"Esthetics" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lifting their common aspirations and sympathies (so first clearly revealed to themselves) on the wings of his song to a purer ether and a wider reach of view. We cannot, if we would, read the poetry of Wordsworth as mere poetry; at every other page we find ourselves entangled in a problem of aesthetics. The world-old question of matter and form, of whether nectar is of precisely the same flavour when served to us from a Grecian chalice or from any jug of ruder pottery, comes up for decision anew. The Teutonic nature has always shown a sturdy preference of the solid bone ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... whacks who string out the sessions interminably for the sake of the $2 a day—imagine these fellows, each with a large pendulous ear to the earth, listening for the approach of some Pegasus to carry him to Congress—teaching the aesthetics of civilization to the divine philosophers of Greece and the god-like senators of Rome! Think of Perry J. Lewis pulling the Conscript Fathers over the coals—of Senator Bowser pointing out civic duties to Socrates; of Attorney-General Crane giving ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... 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
... 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
... American aloe floats into the charmed circle of New Orleans society—that lively, sparkling epitome and relic of the old regime. He has good letters and a fair name, and mingles in the Mystick Krewe, that curious club, possible nowhere else, that has raised mummery into the sphere of aesthetics. Perhaps he has worn the gray, perhaps the blue. It is only in the very arcana of exclusive passion it makes much difference. But gray or blue, or North or South in birth, he is in every essential a Southerner, as many, like S.S. Prentiss, curiously independent ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 06, June 1895 - Renaissance Panels from Perugia • Various
... much it may give it compactness and gloss. Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost entirely superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; and I will add (since there is an aesthetics in all things), is much more handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp. Hemp is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian to behold. The whale line is only two thirds of an inch in ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... 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 without attainment, is no reason why you should not partake in a small measure of these qualities, ...
— A Jolly by Josh • "Josh"
... 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
... editor of the Morning Star, taunts me, as its promulgator, with living out of the world and knowing nothing of life and men. That great austere toiler, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, upbraids me,—but kindly, and more in sorrow than in anger,—for trifling with aesthetics and poetical fancies, while he himself, in that arsenal of his in Fleet Street, is bearing the burden and heat of the day. An intelligent American newspaper, the Nation, says that it is very easy to sit in one's study and find fault with the course ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... 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 ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... I 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
... first condition of the attainment of scientific truth. Nobody denies that men of action find in it the first law of successful achievement in the material order. Its varied but always superlative power in the region of aesthetics is only an object of recent recognition, though great work enough has been done in past ages by men whose recognition was informal and inexpress. It is plain that, in the different classes of aesthetic manifestation, there will be differences in ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... Brownlow, and whereas, in her prosperity, she had never dropped old friends, they welcomed her back as one of themselves, resuming the homely inexpensive gatherings where the brains were more consulted than the palate, aesthetics more than fashion. She was glad of it for the young people's sake as well as her own, and returned to her old habit of keeping open house one evening in the week between eight and ten, with cups of coffee and varieties of cheap foreign drinks, and slight but dainty cakes made ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 into actual chaos; ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... as the blank 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 behalf of the Dean, that there is any ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... the 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 no reproduction of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... zeal of a Spanish inquisitor, and the flippant brutality of a French orthodox journalist. Behind him stood the gifted but erratic Frederick William IV—a man admirably fitted for a professorship of aesthetics, but whom an inscrutable fate had made King of Prussia. Both these rulers in the German Israel arrayed all possible opposition against the great scholars labouring in the new paths; but this opposition was vain: the succession ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... labour can be freed from its present fetters, and organized unwastefully, so as to produce the greatest possible amount of wealth for the community and for every member of it, but which bears with it its own ethics and religion and aesthetics: that is the hope and promise of a new and higher life in all ways. So that even if those unforeseen economical events above spoken of were to happen, and put off for a while the end of our Capitalist system, the latter would drag itself along as an anomaly cursed ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... 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 ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... personal cleanliness which obtains among a coat-wearing than among a blouse-wearing population. Cleanliness is very truly reputed to be next to godliness, and it may be worth while making some sacrifice of convenience and taste for the sake of it: it belongs to morals rather than to aesthetics, and should accordingly take precedence of any thing appertaining only ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... of prophecy. Of the sham-shaggy, who have tried the trick of Jacob upon us, we have had quite enough, and may safely doubt whether this satyr of masquerade is to be our representative singer.[1] Were it so, it would not be greatly to the credit of democracy as an element of aesthetics. But we may safely hope ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... which follow from 1798 to 1818 may with equal accuracy be styled the "critical period." It was during these years that he did his best work as a journalist, and all his work as a public lecturer on aesthetics. It was during them that he said his say, and even his final say, so far as any public modes of expression were concerned, on politics and on art. From 1818 to his death his life was devoted entirely to metaphysics and theology, and with such close and constant ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... and Intuition. Studies in psychology and aesthetics. Chap, iv, "Belief: Its Varieties and Its ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... and the reasons given by us, moderns, is easily explained by our intense self-consciousness. We are deeply interested in our own states of mind: we are all psychologists now. From psychology springs the modern interest in aesthetics; those who care for art and the processes of their own minds finding themselves aestheticians willy-nilly. Now, art-criticism and aesthetics are two things, though at the present moment the former is profoundly influenced by the latter. By works of art we are ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... what, had he been a lady, he might have described as an insertion of lace. At last came the boot-blacking parlor, late nineteenth century, commercial, practical, convenient, and an important factor in civic aesthetics. Not that the parlor is beautiful in itself. It is a cave without architectural pretensions, but it accomplishes unwittingly an important mission: it removes from public view the man who is having his ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... and the theistic arguments have shifted from worlds to atoms. At the present moment the vision of God has narrowed down to a perception of the divine intelligence noted in the design of the atom. Astronomy, physics, geology, chemistry, medicine, psychology, ethics, aesthetics, and the social sciences have left no room for a theistic explanation of the universe. The mystics who proclaim God in their intuitive trances are being crowded out into the light of reason by the researches of psychologists. There are ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... purchaser of Mr. William Morris's wall papers. It existed ten or twelve years before the public "caught on," as they say, to these delights. But, except one or two of the masters, the school were only playing at aesthetics, and laughing at their own performances. There was more fun than fashion in the cult, which was later revived, developed, and gossiped about ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... is 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 ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... lion-like heart within—the true sailor is one of the noblest specimens of man. He that is fierce as a bull, and yet tender-hearted like a young child—the greatest blasphemer on earth, and yet the most religious, or even the most superstitious, of men—he is not to be tied down by the rules of aesthetics, like a land-crab. His home is on the sea, as somebody has said or sung; he has nobody there to see him but himself, (if we may be excused the bull.) What does he care for dress? Only look at him standing by his gun, when broadside after broadside is pouring into ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... felt that something must be done to stem the tide, and again she fell back upon luncheon. They had bought some provisions on their way to the station in Paris. He might subsist on scenery and aesthetics if he pleased—as for her, she was a common person with ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... discontented With a world of dust and stones and flesh too ailing: Even before the question grew to problem And drove you bickering into metaphysics, You met on lower planes the same great dragon, Seeking release, some fleeting satisfaction, In strange aesthetics . . . You tried, as I remember, One after one, strange cults, and some, too, morbid, The cruder first, more violent sensations, Gorgeously carnal things, conceived and acted With splendid animal thirst . . . Then, by degrees,— ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... gospel and decalogue of the art. The theorists have so thoroughly mapped out the legitimate resources of the composer, and have so prescribed his course in nearly every possible position, that music is made almost more of a mathematical problem than the free expression of emotions and aesthetics. "Correct" music has now hardly more liberty than Egyptian sculpture or Byzantine painting once had. Certain dissonances are permitted, and certain others, no more dissonant, forbidden, quite arbitrarily, or on hair-splitting theories. It is as if one should write down in a ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... spirit roams among unbridled emotions; art becomes impressionism. What it then produces may indeed be picturesque, melodramatic, sensual, but it will not be beautiful because there will be no imaginative wholeness in it. In other words, the artist who divorces aesthetics from ethics does gain creative license, but he gains it at the expense of a balanced and harmonious expression. If you do not believe it, compare the Venus de Milo with the Venus de Medici or a Rubens fleshy, spilling-out-of-her-clothes Magdalen with a Donatello Madonna. When ethical ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... right," and "if a book is bad, feel it is 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 be justly estimated by the critic except those which are unworthy of criticism. Upon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... bunk and spent a moment analyzing the aesthetics of the layout. It had a certain pleasing severity, the unconscious balance of complete functionalism. Soon ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... everywhere apparent. The 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 ingenious inventions that tend to promote the convenience ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... the aesthetic, or even the scientific importance of 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 knowledge that, historically speaking, ...
— The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science - Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 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
... Lord Verulam, "is man added to Nature" (homo additus naturae); and we may modernize his statement, and adapt it to the demands of aesthetics, if we define art to be Nature infused with and shaped by the imaginative faculty of man; thus, as Bacon says elsewhere, "conforming the shows of things to the desires of the mind." Art always platonizes: it results ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... All was on the basis of personal preference. His chiefs learned early that so rare an organism was best left alone to function in harmony with its own nature. The Column had not only its own philosophy and its own aesthetics, but its own politics: if it seemed to contravene other and more representative departments of the paper, never mind. Its conductor had such confidence in the validity of his personal predilections and in their identity with those of ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... 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
... a student of aesthetics Duerer was also the northern Leonardo. His theory of art reveals the secret of his genius: "What beauty is, I know not; but for myself I take that which at all times has been considered beautiful by the greater ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... views than this, if I 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
... Germans, (to whom we are undeniably indebted for the first philosophic appreciation of the poet,) being debarred by their alienage from the tempting parliament of verbal commentary and conflict, have made themselves such ample amends by expatiations in the unfenced field of aesthetics and of that constructive criticism which is too often confined to the architecture of Castles in Spain, that we feel as if Dogberry had charged us in relation to them with that hopelessly bewildering commission ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... undoubtedly is in many ways. It is curious that modern critics of the Greeks have not called attention to the aesthetic obtuseness which showed itself in the defective reaction of the ancients against cruelty. It was not that they excluded beautiful actions from the sphere of aesthetics; they never thought of separating the beautiful from the good in this way. But they were not disgusted at the torture of slaves, the exposure of new-born children, or the massacre of the population of a revolted city. The same callousness appears in the Italian ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... people, thus Tolstoy is and remains the glorified Russian peasant uttering his heart to the world. The voice of this man alone is sufficient to tell the outside world that the Russian democracy is a creation not of form and economics but of spirit and aesthetics. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... professor that these are sequences of sounds, and nothing more.' Then she sighed. In the pause which followed, her husband, the famous critic, filled his glass, stretched his legs out, and began: 'You have embarked, I see, upon the ocean of aesthetics. For my part, to-night I was thinking how much better fitted for the stage Beaumarchais' play was than this musical mongrel—this operatic adaptation. The wit, observe, is lost. And Cherubino—that sparkling little enfant terrible—becomes a sentimental fellow—a ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... strings and pulleys. In a similar way, psychology itself, when pushed to any nicety, discovers an abhorrent baldness, but rather from the fault of our analysis than from any poverty native to the mind. And perhaps in aesthetics the reason is the same: those disclosures which seem fatal to the dignity of art seem so perhaps only in the proportion of our ignorance; and those conscious and unconscious artifices which it seems ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... drapes—oh-h! those drapes!! Yellow, s'help me! And those bisque figures that you get with every pound of tea you buy; and this, this, THIS," he whimpered, waving his hands at the decorated sewer-pipe with its gilded cat-tails. "Oh, speak to me of this; speak to me of art; speak to me of aesthetics. Cat-tails, GILDED. Of course, why not GILDED!" He wrung his hands. "'Somewhere people are happy. Somewhere little ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... you ever reflected on that which does not change in man's life, but for ever remains the same? No, no, wait!... There have been hundreds of religions, ethics, aesthetics, sciences, philosophical systems: they have all changed and are still changing— only one law remains unaltered, that all living things—whether men, mice, or ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... the 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
... a man well bred, He was up in Electricity, Fortification, Theology, aesthetics and Pugilicity; Celsus and Gregory he'd read; Knew every "dodge" of glove and fist; Was a capital curate, (I think I've said) And Transcendental Anatomist: Well up in Materia Medica, Right up in Toxicology, And Medical ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... weeks after his return—Hazlehurst gave himself very much to the study of aesthetics. The beautiful, the harmonious, alone attracted him; he could not endure anything approaching to coarseness. He wandered up and down the galleries of the Louvre, delighting more in the beautiful faces of the Italian masters, in ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... obliged to 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 ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... lights we may boast of, etc., etc.'" On August 5: "I have, at a shameful charge of ten francs, got August magazine and Dickens, quite a prohibition for parcels from England. In British Quarterly, under aesthetics of Gothic architecture they take four works, you first.... As a critic they almost rank you with Goethe and Coleridge, and in style ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... 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 instance of it on which she had opened ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... is a most highly useful 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," written in the fade, flowery ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... flower of youth; with a heart absorbed into the brain, and giving warm blood to frigid ideas: a man who sneers at everything I call lofty, yet would do nothing that he thinks mean; to whom vice and virtue are as indifferent as they were to the Aesthetics of Goethe; who would never jeopardize his career as a practical reasoner by an imprudent virtue, and never sully his reputation by a degrading vice. Imagine this man with an intellect keen, strong, ready, unscrupulous, dauntless,—all cleverness and no genius. Imagine this man, and then ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... suffering has a peculiar 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 a ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... always depends upon progress in two directions—the reason, and the feelings or emotions. Art is the expression of the latter, and science of the former. Every great period in the world's history, therefore, is marked by a high appreciation of aesthetics and an advance in knowledge. To this general rule, the sixteenth century was no exception, for it was distinguished not only by a wonderful development of architecture, sculpture, painting, engraving, music, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... writings, which were in the classico-sentimental manner of the late 18th century, when, in the summer of 1802, the young Norwegian philosopher, Henrik Steffens, arrived in Copenhagen from Germany, where he had imbibed the new romantic ideas. He began to give lectures on aesthetics, and these awakened a turmoil of opposition. Among those who heard him, no one was more scandalised than Oehlenschlager, then in his twenty-third year. He was not acquainted with Steffens, but in the course of the ...
— The Gold Horns • Adam Gottlob Oehlenschlager
... names of branches of learning come from the 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, ethics, ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... level all through, and if every element of strength in him had been purified from every weakness? What would it have been, shall we say, if he could have had the advantage of reading a few modern lectures on aesthetics? We may, perhaps, be content with Shakespeare as circumstances left him; but in reading our modern poets, the sentiment of regret is stronger. If Byron had not been driven into his wild revolt against the world; if Shelley had been judiciously treated from his youth; if Keats had ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... 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 ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... Essay, "Of the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy," in the Inquiry concerning the Human Understanding.—[Many critics of this passage seem to forget that the subject-matter of Ethics and AEsthetics consists of, matters of fact ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 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 ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... 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; where sculpture is voted and paid for by the common ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... amassing light and learning at the University of Munich, there were a number of foreigners. One of them was a young American, Charles Godfrey Leland ("Hans Breitmann"), who had gone there, he says, to "study aesthetics." But this did not take up all his time, for, during the intervals of attending classes, he managed to see something of Lola Montez. "I must," he says, "have had a great moral influence on her, ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... 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 ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... weak force 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 the foliage. ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... normal existence. The 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
... the heavier tasks 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 the high temperature of the mouth favors germ propagation, that the twenty to thirty square ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... true since 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, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... risk of 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 used ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... 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 Carlyle called them, "busily grubbing and grunting ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... painters and sculptors. It is true that love is the theme of western writers also but with them the idea of love is entirely free from divine signification. (As a corollary), the more the divine background disappears, the more the prudishness of the police becomes the standard of ethics and aesthetics alike. Under such an aegis the arts are necessarily degraded to the level of the merely sentimental or the merely sensual and while the sentimental is everywhere applauded, the sensual is a source ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... balanced, but Leam grasped hers like a whanger, and cut off 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 spoken to if she would rather be silent? Why get ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... of the steward and chaplain with a boat load of "marketing" was a welcome surprise. The parson, whose unquestionable taste in the aesthetics of eating had been wisely secured by the steward, dilated with great gusto upon the juicy beefsteaks, the freshness of the fish, and the richness of the fruit. When, at breakfast, we enjoyed as salt-sea voyagers only could, the stores of fresh meat, fresh eggs, fresh butter, fresh milk, juicy grapes, ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... necessary in the natural sciences and also in aesthetics, because in both of these departments the sensuous is an essential element of the matter dealt with. In this respect we have made great progress in charts and maps. Sydow's hand and wall maps and Berghaus's physical atlas are most excellent means of illustrative ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... beauty as "the representation of an idea in a sensual form," modern aesthetics has eliminated the spiritual element and in consequence is unable to appreciate the spiritual beauty of God and of the soul. Being composed of body and soul, man is naturally most impressed by beauty when it appears in ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... whatever reserves we may utter concerning the Transfiguration. If we are honest, we more or less own what our impressions really are from those other famous works, concerning which our impressions are otherwise altogether and inexpressibly unimportant; it is a question of ethics and not aesthetics, as most of our simple-hearted company suppose it to be; and, if we are dishonest, we pretend to have felt and thought things at first-hand from them which we have learned at second-hand from our reading. I will confess, for my small part, that I had more pleasure in the coloring and feeling ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... 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 ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... proved that, in so doing, Wagner attempted the impossible, he would still only share the lot of all those who have meditated deeply on art; and even so he would be ahead of most of them in this, namely, that the strongest instinct for all arts harboured in him. I know of no written aesthetics that give more light than those of Wagner; all that can possibly be learnt concerning the origin of a work of art is to be found in them. He is one of the very great, who appeared amongst us a witness, and who is continually improving his ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... simple. Beauty, I suppose, opens the heart, extends the consciousness. It is a platitude, of course. You will laugh when I tell you that afterwards I tried to reason it all out. I am not apparently intellectual. The books I read would fill your empty room—on aesthetics, art, and what not. I got no result from any of them, but rather a state of muddle that was, no doubt, congestion. None of the theories and explanations touched the root of the matter. I am evidently not "an artist"—that at any rate I gathered, and yet these learned people seemed to ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... employed in developing the resources of a great country, that little has been left to expend in creative imagination. The currents of genius have flowed toward trade, agriculture, and manufacturing, not aesthetics. ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... ABSOLUTISM, in 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 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... 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 ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... 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
... has little to say upon the experimental aspect or on its aesthetics, but much upon the theory of colour, especially as it bears upon the question—an all-important one to dyers, calico printers and artists, who have to produce such a variety of shades and tints—of the admixture of one colour upon another.... The author is a dyer, and ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... wanting, the author reports. Antiquity has laboured much in this field. Notwithstanding, he says, there is something to be done here too, and the Elizabethan aesthetics must be begun also in the prima philosophia. 'Notwithstanding,' he continues, 'to stir the earth a little about the roots of this science, as we have done of the rest; the duty and office of Rhetoric is to apply ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... synonymous with detesting the dramas of Sardou, and to be a Wagnerite involved a horror of Mendelssohn. It was only the uncultured who held their artistic and political creeds with the narrowness of Little Bethel, importing into thought and aesthetics the zealotry they had lost in religion. The book of Experience, thought I, is not an Encyclopaedia, with every possible topic neatly ranged in alphabetical order; 'tis no A B C Time Table, with the trains docketed for the enlightenment of the simple,'t is rather an Encyclopaedia torn into ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... perfectly spontaneous flow of his narratives. Carlyle quotes Schiller against him, amongst other and greater names. We need not attempt to compare the two men; but do not Schiller's tragedies smell rather painfully of the lamp? Does not the professor of aesthetics pierce a little too distinctly through the exterior of the poet? And, for one example, are not Schiller's excellent but remarkably platitudinous peasants in 'William Tell' miserably colourless alongside of Scott's rough border ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... in the aesthetics of landscape gardening. It is the artist's one desire to make pictures in the landscape. This is done in two ways: by the form of plantations, and by the use of vistas. He will throw his plantations into such positions that open and yet more or less confined areas of greensward ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... H. Doyle thus continues his reference to Dr. Lorinser. "Even learned critics", he says, "highly cultivated in all the niceties of aesthetics, are deficient in the knowledge of Catholic faith and Catholic theology properly to understand Calderon" (Lectures, p. 110, taken from the Introduction to my volume, p. 3). "Old traditions", continues Dr. Lorinzer, "which twine round the dogma like a beautiful ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... not only did sculptors draw from it an inspiration such as has been felt by no later age, but to the combatants themselves, and the spectators, the plastic beauty of the human form grew to be more than its prowess or its strength, and gymnastic became a training in aesthetics as much as, or more than, in ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... resisting this attractive purpose and in preferring beauty 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 ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... 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
... 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 was devoted to truth and usefulness, and his character ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... things come to him, instead of running after them; and his sensations have had time to ripen slowly toward the true moment of projection, without being shaken and hurried, or huddled one atop of the other. We doubt if the picturesque can be profitably done by the job, for in aesthetics the proverb that half a loaf is better than no bread does not hold. An Italian festa, we suspect, if you make it a matter of business, will turn its business-side to you, and you will go away without having been admitted to the delightful confidence of its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various |
