For aesthetics is the mother of ethics.... Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their po...litical programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe--not empirically, alas, but only theoretically--that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At its best, [Japanese cooking] is inextricably meshed with aesthetics, with religion, with tradition and history. It is evocative... of seasonal changes, or of one's childhood, or of a storm at sea ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is the use of aesthetics if they can neither teach how to produce beauty nor how to appreciate it in good taste? It exists be...cause it behooves rational human beings to provide reasons for their actions and assessments. Even if aesthetics are not the mathematics of beauty, they are the proof of the calculation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are moods 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nothing is beautiful, except man alone: all aesthetics rests upon this naïveté, which is its first truth. Let us immediately add... the second: nothing is ugly except the degenerating man--and with this the realm of aesthetic judgment is circumscribed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useles...s in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Both art and physics are unique forms of language. Each has a specialized lexicon of symbols that is used in a distinctive syntax.... Their very different and specific contexts obscure their connection to everyday language as well as to each other. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy just how often the terms of one can be applied to the concepts of the other. "Volume," "space," "mass," "force," "light," "color," "tension," "relationship," and "density" are descriptive words that are heard repeatedly if you trail along with a museum docent. They also appear on the blackboards of freshman college physics lectures. The proponents of these two diverse endeavors wax poetic about elegance, symmetry, beauty, and aesthetics. While physicists demonstrate that A equals B or that X is the same as Y, artists often choose signs, symbols, and allegories to equate a painterly image with a feature of experience. Both of these techniques reveal previously hidden relationships.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »