will have the greater utility, since, apart from any intrinsic novelty or importance the results may prove to have, it shows some of the general bearings of the facts of vision in relation to AEsthetics, to the theory of Illusions, and to the ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... such works, and their worth as historical documents. Unquestionably, to the poetic artist, or even to the student of psychology, "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" may be better instructors than all the books of a wilderness of professors of aesthetics or of moral philosophy. But, as evidence of occurrences in Denmark, or in Scotland, at the times and places indicated, they are out of court; the profoundest admiration for them, the deepest gratitude for their influence, are consistent with the ...
— The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science - Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... BROCHURE SERIES have struggled as has the writer (and possibly some are still in an unsettled state of mind in consequence) over the abstruseness of the current works upon the philosophy of art, trying to find some obscure foundation on which to build for themselves a theory of aesthetics. To such, and to all others who have any wish to reason connectedly on art matters, Mr. Marshall's little book will be interesting and instructive reading. It is remarkably clear and understandable even to a reader with ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 06, June 1895 - Renaissance Panels from Perugia • Various
... the earliest days. Emerson himself, though a man of unusual discernment and a diligent drinker from German spigots, nevertheless remained a dilettante in both aesthetics and metaphysics to the end of his days, and the incompleteness of his equipment never showed more plainly than in his criticism of books. Lowell, if anything, was even worse; his aesthetic theory, first and last, was nebulous and superficial, and all that ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... from fainting by fanning herself vigorously, and was about to show the two ladies that they had a wrong idea of aesthetics, when a lady from the West Side, who had just been married, got up and said she felt that we were all too ignorant of aesthetics, and they should take every opportunity to become better informed. She said when she first went to keeping house she couldn't ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... garden health. Both depend on the presence of large enough quantities of organic material in the soil. This organic matter holds a massive reserve of nutrition built up over the years by the growing plants themselves. When, for reasons of momentary aesthetics, we bag up and remove clippings from our lawn, we prevent the grass from recycling its ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... indeed, but one of the accidents of an art. Its influence, like the scent of a flower, is diffused unconsciously. It has its own aims and laws, and knows none other. And the only person who ever fully acknowledged this truth in aesthetics is, of all persons most unlikely, the author of Sartor Resartus. That any one who dressed so very badly as did Thomas Carlyle should have tried to construct a philosophy of clothes has always seemed to me one of the most pathetic things in literature. ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... comes under the head of Aesthetics, which may be defined as the philosophy of taste, ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... has put these models before him, he is neither to take much blame to himself, nor to be in anywise disheartened for the future. That in as far as he shall utterly reverse his whole poetic method, whether in morals or in aesthetics, leave undone all that he has done, and do all that he has not done, he will become, what he evidently, by grace of God, can become if he will, namely, a lasting and ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... by establishing his beautiful theories on the analysis of the solar spectrum. M. Charles Henry, an original and remarkable spirit, occupied himself in his turn with these delicate problems by applying them directly to aesthetics, which Helmholtz and Chevreul had not thought of doing. M. Charles Henry had the idea of creating relations between this branch of science and the laws of painting. As a friend of several young painters he had a real influence over them, showing them that ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... inhabitants had flown to their hot-air registers in Boston and Providence, I breakfasted with one who had lingered. It was a certain Boston lawyer,—replete with principle, honesty, self-discipline, statistics, aesthetics, and a perfect consciousness of possessing all these virtues, and a full recognition of their market values. I think he tolerated me as a kind of foreigner, gently but firmly waiving all argument on any topic, frequently distrusting ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... James. Sensation and Intuition. Studies in psychology and aesthetics. Chap, iv, "Belief: Its Varieties ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... this dream which he attributed to Leo XIII, he was all at once interrupted by Narcisse, who exclaimed: "Oh! my dear Abbe, just look at those statues on the colonnade." The young fellow had ordered a cup of coffee and was languidly smoking a cigar, deep once more in the subtle aesthetics which were his only preoccupation. "They are rosy, are they not?" he continued; "rosy, with a touch of mauve, as if the blue blood of angels circulated in their stone veins. It is the sun of Rome which gives them that supra-terrestrial life; for they live, my friend; I have seen them smile and hold ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... and the features that differentiated him from others. Goethe himself has recorded in his correspondence that it was Felix Mendelssohn who taught him of Hengstenberg and Spontini, introduced him to Hegel's "AEsthetics," and revealed to him for the first ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... sensuousness. It is rare to find a farmer or peasant whose enthusiasm for the beauty in Nature finds outward expression to compare with that of the city-man who comes out for a Sunday in the country, but Thoreau is that rare country-man and Debussy the city-man with his weekend flights into country-aesthetics. We would be inclined to say that Thoreau leaned towards substance and Debussy ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... of beauty has its reign over bread as well as over all other things; it has its laws of aesthetics; and that bread which is so prepared that it can be formed into separate and well-proportioned loaves, each one carefully worked and moulded, will develop the most beautiful results. After being moulded, the loaves should stand a little while, just long enough to allow the fermentation going ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... are none the less important, and which, for want of a better name, I shall call the Discard. Among these can be named the education of the imagination, having a good time generally, foolishness, mysticism, good fellowship, aesthetics, humanity, and humanities in general. The fact that many a man has thrown himself away by putting all his time into these things, and lived solely for good fellowship, for foolishness, or for imagination ...
— A Jolly by Josh • "Josh"
... bunk and spent a moment analyzing the aesthetics of the layout. It had a certain pleasing severity, the unconscious balance of complete functionalism. Soon Dalgetty ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things. But the healthier state of mind surely is to lay no tax on any really intelligent manifestation of the curious, and exquisite. Intelligence hangs ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... for the radiant life that is in him, but bow before the personality of Sophocles, whose perfect form enshrined a noble and highly educated soul, so we gratefully accept Correggio for his grace, while we approach the consummate art of Michelangelo with reverent awe. It is necessary in aesthetics as elsewhere to recognise a hierarchy of excellence, the grades of which are determined by the greater or less comprehensiveness of the artist's nature expressed in his work. At the same time, the calibre of the artist's genius must be estimated; ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... here, but a paradox of language, and not of fact. Men made bridges before there was a science of bridge-building; they cured disease before they knew medicine. Art came before aesthetics, and righteousness before ethics. Conduct and theory react upon each other. Hypothesis is confirmed and modified by action, and action is guided by hypothesis. If it is a paradox to ask for a human politics before we understand humanity or politics, it is what Mr. Chesterton describes as one of ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... front, pose in indecent garments without starch, or crinoline, or even the protection of pleats and gathers; and insult good, sound, wholesome common sense with the sickening affectations they are pleased to call 'aesthetics.' Don't waste your time, and dilute your own mind by quoting the silly twaddle of a poor girl who was turned loose too early on society, who falls on her knees in ecstasies before a hideous broken-nose tea-pot from some filthy hovel in Japan; and who would not dare to admire the loveliest bit ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... pieces of meat anyhow, which as often as not she took from the point. Mamma had eaten with her knife grasped also like a whanger, and why might not she? she said when madame remonstrated and gave her a lecture on the aesthetics of the table. And why should she not make her bread her plate, and hold both bread and meat in her hand if she liked? Why was she to wipe her lips when she drank? and why, traveling farther afield, was she to speak when she was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... your false estimation of the subject, dear friend!" said Wilhelm: "in aesthetics you come at once to the pure and true; but in music you are far away in the outer court, where the crowd is dancing, with cymbals and trumpets, around the ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... Oxonienses, Oscar Wilde described himself on leaving Oxford as a "Professor of AEsthetics, and a Critic of Art"—an announcement to me at once infinitely ludicrous and pathetic. "Ludicrous" because it betrays such complete ignorance of life all given over to men industrious with muck-rakes: "Gadarene swine," as ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... this distinction always in the case of Dickens. Dickens is the great Cockney, at once tragic and comic, who enters abruptly upon the Arcadian banquet of the aesthetics and says, "Forbear and eat no more," and tells them that they shall not eat "until necessity be served." If there was one thing he would have favoured instinctively it would have been the spreading of the town as meaning the spreading of civilisation. And we should ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... small group of early eighteenth-century critics who tended to reject the aesthetics based upon authority and pre-established definitions of the genres, and to evolve one logically from the nature of the human mind and the sources of its enjoyment; in other words, who turned attention from the objective work of art to the subjective response. These men, such as Dennis ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... persuaded his kind-hearted, simple friend to believe him a sincere penitent, and to introduce him as such to the ladies at Gothlands, from whom he caught the talk most pleasing to them. At present it was all ecclesiastical aesthetics, and discontent with the existing system, especially as regarded penitence; by and by, when his hold should be secure, he would persuade the heiress that she had been the prime instrument in his conversion, and that ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of Jena, where the dignity of Professorship was associated with that of Member of the Council, he now commenced a course of lectures on Aesthetics, and joined his brother Frederick in the editorship of the Athenaeum, (3 vols., Berlin, 1796-1800,) an Aesthetico-critical journal, intended, while observing a rigorous but an impartial spirit of criticism, to discover and foster every grain of a truly vital ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... religious, literary, and artistic problems. Unless his own art was the subject, Chopin did not take part in discussions. And Liszt tells us that Chopin not only, like most artists, lacked a generalising mind [esprit generalisateur], but showed hardly any inclination for aesthetics, of which he had not even heard much. We may be sure that to Chopin to whom discussions of any kind were distasteful, those of a circle in which, as in that of George Sand, democratic and socialistic, theistic and atheistic views prevailed, were particularly so. For, notwithstanding his bourgeois ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... elevated morality is the professed aim of all enlightened lawgivers; and the prosperity of nations is built upon it, for it is righteousness which exalteth them. Culture is desirable; but the welfare of nations is based on morals rather than on aesthetics. On this point Moses, or even Epictetus, is a greater authority than Goethe. All the ordinances of Moses tend to this end. They are the publication of natural religion,—that God is a rewarder of virtuous actions, and punishes wicked deeds. Moses, from first to last, insists imperatively ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... to freedom. I hope that I shall succeed in convincing you that this matter of art is less foreign to the needs than to the tastes of our age; nay, that, to arrive at a solution even in the political problem, the road of aesthetics must be pursued, because it is through beauty that we arrive at freedom. But I cannot carry out this proof without my bringing to your remembrance the principles by which the reason is guided ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... and rather apt comparison raised no smile on his listeners' faces, only Nejdanov remarked that if young people were fools enough to interest themselves in aesthetics, they deserved no pity whatever, even if ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... luxuriously but monstrously furnished. Its frank, opulent ugliness was a relief to the girl after the rarefied atmosphere of aesthetics in which for three years she had lived with Charles, upon whom all her thoughts were still concentrated. Of herself she had no thought. It did not concern her what she was called: wife or mistress. She was Clara Day and would remain so whatever happened ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... workmen of Tanagra fashioned their little clay familiars for the tombs, slim Greek girls in their reedy habit as they lived, or chattering matrons like those you read of in Theocritus. Much fine phrasing has been spent upon the effort to analyse the aesthetics of Delia Robbia ware. Its inexhaustible charm is unquestionable; but just where does it catch one's breath? Not altogether in the clean colouring, like nothing so much as that of a cool, glazed dairy at home,—"milky- blue," "cream-white," "butter-yellow," ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... various works. And the biographer adds: "This term (i.e. poetic idea) belongs to Beethoven's epoch, and was used by him as frequently as was, for example, the expression 'poetic contents' by others—in opposition to works which only offer an harmonic and rhythmic play of tones. Writers on aesthetics of our day declaim against the latter term; with good reason, if it refer to programme-music; without reason, if they extend their negation to all Beethoven's music, and deny its poetic contents. Whence that tendency, which so frequently manifests ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... constantly and pretty universally felt pressure and think of an impersonal, objective "ought." All the arts are expressible in "oughts"; and if there is a more authoritative and categorical nature to moral laws than there is, for example, to the aesthetic laws that art-study reveals, it is because aesthetics deals with only one aspect of human good and ethics with its totality. Indeed, every impulse is, in its initial push, categorical, offering no reasons, simply pressing upon us with its requirements. Hunger and thirst and sex-desire ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... work; but, as a judge of aesthetic works, he is one- sided, and even fanatically devoted to party spirit. He belongs, unfortunately, to the men of science, who are only one sixty-fourth of a poet, and who are the most incompetent judges of aesthetics. He has, for example, by his critiques on Ingemann's romances, shown how far he is below the poetry which he censures. He has himself published a volume of poems, which belong to the common run of books, "A Ramble through Denmark," ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... more than once. After his return to Macchia followed some years of apparent sterility, but later on, and especially during the last twenty years of his life, his literary activity became prodigious. Journalism, folklore, poetry, history, grammar, philology, ethnology, aesthetics, politics, morals—nothing came amiss to his gifted pen, and he was fruitful, say his admirers, even in his errors, Like other men inflamed with one single idea, he boldly ventured into domains ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... was appointed teacher of the students of the Royal Academy, having been preceded by a clever, talkative, scientific expounder of aesthetics, who delighted to tell the young men how everything was done, how to copy this, and how to express that. A student came up to the new master, "How should I do this, sir?" "Suppose you try." Another, "What does this mean, Mr. Etty?" "Suppose you look." "But I have ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... "Machiavellian campaign organized for the unloading of these works. Editions de luxe ... were published and sold by the picture dealers; ...every crafty device known to the picture trade was resorted to in order to discredit and destroy the heretofore universally accepted standards of aesthetics."[756] ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... six, and pass rather a dull evening, because of no picquet. You will be sauntering in St. Peter's perhaps, or standing on the Capitol while the sun sets. I should like to see Rome after all. Livy's lies (as the aesthetics prove them to be) do at least animate one so far—how far?—so far as to wish, and not to do, having perfect power ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... mediocrity; and is one of the many examples of a truth in the idea that extremes meet. Thus, to appreciate the virtues of the mob one must either be on a level with it (as I am) or be really high up, like the saints. It is roughly the same with aesthetics; slang and rude dialect can be relished by a really literary taste, but not by a merely bookish taste. And when these cultivated cranks say that rustics do not talk of Nature in an appreciative way, they really mean that they do not talk in a ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... the problem of bordering, or page-edge, effects. Books and bound volumes that are placed on a photocopy machine or a scanner produce page-edge effects that are undesirable for two reasons: 1) the aesthetics of the image; after all, if the image is to be preserved, one does not necessarily want to keep all of its deficiencies; 2) compression (with the bordering problem THOMA illustrated, the compression ratio deteriorated tremendously). ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... to questions which were lately declared out of date and closed; hence its taste for problems of aesthetics and morality, its close siege of social and religious problems, its homesickness for a faith harmonising the powers of action and the powers of thought; hence its restless desire to hark back to tradition ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... hour's time and a visit. The visit is to an extremely interesting, learned and distinguished man—Dr. Ambros, formerly Imperial Solicitor-General in Prague, now professor and referendary to the Officielle Zeitung in Vienna, always an eminent writer on aesthetics, history, the history of music, a polygraphist, composer—in fact, a good friend of mine. Be kind enough to tell him that I am awaiting his answer in the affirmative, respecting a lecture by him on Robert Franz at the extra Soiree ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... art and to biographies of artists, but he found no answer! to the "Why?" The philosophers with their theories of aesthetics helped him little to understand the dignity and force of this portrait or the beauty of that landscape. In the conversation of his artist friends there was no enlightenment, for they talked about "values" and ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... the soul of him who gives it form. In writing, as in painting, it reveals to us the character and the conception of its author. Placed at the service of certain philosophical ideas, which will be set forth later on, this technique was bound to lead to a special code of Aesthetics. The painter seeks to suggest with an unbroken line the fundamental character of a form. His endeavor, in this respect, is to simplify the objective images of the world to the extreme, replacing them with ideal images, ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci
... attraction for me. Nothing can intensify my passion more than tyranny, cruelty, and especially the faithlessness of a beautiful woman. And I cannot imagine this woman, this strange ideal derived from an aesthetics of ugliness, this soul of Nero in the body of ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... season and the direct results thereof. The trees are manifestly over-exerting themselves, in a witless competition with others which may never boast of painted, scented fruit. There is not a sufficient audience of aesthetics to tolerate the change of which ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... sentimentality, this sickly gasping system of aesthetics, soi-disant 'Religion of the Beautiful,' is the curse of the age,—is a vast, universal vampire sucking the life from humanity. Like other idolatries it may arrogate the name of 'Religion,' but it ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... ranges of mountains, geographical outlines and other horticultural allusions to their holy lands and spiritual history, seen beside so many houses, temples and monasteries in Japan. In their floral art, no people excels the Japanese in making leaf and bloom teach history, religion, philosophy, aesthetics and patriotism. ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... seeming to wander off into the boundless domain of aesthetics, we must stop at this point for a moment to make sure that we are of one mind regarding the meaning of the phrase "artistic pleasure," in so far at least as it is ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... he cannot find space in which to use his wings freely) he has only to choose and define, to discover and to illuminate. In the "myriad-minded man," in his "oceanic mind," he finds all the material that he needs for the making of a complete aesthetics. Nothing with Coleridge ever came to completion; but we have only to turn over the pages about Shakespeare, to come upon fragments worth more than anyone else's finished work. I find the whole secret of Shakespeare's way of ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... always leave one in a condition to know that without a finger-post. Sometimes he and I sat and wrangled on the edge of a crevasse while I denied that there was anything to admire at all. Indeed, he and I have often quarrelled on the edge of a precipice about matters of mountain aesthetics. ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... of his chapters, gives an account of his passage through what he is pleased to call neology and rationalism. He represents himself as having sounded the depths of German metaphysics, criticism, and aesthetics. But a man who is able to write a sentence in which Lessing's Works are spoken of as if the reading of them tended to make men "transcendentalists of the supra-nebulous order" no more deserves a scourging by angels for his devotion to German literature ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... instruction, and all its departments of culture, women should be admitted on an equality with men, as to opportunities, positions and salaries. Miss Willard was then chosen dean of the Woman's College, and professor of aesthetics in the University. Mrs. Emily Huntington Miller was placed on the executive committee of the board, and Mrs. R. F. Queal, Mrs. Jennie Fowler Willing, Mrs. Mary Bannister Willard, and Mrs. L. L. Greenleaf were ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... Metaphysics, and author of a Roman History (died 1857); Zeller, also a writer on Greek philosophy, now Professor of philosophy at Marburg; whose appointment to Berne in 1847 has been elsewhere stated to have caused a similar excitement to that of Strauss to Zurich; Koestlin, Professor of aesthetics at Tuebingen; and Hilgenfeld, Professor of theology at Jena, who is the best living representative of the modified form which the school has now assumed. Respecting these theologians, see the notes which ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... to this theory, seems to us to be very loose scientifically, and philosophically most misleading."—"Pall Mall Gazette.") This is not at all improbable, as it is almost a lifetime since I attended to the philosophy of aesthetics, and did not then think that I should ever make use of my conclusions. Can you refer me to any one or two books (for my power of reading is not great) which would illumine me? or can you explain in one or two sentences how ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... nineteenth century could exist without the India-rubber tree. If that plant were destroyed, civilization would be left gasping, helpless and crippled; and of late years, not content with making it serviceable in every department of practical life, men have brought the shrub into the domain of aesthetics by using it for ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... end. I had long felt a deep desire to visit Munich, to study art, and to investigate fundamentally the wonderful and mysterious science of AEsthetics, of which I had heard so much. So I packed up and paid my bills, and passing through one town where there was in the hotel where I stopped, the last wolf ever killed in Germany, and freshly killed (I believe he has been slain two or three times since), and at another where I was invited to see a ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... democrats of history—the real-idealists—the men who love the crowd and the beautiful too, and who can have no honest or human pleasure in either of them except as they are being drawn together, are obliged to admit that living in a democratic country, a country where politics and aesthetics can no longer be kept apart, is an ordeal that can only be faced a large part of the time with heavy hearts. We are obliged to admit that it is a country where paintings have little but the Constitution of the United States wrought into them; ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Catholic, and the Eclectic; or as it may be put in other terms, the Materialist, the Theological, and the Spiritualist. The first looked for the sources of knowledge, the sanction of morals, the inspiring fountain and standard of aesthetics, to the outside of men, to matter, and the impressions made by matter on the corporeal senses. The second looked to divine revelation, authority and the traditions of the Church. The third, steering a middle course, looked partly within and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... has its own architectural rules, rules as unchangeable as anatomical peculiarities. Each group builds according to the same set of principles, conforming to the laws of a very elementary system of aesthetics; but often circumstances beyond the architect's control—the space at her disposal, the unevenness of the site, the nature of the material and other accidental causes—interfere with the worker's plans and disturb the structure. Then virtual regularity is translated ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... details, but Spencer addressed himself to everything. He dealt in logical, metaphysical, and ethical first principles, in cosmogony and geology, in physics, and chemistry after a fashion, in biology, psychology, sociology, politics, and aesthetics. Hardly any subject can be named which has not at least been touched on in some one of his many volumes. His erudition was prodigious. His civic conscience and his social courage both were admirable. His life was pure. He ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... be readily acquired, and, if need be, imitated. Again, that which is sublime, god-like, demonic, must not be dwelt upon, simply because it is impossible or difficult to copy. Pseudo-culture accordingly talks of "excrescencies," "exaggerations," and the like—and sets up a novel system of aesthetics, which professes to rest upon Goethe— since he, too, was averse to prodigious monstrosities, and was good enough to invent "artistic calm and beauty" in lieu thereof. "The guileless innocence of art" becomes an object of laudation; and Schiller, who now and then ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... which, on aesthetic and ethical grounds, may be called imperatival—an element that acts in opposition to its purely scientific behaviour. Philology is composed of history just as much as of natural science or aesthetics: history, in so far as it endeavours to comprehend the manifestations of the individualities of peoples in ever new images, and the prevailing law in the disappearance of phenomena; natural science, in so far as it strives to fathom the deepest instinct of man, that of speech; aesthetics, ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... be supposed that that attraction will ever diminish; it will ever increase, although its forms may change; and finally, along with this betterment of the emotions, and of the sense of justice—of right and of ethics and of aesthetics—we find the constant effort and desire of all mankind, in all stages of culture, to find out what is true, as distinct from that which is not true. You will not be mistaken if you seek for this in the soul of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... to be much moved by the story of his spiritual troubles. And after all, even in England, even in Germany and Russia, there are more adults than adolescents. As for the artist, he is preoccupied with problems that are so utterly unlike those of the ordinary adult man—problems of pure aesthetics which don't so much as present themselves to people like myself—that a description of his mental processes is as boring to the ordinary reader as a piece of pure mathematics. A serious book about artists ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... an amusing story hailing from Munich. During the past year the professor of Aesthetics in the University, whose lectures are proverbially wearisome, delivered his lectures (as usual) to a scanty audience. There were five students in all, who, week by week, melted and grew "beautifully less," until at last but one was left. This solitary ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe
... ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... for all that is bad in country life. In London he would keep his place. He would belong to a brainless club, and his wife would give brainless dinner parties. But down here he acts the little god with his gentility, and his patronage, and his sham aesthetics, and every one—even your ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... great predecessor we must leave these Discourses, which need, to be properly appreciated, to be studied as a whole; as indeed they form Leighton's deliberate exposition of his whole principles of Aesthetics. In working this out, Discourse by Discourse, he was not content to rely upon convenient literary sources, or previously acquired knowledge of his subject; but undertook special journeys, and spent long periods, ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... impossibilities of Lilliput, of Laputa, of the Yahoos, &c., had licensed those. If, therefore, any man thinks it worth his while to tilt against so mere a foam-bubble of gaiety as this lecture on the aesthetics of murder, I shelter myself for the moment under the Telamonian shield of the Dean. But, in reality, my own little paper may plead a privileged excuse for its extravagance, such as is altogether wanting to the Dean's. Nobody can pretend, for a moment, on ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... bad," without being able to refer to a critical principle in proof, but that many who write reviews have not formed opinions and have not felt at all, and have rather proceeded upon a prejudice, a supposed law of aesthetics applicable to every exigency of literary development. A sense of the inadequacy of criticism must trouble every honest man who sits down to examine a new book; and it might almost be said, that no books can ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... on this theme, fell into a reverie over Rembrandt's strange conception of Christian aesthetics. It is evident that in his mode of depicting Gospel scenes this painter still exhales a breath of the Old Testament; his church, even if he had meant to paint it as it was in his day, would still be a synagogue, so strong is the odour of the Jew in all his work; he is possessed by the ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... heroically, but are not trained to teach the simple truths about dental hygiene. The far-reaching results of neglect of teeth will not be understood until greater emphasis is placed on the bacteriology, the economics, the sociology, and the aesthetics of clean, sound teeth. Whether or not there is at present a tendency to exaggerate the importance of sound teeth, there is no difference of opinion as to the fact that the teeth harbor virulent germs, that ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... beginning the learning of the Church was of pagan origin. St. Augustine was a professor of rhetoric and the author of a treatise on aesthetics before he wrote the City of God, and his Confessions. In fact, he never quite got over being a professor of rhetoric. Clement of Alexandria was a product of the same rhetoric schools and an excellent teacher of his subject before he recognized the divine origin ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... That evening he had all but succumbed to a terrible temptation. It was so long since he had been alone with Lucia, and there was something in her face, her dress, her attitude, that appealed to the authority on AEsthetics. He found himself wondering how it would be if he got up and kissed her. But just then Lucia leaned back in her chair, and there was that tired look in her face which he had come to dread. He thought better of it. If he had kissed her his sense of propriety ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... books will all be consigned to the garret or be used for old paper and manure! O posterity, above all things do not forget our gothic salons, our Renaissance furniture, M. Pasquier's discourses, the shape of our hats, and the aesthetics of La Revue ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... five minutes afterwards, having some time before him; for the Government was, at that moment, receiving a deputation from the stone-cutters. He was going with his colleagues to ask for the creation of a Forum of Art, a kind of Exchange where the interests of AEsthetics would be discussed. Sublime masterpieces would be produced, inasmuch as the workers would amalgamate their talents. Ere long Paris would be covered with gigantic monuments. He would decorate them. He had even begun a figure ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... the Classical school. Perceiving the beauty of clarity, order, refinement, and simplicity, he jumped to the conclusion that these were the characteristics of Nature herself, and that without them no beauty could exist. He was wrong. Nature is too large a thing to fit into a system of aesthetics; and beauty is often—perhaps more often than not—complex, obscure, fantastic, and strange. At the bottom of all Boileau's theories lay a hearty love of sound common sense. It was not, as has sometimes been asserted, imagination that he disliked, but singularity. ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... not many years ago, had been surrounded with art-tinted hangings and photographs from Rossetti, and the austerity of her eighteenth-century reaction was now almost defiant. Her drawing-room, in its arid chastity, challenged you, as it were, to dare remember the aesthetics of ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... 1901, p. 11) lays it down that psychology has nothing to do with good or bad taste. "The distinction between good and bad taste has no meaning for psychology. On this account, the fundamental conceptions of aesthetics cannot arise from psychology." It may be a question whether this view ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... to say, Ye come and go incessant; we remain Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past; Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot, Of faith so nobly realized as this. I seem to have heard it said by learned folk Who drench you with aesthetics till you feel As if all beauty were a ghastly bore, 240 The faucet to let loose a wash of words, That Gothic is not Grecian, therefore worse; But, being convinced by much experiment How little inventiveness there is in man, Grave copier of copies, I give thanks For a new relish, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... one hobby without knowing something more about pictures than their market values. He was, as it were, the missing link between the artist and the commercial public. Art for art's sake and all that, of course, was cant. But aesthetics and good taste were necessary. The appreciation of enough persons of good taste was what gave a work of art its permanent market value, or in other words made it "a work of art." There was no real cleavage. And he was sufficiently accustomed to sheep-like and unseeing ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... revolutionary sayings and doings of his second son, which had been the more disconcerting because they flowed from the young reactionary in such a gay flood of high spirits. Harry had no more shared the reverent attitude of his family toward household aesthetics than toward social values. A house was a place to keep the weather from you, he had said laughingly. If you could have it pretty and well-ordered without too much bother, well and good; but might the Lord protect him from everlastingly making ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... leave out for lack of space. Such are: Demonism, Primitive Religion, and Witchcraft; The Status of Women; War; Evolution and the Mores; Usury; Gambling; Societal Organization and Classes; Mortuary Usages; Oaths; Taboos; Ethics; AEsthetics; and Democracy. The first four of these are written. I may be able to publish them soon, separately. My next task is to finish ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... itself service to human progress. But this human progress is not a mere growth of the animal race. It has its total meaning in the understanding of man as a soul, determined by purposes and ideals. Not the laws of physiology, but the demands of logic, ethics, aesthetics, and religion control the man who makes history and who serves civilization. He who says that the child's questions ought to be answered truthfully means in this connection that lowest truth of all, the truth of physiology, and forgets that when he opens too early ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... H. Taine, Professor of Aesthetics and of History of Art in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Translated by John Durand. Second edition. Thoroughly revised by the translator. New York: Holt ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... said then, is intended to form part of a series, on which I have been engaged for many years. I am gradually working my way towards the concrete expression of a theory, or system of aesthetics, of all the arts. ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... Greek. In fact, nearly all the terms of learning and art, from the alphabet to the highest peaks of metaphysics and theology, come directly from the Greek— philosophy, logic, anthropology, psychology, aesthetics, grammar, rhetoric, history, philology, mathematics, arithmetic, astronomy, anatomy, geography, stenography, physiology, architecture, and hundreds more in similar domains; the subdivisions and ramifications of theology as exegesis, hermeneutics, apologetics, polemics, dogmatics, ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... at a glance—a power which dispenses with all process and gains its end by a flash. A higher stage is known as vision; the highest is known as ecstasy. Intuition has its own place in general psychology, and has acquired peculiar significance in the domains of aesthetics, ethics, and theology; and the same root idea is preserved throughout—that of immediacy of insight. The characteristic of passivity on which certain mystics would insist is subsidiary—even if it is to be allowed at all. Its claims will be ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... method of their revelation is new or old, academic or futuristic. It only asks that the revelation shall be genuine. It is concerned with form, because beauty and truth demand perfect expression. But it is a mere heresy in aesthetics to say that perfect expression is the whole of art that matters. It is the spirit that breaks through the form that is the main interest of criticism. Form, we know, has a permanence of its own: so much so that it has again and again been worshipped by ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... him any pronounced principles. His unerring feeling and cultured mind served him as a guide in morals as well as in aesthetics. His ideal was a kind of natural religion, in which God appears as the ultimate source of the beautiful and hardly as a being having any other relation to man. His conduct was most beautiful in all cases ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... usually been discussed under the head of aesthetic emotions. As to what rightfully belongs under the head of aesthetics is in dispute—writers on the subject varying tremendously in their opinions. Most of the recent writers, however, agree that the stimulus for aesthetic appreciation must be a sense percept or an image of some sense object. ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... his work an elegant shape; he decorates it with rosettes, with twists, with scrolls. Phanaeus Milon is no stranger to these culinary aesthetics. She turns the crust of her meat-pie into a splendid gourd, with ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... advertising columns when I cease to tell the truth! There is the sum twice told: I pays my money and I takes my choice. Never mind the change." And with these words Mr. BEZZLE stalked off, his face crimson with a rush of aesthetics ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II. No. 38, Saturday, December 17, 1870. • Various
... elegance, comeliness, pulchritude, grace, exquisiteness, charm, attraction. Associated Words: aesthetics, aesthetician, aestheticism, aesthete, aesthetic, esthetology, Apollo, Adonis, Venus, Hebe, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Rheinisch-Westphalische Zeitung, the organs merely of the War trade House of Krupp. Out from the ruck of hack writers, there stands a single imposing figure, Maximilian Harden, the "poet of German politics," who "casts forth heroic gestures and thinks of politics in terms of aesthetics, the prophet of a great, strong and saber-rattling nation," whose force shall be ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... good rank as a poet, and was one of the very foremost of our aesthetics, was much older than we. The tall young man, who often walked as if he were absorbed in thought, seemed to us a peculiar and unapproachable person. His younger brother, Rudolf, on the other hand, was a cheery fellow, whose beauty and brightness charmed me unspeakably. When he came ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... occasion to analogous observations. The human mind becoming the object of our adoration, we must give up judging it in every particular, and suppress the rules of the ideal in art, as those of morals in the conduct, and truth in the intellect. We must form a system of aesthetics which accepts all, and finds equally legitimate whatever affords recreation to the Humanity-God, in the great variety of its tastes. Then high aspirations are extinguished, the beautiful gives place to the agreeable; and since the ugly and misshapen please a vicious taste, room must be ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... Saxon, it was his aptitude for appreciating beauty as distinguished from use,—an aptitude on which French influence could not have been lost before the Conquest of England. The Normans in Sicily certainly had not had the advantage of Saxon training in aesthetics, and the poetry and architecture of the Normans in England were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... seems no longer strange to bother about health conditions, it will be relatively easy to give attention to rural aesthetics. If a schoolhouse or a meeting-house is to be erected, it will give greater satisfaction to the community if the principles of good architecture are observed and the building is set in the midst of trees and shrubbery and well-kept lawn. With such an object-lesson, the people ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... have been correctly Informed, had been entertained for his future—a fact that provokes a smile now that his manifest destiny has been, or is in course of being, so very neatly accomplished. The spirit of modern aesthetics did not, at any rate, as I understand the matter, smile upon his cradle, and the circumstance only increases the interest of his having had from the earliest ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... this point and the matter in general, I might confine myself to referring those interested to the writings of Dr. Valfrid Vasenius, lecturer on Aesthetics at the University of Helsingfors. In the thesis which gained him his degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Henrik Ibsen's Dramatic Poetry in its First stage (1879), and also in Henrik Ibsen: The Portrait of a Skald (Jos. Seligman & Co., ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... aesthetics, a term applied to the theory that beauty is an objective attribute of things, not merely a subjective feeling of pleasure in him who perceives. It follows that there is an absolute standard of the beautiful by which all objects can be judged. The fact that, in practice, the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... over irrelevant subjects during tea. He held forth on the love of ornament—the cottage parlour moved him thereto—and its connection with aesthetics. She was cold and quiet. As they ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... but it is a brave one. It does not fall back on weak substitutes for reality; it does not throw the glamor of history and the aesthetics of industry around trades with the poor hope that they make up for the content which is not there; it does not foster the assumption that training in technique of industry or physical science can enrich, under the circumstances, the worker's experience to any important ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... responsibilities of architects are greater than they have ever before been; the growing demand of the times calls for intelligent studies in all that relates to architecture, whether it be in the realm of aesthetics, in sciences that relate to construction, in the nature and properties of the materials used, in the atmosphere that surrounds us, or in the availability of the thousand-and-one useful and ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... still more available, we barricaded the approaches to the chief streets by constructing barriers or felling trees. It went to my heart to sacrifice, for this purpose, several of my beautiful lindens; but it was no time for aesthetics. As the giants lay on the ground, still scenting the air with their abundant bloom, I used to rein up my horse and watch the children playing hide-and-seek amongst their branches, or some quiet cow grazing at ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... that guides him. It is as impossible to teach virtue as it is to teach genius. It would be as foolish to expect our moral systems to produce virtuous characters and saints as to expect the science of aesthetics to bring forth poets, sculptors and musicians." To this view ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... N. sensibility; sensitiveness &c adj.; physical sensibility, feeling, impressibility, perceptivity, aesthetics; moral sensibility &c 822. sensation, impression; consciousness &c (knowledge) 490. external senses. V. be sensible of &c adj.; feel, perceive. render sensible &c adj.; sharpen, cultivate, tutor. cause sensation, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... before the work is complete. A flood of light has been thrown on the dark and nebulous places of the instrumental classics by various distinguished and highly competent musicians. It is sincerely to be hoped, in the interests of this branch of the aesthetics of vocal art, that those competent to speak with authority will do so, in order that in this direction also "the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... D. Thorpe is surely correct in his view of Addison as a "grandfather" of such that would come in romantic aesthetics for the next hundred years.[2] Not that Addison invents anything; but he catches every current whisper and swells it to the journalistic audibility. Here, if we take Addison at his word, are the key ideas for Wordsworth's Preface on ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... helped: the sentiment of surrender, of sacrifice for one's neighbour, and all self-renunciation-morality, must be mercilessly called to account, and brought to judgment; just as the aesthetics of "disinterested contemplation," under which the emasculation of art nowadays seeks insidiously enough to create itself a good conscience. There is far too much witchery and sugar in the sentiments "for others" and "NOT for myself," for one not needing to be doubly distrustful ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... could not understand art without personality. 'I am aware,' she writes to Flaubert, 'that you are opposed to the exposition of personal doctrine in literature. Are you right? Does not your opposition proceed rather from a want of conviction than from a principle of aesthetics? If we have any philosophy in our brain it must needs break forth in our writings. But you, as soon as you handle literature, you seem anxious, I know not why, to be another man, the one who must disappear, who annihilates ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde |
