#esthetic

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#esthetics #lying #art

Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air. ↗

— Leonard Bernstein

#art #creativity #epiphanic-moment #epiphany #inspirational

The assignment of meanings [in music] is a shifting, kaleidoscopic play, probably below the threshold of consciousness, certainly outside the pale of discursive thinking. The imagination that responds to music is personal and associative and logical, tinged with affect, tinged with bodily rhythm, tinged with dream, but concerned with a wealth of formulations for its wealth of wordless knowledge, its whole knowledge of emotional and organic experience, of vital impulse, balance, conflict, the ways of living and dying and feeling. ↗

— Susanne K. Langer

#music #philosophy #symbolism #art

High standards generally -- about workmanship and creation of objects, about what is owed in friendship, about the quality of art and much else -- far from being snobbish, are required to maintain decency in life. ↗

— Joseph Epstein

#art #life #snobbery #art

The value of a work of art cannot ultimately turn on the more or less of its subservience to ideology; for painting can be grandly subservient to the half-truths of the moment, doggedly servile, and yet be no less intense. ↗

— T.J. Clark

#art #art-history #art

Nothing's perfect, the world's not perfect. But it's there for us, trying the best it can; that's what makes it so damn beautiful. ↗

— Hiromu Arakawa

#flaws #inspirational #beauty

In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness. ↗

— Clarice Lispector

#art #beauty #good #truth #art

What a difference! Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient! when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular and infinitely boring ↗

— Søren Kierkegaard

#esthetic #interesting #love #seduction #the-seducer-s-diary

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

— Bret Easton Ellis

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

Aesthetics have substantial political consequences. How one views oneself as beautiful or not beautiful or desirable or not desirable has deep consequences in terms of one’s feelings of self-worth and one’s capacity to be a political agent. ↗

— Cornel West

#beauty