"AEsthetical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "is somethink wrong with the inside. Her at my last place in Cadogan Square had them uncommon bad. She was what they call aesthetical, pore young thing. Them infallible ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... and they applied the term to nations that had no inconsiderable culture and refinement of manners, and that had made respectable progress in art and sciences—the Indians, Persians, Medians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians. They applied the term evidently in a political, not an ethical or an aesthetical sense, and as it would seem to designate a social order in which the state was not developed, and in which the nation was personal, not territorial, and authority was held as a private right, not as a public trust, or in which the domain vests in the chief or tribe, and not in the state; ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... across the flowerets of Paradise; of assemblies of saints seated, arrayed in pure pink, and blue and lilac, in an atmosphere of liquid gold, in glory. And thus Fra Angelico worked on, content with the dearly-purchased science of his masters, placid, beatic, effeminate, in an aesthetical paradise of his own, a paradise of sloth and sweetness, a paradise for weak souls, weak hearts, and weak eyes; patiently repeating the same fleshless angels, the same boneless saints, the same bloodless ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... being able "to reason," between learning how an artist may see the external world according to his prevailing interest in color, harmony, and form, and actually seeing the external world about a fulcrum which sustains one's own aesthetical creation. In the mind of one who "learns the things of others" we may find, as in a sack of old clothes hanging over the shoulders of a hawker, solutions of the problems of Euclid, together with the images of Raphael's works, ideas of history and geography, and rules of style, huddled ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... middle age, who piques himself on his enlightened opinions, is expecting two guests to dinner—his eldest son, and his son's friend, T. J. Hogg, who have just been sent down from Oxford for a scandalous affair of an aesthetical squib. When the young men arrive at five o'clock, Mr. Shelley receives Hogg, an observant and cool-headed person, with graciousness, and an hour is spent in conversation. Mr. Shelley runs on strangely, "in an odd, unconnected manner, ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... so long as the Holy Father has not signed the judgment. You have all to-morrow and even the morning of the day after before you. A miracle is always possible." Then, lowering his voice and drawing Pierre on one side whilst Narcisse in an aesthetical spirit examined the ladies, he added: "Listen, I have a communication to make to you in great secrecy. Come and join me in the little Saloon of the Mirrors by and by, during the Cotillon. We shall be able to ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... important part played by sexual selection in the elevation of man and the other higher animals. He showed that the careful selection which the sexes exercise on each other in regard to sexual relations and procreation, and the aesthetic feeling which the higher animals develop through this, are of the utmost importance in the progressive development of forms and the differentiation of the sexes. The males choosing the handsomest females in one class of animals, and the females choosing only the finest-looking males ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... one more suasive and agreeable; his suavity was penetrating as his small dark eyes. He lived in Elm Court, and his rooms impressed you with a sense of cleanliness and comfort. The furniture was all in solid mahogany; there were no knick-knacks or any lightness, and almost the only aesthetic intentions were a few sober engravings—portraits of men in wigs and breastplates. He took pleasure in these and also in some first editions, containing the original plates, which, when you knew him well, he produced from the bookcase and descanted ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... have to do. I cannot put my sufferings into any form they took, I need hardly say. Art only begins where Imitation ends, but something must come into my work, of fuller memory of words perhaps, of richer cadences, of more curious effects, of simpler architectural order, of some aesthetic quality ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... purple panorama brought no emotions, as pride of country or aesthetic associations; and even the bracing savor of the gale upon the eminence seemed laden, to his hard regard, with the corruptions and excesses of a debauched government and a rank society. The river, to him, was but the fair sewer to this sculptured sepulchre. The lambent amphitheatre ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... say because of his dulness. This childlike and prosaic mind is beginning to wane in the world of science. Men of science are beginning to see themselves, as the fine phrase is, in the part; they are beginning to be proud of their humility. They are beginning to be aesthetic, like the rest of the world, beginning to spell truth with a capital T, beginning to talk of the creeds they imagine themselves to have destroyed, of the discoveries that their forbears made. Like the modern ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... of her face were those of a woman grown, but the child lingered on in her complexion and in the sweetness of her mouth. Above all she was natural—that was indubitable now; more natural than he had supposed at first, perhaps on account of her aesthetic toggery, which was conventionally unconventional, suggesting what he might have called a tortuous spontaneity. He had feared that sort of thing in other cases, and his fears had been justified; for, though he was an artist to the essence, the modern reactionary nymph, ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... condensed address, a brief but generally intelligible term—that popular philosophy whereby a practically trained intelligence is set in decision over the moral worth of things, and is made the judge of their aesthetic value. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of which are common in Australia, India, and the Molucca Islands. These pretty and interesting creatures are in point of fact parrots which have practically made themselves into humming-birds by long continuance in the poetical habit of visiting flowers for food. Like Mr. Oscar Wilde in his aesthetic days, they breakfast off a lily. Flitting about from tree to tree with great rapidity, they thrust their long extensible tongues, pencilled with honey-gathering hairs, into the tubes of many big tropical blossoms. The lories, indeed, ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... very cool and lighted from above. In this chamber sat and stood three men: Vespasian, whom they knew by his strong, quiet face and grizzled hair; Titus, his son, "the darling of mankind," thin, active, and aesthetic-looking, with eyes that were not unkindly, a sarcastic smile playing about the corners of his mouth; and Domitian, his brother, who has already been described, a man taller than either of them by half a head, and more gorgeously attired. In front of the august three was ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... Parliament is most literally a Rump Parliament—everything depending on the hind legs, and nothing on the brains; which makes it wonderfully like some other Parliaments we know of nowadays, with Mr. Ayrton and Mr. Lowe for their aesthetic and acquisitive eyes, and a rump ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... in large type for aesthetic reasons. These are few, beauty and artistic form being apparently linked in some way with illegibility by many printers, no matter what the size ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... and it is absurd to allow it to become entangled in the general propositions of sex-education. As I have often said in this series of lectures, the larger sex-education aims at making the best possible adjustments of sex and life. If the aesthetic demands of affection are in real conflict with the animal function of propagation, then a pragmatically ethical solution is found in intelligent control of the original function. Ideally, the animal ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... I cannot now put my hand, for purposes of quotation, upon the title of the periodical in which these appeared; but I remember that the writer was greatly amused, as well as somewhat provoked, by his inability to get any of the philosophers with whom he sought interviews to take an aesthetic view of any poem, or painting, or other art product. They would talk of its "message" or its "ethical content"; but as to questions of technique or beauty, they gently put them one side as unworthy to engage the ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... exhaustion, at which the workman and the work would be ruined. Fatigue and restoration accordingly demand especial consideration. In a similar way emotions may be conditions of stimulation or interference, and no one ought to underestimate the importance of higher motives, intellectual, aesthetic, and moral motives, in their bearing on the psychophysical impulses of the laborer. If these higher demands are satisfied, the whole system gains a new tonus, and if they are disappointed, the irritation ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... use of the precious metals, to satisfy certain wants of luxury in the most aesthetic and the most substantial manner, continues still; but with the advance of civilization, the employment of gold and silver for this purpose has fallen farther and farther behind the more recent employment of these metals as the best material for money. And since now the services rendered ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... to-day, not only in those parts of the Anglican communion where sacramentarian theories are in favour, but amongst all sections of the Christian Church, in which there is obvious a drift towards more ornate ritual, and aesthetic services, as means of attracting to church or chapel, and as more important than proclaiming Christ. I am free to confess that possibly some of us, with our Puritan upbringing and tendency, too much disregard that side of human nature. Possibly it is so. But for all that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... I do not see," cried Else, "the art-production of your life. Where is the climax, where the harmonious close? Is it aesthetic, is it dignified to pay court to frivolous actresses and ballet-dancers, and treat the cheap triumph, before and after, as though it were something important? Does not this humiliate a man of intellect in his own eyes? ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... land," the attitude, and gesture of the lines are admirable. The coast is dismally inferior to ours; glens are not to be seen, and streams are puny, but very clean. On the whole we give the preference to Mona, and that upon purely aesthetic, not patriotic, grounds. ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... principal forms of their inspiration, are grouped, superb and mournful. Who are they? No doubt Madame de Pompadour, the Geisha of Japanese art, and finally, bestial and degraded, La Fille Elisa—types that symbolize the most salient aspects of that genius—historic, aesthetic, and fictional—which will keep green the precious memory of Edmond and ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... thing common to the whole Italian Renaissance was the worship of beauty. It was the aesthetic against the ascetic. In this exclusive study, that is, in art, the Italians speedily attained the highest perfection that has been reached by man. And it was reached almost simultaneously in many parts of Italy, Rome, Florence, Milan, and Venice. First, it was ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... panels; and the sculptors who carve antique heads over the doorways of palace cars make the place merry with studio jokes from the Berlin Academy. It is evident that a community of artists like this, furnishing the aesthetic department to an immense manufactory, will also elevate the tone of the industrial society outside, if they can but be kept free from vice and supplied with means of culture; more of which anon. Meantime, as a kind of standard of what the manufacturers themselves arrive ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... Sangdugong Panaguinip ("The Dreamed Alliance"). As a brilliant conversationalist and well-versed political economist he has few rivals in his country. A lover of the picturesque and of a nature inclined to revel in scenes of aesthetic splendour, his dream of one day wearing a coronet was nurtured by no vulgar veneration for aristocracy, but by a desire for a recognized social position enabling him, by his prestige, to draw his fellow-men from the sordid pleasure of ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... under the blessing of God will produce in seventy-five or one hundred years the most magnificent style of man and woman the world ever saw. They will have the wit of one race, the eloquence of another race, the kindness of another, the generosity of another, the aesthetic taste of another, the high moral character of another, and when that man and woman step forth, their brain and nerve and muscle an intertwining of the fibres of all nationalities, nothing but the new electric photographic apparatus, ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... "aesthetic" poetry is neither a mere reproduction of Greek or medieval poetry, nor only an idealisation of modern life and sentiment. The atmosphere on which its effect depends belongs to no simple form of poetry, no actual ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... my age I had more than an average love of business. Indeed, I deliberately set about learning to play the guitar well enough to become eligible for membership in the Banjo Club—and this for no more aesthetic purpose than to place myself in line for the position of manager, to which ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... history of art, this monument brings back to our memory the fall of Constantinople and Granada, the discovery of the new world, the figures of Bayazid, Ferdinand, and Christopher Columbus, we have a subject for meditation, as well as aesthetic enjoyment. Innocent VIII., Giovanni Battista Cibo, of Genoa, is represented on his sarcophagus sleeping the sleep of the just, while above it he appears again in the full power of life, seated on the pontifical throne, with the right hand raised in the act of blessing ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... obligation to honesty of thinking, no less than integrity of conduct; of the immorality of the pragmatic standard of mere effectiveness or immediate efficiency in the selection of material; of the aesthetic folly and ethical dubiety of simulated extempore speaking and genuinely impromptu prayers, would not be superfluous. But, on the other hand, we may hope to accomplish much of this indirectly today. Because there is no way ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... like a war-horse, she scents from afar, drags him out with her—somewhere—generally, when there is nothing more exciting on hand, across the way to that bric-a-brac-shop of a house, where the tawdry elegant, always weary Mrs. Babbington Brooks holds forth in an ultra-aesthetic style peculiarly her own. There they spend the entire evening in what mamma softly calls "a sweet communion of congenial souls," which, being translated according to methods of the earth, earthy, means simply a tiresome ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... life is demoralizing to Americans? Are we to conclude that the innumerable advantages that such a life confers—the wider view and broader knowledge of things, the softening influences gained by contact with a riper civilization, the aesthetic tastes developed by acquaintance with older and more perfect art—are to count as nothing, are to be outweighed by the disadvantages ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... birthday boxes from home, never any Christmas presents, except those that came from the school. While the other girls were clamoring for mail, Harriet stood in the background silent and unexpectant. Miss Sallie picked out her clothes, and Miss Sallie's standards were utilitarian rather than aesthetic. Harriet, with no exception, was the worst dressed girl in the school. Even her school uniform, which was an exact twin of sixty-three other uniforms, hung upon her with the grace of a meal-bag. Miss Sallie, with provident foresight, always ordered ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... aesthetic point of view, however, the war has done a great deal of enduring mischief, by causing the devastation of great tracts of woodland scenery, in which this part of Virginia would appear to be very rich. Around all the ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I naturally seek to give its universal and aesthetic flavor wherever it is separable from its political quality; for I should not hope to interest any one else in what I had myself often found very tiresome. I suspect, indeed, that political satire and ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... one of his masters. "Voltaire," he wrote to Oeser, "has been able to do no harm to Shakespeare; no lesser spirit will prevail over a greater one."[60] The German writers who now stood highest in his esteem were Lessing and Wieland. Lessing's aesthetic teaching he accepted with some reserves, but this did not abate the admiration which he retained for him at every period of his life. "Lessing! Lessing!" he wrote in the same letter to Oeser; "if he were not Lessing, I might say something. Write against him I may not; he is ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... I am far from seeking to despise. 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 ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... something seen, either beauty of color or form or tone. It may be light which attracts the artist, or it may be some dimming of natural forms, until they seem to have more of the loveliness of mind than of nature. But it is the aesthetic, not the moral or ethical, nature which is stirred. The picture may afterwards be called "Charity," or "Faith," or "Hope"—and any of these words may make an apt title. But what looms up before the vision of the artist first of all is an image, and that is accepted on account of its fitness ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... is right; and due reflection on his teachings, instead of diminishing our reverence and our wonder, adds all the force of intellectual sublimity to the mere aesthetic intuition ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... the aesthetic in the manner in which this writer treats his subjects. In external forms he is indeed varied enough, but throughout he makes too much use of direct irony; namely, in praising the blameworthy and blaming the praiseworthy, whereas ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... has immortalized this vision in a poem, giving utterance to an irrepressible emotion, but still exhibiting the delicate lines of a beautifully designed composition." The other Germans are usually so taken up with technical and mechanical questions that they leave no room for aesthetic considerations. Whether Cynewulf wrote the poem or not,—and the probabilities favor his authorship, though we may not hesitate to say with Morley, "I don't know,"—it is certainly the work of a gifted Christian ...
— Elene; Judith; Athelstan, or the Fight at Brunanburh; Byrhtnoth, or the Fight at Maldon; and the Dream of the Rood • Anonymous
... sense-perceptions—and the feelings which mediate between the former and the perfectly distinct ideas of rational thought. The delight of music depends, in his opinion, on an unconscious numbering and measuring of the harmonic and rhythmic relations of tones, aesthetic enjoyment of the beautiful in general, and even sensuous pleasure, on the confused perception of a perfection, order, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... to see the quantity that some of the Bretons managed to appropriate in an incredibly short space of time at the table d'hote. H.C., who was accustomed to the aesthetic table of his aunt, Lady Maria, more than once had to retire to his room, and recover his composure, and wonder whether his own appetite would ever return to him. And once or twice when I unfeelingly ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... difficulty of an adequate scientific treatment consists in the fact that each and all of these scientific objects ought to be pursued simultaneously; that is to say, the whole of the phenomena—industrial, intellectual, political, moral, aesthetic—should be presented in their ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... sky so 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 it ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... visitor who came to Minnesota in the early days was entertained by Mr. Sibley in this hospitable old mansion, and, together with its genial, generous and refined proprietor, it contributed much towards planting the seeds of those aesthetic amenities of social life that have so generally flourished in the later days of Minnesota's history and given it its deserved prominence among the states of the West. The house still stands, and has been occupied ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... marts of trade. Men, women, and children zealously ply the hoe, the plow, or the shovel, abetting Nature in her efforts to feed the hungry. In this pastoral scene there is dignity, serenity, and latent power. Its beauty answers back to the aesthetic nature of mankind, and nothing that is artificial can ever supplant it in the way of gratifying ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... notwithstanding her defiant frame of mind, a feeling of something akin to reverence crept over Honor as she crossed the threshold. Her impressionable Celtic temperament could not fail to be influenced by outward surroundings: she had a great love of the beautiful, and this room satisfied her aesthetic tastes. ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... it will find expression in the orderliness of his place. If he is intelligent and inventive it will show in the appointments and adaptations everywhere apparent, inside and outside the buildings. If the man and his family have a fine sense of beauty and propriety, an artistic or aesthetic sense, there will be evidences of cleanliness and simple beauty everywhere—in the architecture, in the painting, in the pictures, and the carpets, in the kinds and positions of the trees and shrubbery, and in the general neatness and cleanliness of the premises. It ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... round its 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, For all who use it show a wondrous ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Christian ceremony. A Sacramental meal, as mentioned a few pages back, seems to have been held by the worshipers of Attis (1) in commemoration of their god; and the 'mysteries' of the Pagan cults generally appear to have included rites—sometimes half-savage, sometimes more aesthetic—in which a dismembered animal was eaten, or bread and wine (the spirits of the Corn and the Vine) were consumed, as representing the body of the god whom his devotees desired to honor. But the best example of this practice ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... take to the men a little and might assist in making more of them fit companions for the sweet and cleanly women they delight in associating with. The absolute neglect of the masculine sex by writers on these subjects causes them to think that nothing in the way of the aesthetic is expected of them. It is a wrong to the men not to en-me and make me his chum as well as his wife. Help courage them to aspire to a common plane with woman in the matters of purity and cleanliness. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, but no more so ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... of mention, among others, The Owl and the Nightingale, generally assigned to the reign of Henry III. (1216-1272), an Estrif, {26} or dispute, in which the owl represents the ascetic and the nightingale the aesthetic view of life. The debate is conducted with much animation and a spirited use of proverbial wisdom. The Land of Cokaygne is an amusing little poem of some two hundred lines, belonging to the class of fabliaux, short humorous tales or satirical pieces in verse. It describes ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... almost—almost, but never quite—driven from Mozart's thought by the anguish that tormented him as he wrote. While speaking of Bach's "Matthew" Passion, I have said it "was an appeal, of a force and poignancy paralleled only in the Ninth symphony, to the emotional side of man's nature ... the aesthetic qualities are subordinated to the utterance of an overwhelming emotion." Had I said "deliberately subordinated" I should have indicated the main difference as well as the main likeness between Bach's masterwork and Mozart's. The aesthetic qualities are subordinated ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... of the fairy tale is frequently apparent. One test fulfilled is followed by the demand for fulfilment of another. Qujavarssuk, having found the skeleton as instructed, is then sent off to search for a lamb stone. This, of course, apart from its aesthetic value as retardation, is particularly useful to the story-teller aiming principally at length. We also find the common progression from one great or splendid thing to other greater or more splendid; a woman appears "even more ...
— Eskimo Folktales • Unknown
... could not dominate every field of human activity. She could rule the people with authority and overcome the proud; but even her own poets rendered homage to Greece in the realms of art, sculpture, and eloquence. But France was the aesthetic as well as the military dictator of seventeenth- century Europe. Her authority was supreme, as Macaulay says, on all matters from orthodoxy in architecture to the proper cut of a courtier's clothes. Her ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... knows him will say that the Native's capacity for the "joy of life unquestioned" is less than that of the average white man. Most Natives are born lovers of song and music, and attain easily to technical proficiency in the art of harmony. The aesthetic sense is present in the average Native as it is in the average European and in both is easily overlooked when not stimulated and developed by education and culture. That the Natives, as a whole, feel the sorrows of life and death as keenly as do the people of other races will be readily admitted ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... if you can, with a floating violet robe and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward, and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands,—those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house,—those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... wild cassava and can prepare it so it won't poison you, you can make an eatable paste. If you like oily cabbage, the top of any palmetto will furnish it. But, my poor friend, there's little here to tempt one's appetite or satisfy one's aesthetic hunger for flowers. Our Northern meadows are far more gorgeous from June to October; and our wild fruits are far more delicious than what one finds ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... emotion, love of beauty with love of truth, idealism with realism, nature with humanity, fancy with fact. And this is the equipment of the great poet. When he divides these qualities each from the other, and is only aesthetic or only severe in his realism; only the worshipper of Nature or only the worshipper of human nature; only the poet of beauty or only the poet of austere fact; only the idealist or only the realist; only of the senses or only of the soul—he may be a poet, but not a great ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... to the fact of their citizenship for their support, and who did, in truth, live on their citizenship. Of "panem et circenses" we have all heard, and know that eleemosynary bread and the public amusements of the day supplied the material and aesthetic wants of many Romans. But men so fed and so amused were sure to need further occupations. They became attached to certain friends, to certain patrons, and to certain parties, and soon learned that a return ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... prosateur of purple patches, or a sophist of honeyed counsels tragically easy to misapply, but as an artist of the interpretative imagination of rare insight and magic, a writer of deep humanity as well as aesthetic beauty, and the teacher of a way of life at once ennobling and exquisite. It is no longer possible to parody him—after the fashion of Mr. Mallock's brilliancy in The New Republic—as a writer of "all manner and ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... desire. Tell me what a man wants, and 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 to a clearer view of life and duty—he is a born minister of the Spirit, and ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... the intellectual and aesthetic revival, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the "spirit of the age" was fostered by the invention of printing, by the downfall of the Byzantine Empire, and the scattering of Greek fugitives, carrying the ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... or principles were involved in the building of civilizations: group survival; propitiating the gods; recognizing and following aesthetic principles; achieving and stabilizing property and class relations; expansion (bigness); individual conformity to the collective pattern; and collective uniformity in a united world of human brotherhood. At times and in places the ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... practice should be checked. Its great prevalence in the United States is to be attributed mainly to the drastic legislation in that country against the sale and use of preventives, to which many persons take objection on moral or aesthetic grounds, but which is surely on an entirely different level from the destruction of life that has already begun. The 'Comstock' legislation in America has done unmixed harm. It is worse than useless to try to put down by law a practice which a very large number of ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... illustrations. The hand or muscle disused withers in power. The fishes of the Mammoth Cave, having no use for their eyes, lose them. Mr. Darwin in an impressive passage of his biography testifies that he began life with a taste for poetry and music, but that by disuse this aesthetic taste grew atrophied so that at last he did not care to read a poem or to hear a musical note. So it is, says Jesus, with spiritual insight and power. Sometimes we see a man of intellectual {137} gifts lose his ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... Smollett confuses historical and aesthetic grandeur. What appeals to him most is a monument of a whole past civilization, such as the Pont du Gard. His views of art, too, as well as his views of life, are profoundly influenced by his early training as a surgeon. He ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... Aesthetic admiration for that old Church Agreed in the large, and differed in the narrow All life seemed suddenly a thing of forms and sham And I don't want to be forgiven At my age one expects no more than one gets! Avoided discussion on matters where he might hurt ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger
... and the unaffected desire of the writer to awaken a kindly interest in the poor souls who have so twined themselves about her own best feelings, may be said to consecrate the work. In its character of aesthetic material for another age, it appeals to our nationality; while, as the effort of a reflecting and Christian mind to call public attention to the needs of an unhappy race, we may ask for it the approbation of all who acknowledge the duty to ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... phaeton he felt that the turn-out was stylish, and he learned to consult certain eccentricities of Frank's in the satisfaction of his pride. One of these was a high reluctance to be passed on the road. Frank was as lazy a horse—but lazy in a self-respectful, aesthetic way—as ever was; yet if he heard a vehicle at no matter how great distance behind him (and he always heard it before his driver), he brightened with resolution and defiance, and struck out with speed that made competition difficult. If my friend found that the horse behind ...
— Buying a Horse • William Dean Howells
... questions affirmatively. Women, I think it has been authoritatively stated, are to be emancipated in order that they may become fully developed human beings, something broader and stronger, something higher and finer, more delicate, more aesthetic, more generally rarefied and sublimated than the old-fashioned type of womanhood, the wife ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... electric glow lamps, in accordance with the latest fashion in that department of artificial lighting, viz., suspension lamps, in which the glow lamps grew out of leaves and scrolls, twisted and twirled in and out, very much after the pattern of our most aesthetic gas lamps, which, of course, are in the style of the most artistic (late eighteenth century) oil lamps, which were in imitation of the most classic Roman lamps, which followed the Persian, and so on back to the time of Tubal Cain, the great arch-artificer in metals, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 514, November 7, 1885 • Various
... was lost upon Florence. She sat upon the fence, her gaze unfavourably though wistfully fixed upon a sign of no special aesthetic merit above ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... this: Whitman chose to express himself in a species of poetry, based roughly upon Hebrew poetry, such as we have in the Psalms and Prophets. If this is a true expansion of the aesthetic law of poetry, then it is a success; if it is not a true expansion, but only a wilful variation, not consonant with the law, ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... year's 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 ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... 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 the past; our painting is ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... would write round-about essays, for which he had a charming gift, and generally take in charge the aesthetic interests of the paper, though, as all were lovers of art and literature, those subjects would be handled now by one and now by another. Even Jenny was to have her place on the staff, and write dress articles, ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... 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 being infested with ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... lineage, nor to the deeds I had done and the champions I had overthrown, but to a certain hogskin belt buckled next the skin. The sweat of months was upon it, toil had defaced it, and it was not a creation such as would appeal to the aesthetic mind; but it was plethoric. There was the arcanum; each yellow grain conduced to my exaltation, and the sum of these grains was the sum of my mightiness. Had they been less, just so would have been my stature; more, and I ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... the universe, which will allow us to fit in all his many-levelled experiences—I believe we have the way of approach to which religion to-day must look as its best hope. Thus only can we conquer that museum-like atmosphere of much traditional piety which—agreeable as it may be to the historic or aesthetic sense—makes it so unreal to our workers, no less than to our students. Such a method, too, will mean the tightening of that alliance between philosophy and psychology which is already a marked character of ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... 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 snow-white tents among the coco palms, and ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... the labret, like many of the attempts at primitive ornamentation, is very old, its use having been traced by Dall along the American coast from the lower part of Chili to Alaska. Persons fond of tracing, vestiges of savage ornamentation amid intellectual advancement and aesthetic sensibility far in advance of the primitive man, may observe in the wearers of bangles and earrings the same tendency existing ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... Carroll, "you must all look at me in my purple gown and get all the comfort you can out of it; you must nourish yourselves through your aesthetic sense, because this soup is all you will get for dinner, except dessert. There is ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Last and chief, while literature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and may call a spade a spade. Talk has none of the freezing immunities of the pulpit. 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 ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... receiving from accredited representatives of the fine arts makes its position no longer a doubtful one. Any of the arts may be used for commercial purposes, but that fact does not take away from them their rightful place when they are used by competent hands for aesthetic purposes. The increasing number of museums that are opening their exhibition halls to good photography is an evidence that is obvious to all observers. Caustic critics like Joseph Pennell may decry photography, but many able ...
— Pictorial Photography in America 1922 • Pictorial Photographers of America
... see the allegory? We are not blind, we see what goes on about us, but we are gentlemen, my dear sir, and we take our revenge like gentlemen.... But here,' added Shubin, uncovering another figure, 'as the artist according to modern aesthetic principles enjoys the enviable privilege of embodying in himself every sort of baseness which he can turn into a gem of creative art, we in the production of this gem, number two, have taken vengeance not as ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... occupied by the Mattmark Lake, and at last we got to the inn. There we changed our things and had lunch, and I and O—— once more fought over the glacier of the upper snows, and the question as to whether we should climb on aesthetic or gymnastic grounds. And though we did not reach the hotel at Saas-Fee till the evening, that argument lasted all the way. But when he and I get together, as we usually do when climbing comes on, we always quarrel in the most friendly way upon that subject. But for my own part I declare that ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... self-justified by its own reasonableness and is further exemplified by many experiences in daily life. Sweet things taste the sweeter after a contrast with something acid; we like to revisit old scenes and to return home after a vacation. No delight is keener than the renewal of some aesthetic experience after its temporary effacement through a change of appeal.[19] This practice is associated with the inherent demand, spoken of above, for Variety in Unity. No theme is of sufficient import to bear constant repetition; in fact, the more eloquent ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... of the reason struggling to define the infinite; they are the expressions of that "yearning after the gods" which the earliest of poets discerned in the hearts of all men. Studied in this sense they are rich in teachings. Would we estimate the intellectual and aesthetic culture of a people, would we generalize the laws of progress, would we appreciate the sublimity of Christianity, and read the seals of its authenticity: the natural conceptions of divinity reveal them. No mythologies are so crude, therefore, none so barbarous, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... thoughtful women of our time are boldly denouncing the bondage of fashion and bravely pleading for such radical reforms in dress as will secure to womanhood health and comfort, while being genuinely artistic and graceful, breathing true refinement and conforming to aesthetic principles rather than the caprice of fashion. To me there is something infinitely pathetic in the brave protests that have from time to time flashed from the outraged sensibilities of those who represent the very flower ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... was a cold, hard, stern man, despising sentiment, reticent and self-restrained. But beneath the surface there lay deep emotions and an aesthetic sense, of which his drawings were the only outward sign. To these sketches he himself attached no value. "You can buy better at the nearest shop for sixpence," he would say, if he heard them praised. Yet good judges of art compared them with the early ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... novels, with never a divergence, never a break, in its development. And of the theme—legitimate marriage contra common-law—what need be said except that he handled it in a manner most acceptable to the aesthetic and least offensive ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... that flaw on the first day. How was it that I did not draw an inference at once? I was shocked because the artist had sinned against an aesthetic law, whereas I ought to have been shocked because he had overlooked a physical law. As though art and nature were not blended together! And as though the laws of gravity could be disturbed ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... awaked the whole party with early dawn. We sprang from our nests, shook the hay-seed out of our hair, and were full-dressed without more ceremony, ready for whatever grand sensation Nature might purvey for our aesthetic breakfast. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... mode of installation formed a striking feature in the case of many of the systems of public schools exhibited at St. Louis. The highest results were achieved where the plan of the exhibit had been carefully worked out with full regard to aesthetic effect and educational significance. In the formation of these plans women had very largely participated, and in one instance, namely, that of the Minnesota educational exhibit, the entire installation was planned and carried to a ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... Winfield Scott standing beside his horse and some piece of artillery, which I copied from a print. It was of course an awful daub, but in connection with it I heard for the first time a new word,—the word "taste" used in its aesthetic sense. One of the neighbour women was calling at the house, and seeing my picture said to Mother, "What taste that boy has." That application of the word made an impression on me that I ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... it is a case of once seen never forgotten, and no one who has ever seen one could possibly mistake him for anything else than what he is. His best friends probably would not claim beauty, in the aesthetic sense, for him; but he is attractive in a quaint way peculiarly his own, and intelligent-looking. In this particular his looks do not bewray him; he is, in fact, one of the most intelligent of all the dogs used in aid of the gun, and in his own sphere one ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... coffers, and chairs that looked as if they came out of some Vandyck portrait. In my mind was the strong impression that all this was natural, spontaneous—that it had about it nothing of the picturesqueness which swell studios have taught to rich and aesthetic houses. Mr. ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee |
