#aesthetics

You're a beautiful boy, Clay, but that's about it. ↗

— Bret Easton Ellis

#bret-easton-ellis #life #transgressive #beauty

In the life of the individual, an aesthetic sensibility is both more authentic and more commendable than a political or religious one. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#life

Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic ↗

— James Branch Cabell

#cynicism #dead #death #death

All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war. ↗

— Walter Benjamin

#art #poltics #propaganda #war #art

For if indeed God became a man, then Truth condescended to became a truth, from whose historical contingency one cannot simply pass to categories of universal rationality; and this means that whatever Christians mean when they speak of truth, it cannot involve simply the dialectical wrestling of abstract principles from intractable facts. (5) ↗

— David Bentley Hart

#christianity #eastern-orthodox #beauty

I want to say something about bad writing. I'm proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. I am proud of Philip Guston's bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire's mamma's boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which's something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b. ↗

— Ariana Reines

#baudelaire #philip-guston #sentimentality #intelligence

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it. ↗

— Kazuo Ishiguro

#art #artist #beauty #art

I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life. ↗

— Clive Bell

#art #emotions #life #art

Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent. ↗

— Roger Scruton

#beauty #classic #style #beauty

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties. ↗

— Harold Bloom

#anxiety #canon #literature #age