"Aesthetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... farrago about savages to do with Dionysus?" I conceive some scholar, or literary critic asking, if such an one looks into this book. Certainly it would have been easier for me to abound in aesthetic criticism of the Hymns, and on the aspect of Greek literary art which they illustrate. But the Hymns, if read even through the pale medium of a translation, speak for themselves. Their beauties and defects as poetry are patent: patent, too, are the charm and geniality of the national ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... had seemed to me even more tedious than usual. The long train journey in the morning, the walk through Farringdon Meat Market, which aesthetic butchers made hideous with mosaics of the intestines of animals, as if the horror of suety pavements and bloody sawdust did not suffice, the weariness of inventing lies that no one believed to account for my lateness and neglected homework, and the monotonous lessons that held me from ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... cultivate with immense care in stove-houses, here riot wild in lavish masses over the stone walls. If the cherished rarities of one country are unnoticed weeds in another land, plenty of analogies in other respects spring to the mind. I could wish though, for aesthetic reasons, that our English lanes grew tropical Begonias, Coraline, and a peculiarly attractive Polypody fern, similar to ours, except for the young growths being rose-pink. Between Dry Harbour and Brown's Town there is one succession of ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... character are swayed. In one scene, however—the dialogue between Antonius and the Jew—we find a degree of historic truth, a reproduction in dramatic form of the sublime spirit of Hebrew poetry, and an aesthetic color which, had it been maintained throughout, would have neutralized our introductory remarks. This scene is of itself a real poem. Herodias is, we may add, consistent, and bravely accented in every thought and word; had she, however, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... R.U.E., and is approached by a drawbridge over a moat. A rocky eminence R. with steps down to the stage. In front of it, a rustic bench, on which ANGELA is seated, with ELLA on her left. Young Ladies wearing aesthetic draperies are grouped about the stage from R. to L.C., SAPHIR being near the L. end of the group. The Ladies play on lutes, etc., as they sing, and all are in the ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... made the match appear even more remote. It was like the comment of a passer-by upon a well-designed figure in a tapestry. It was an expression of his own aesthetic pleasure, and bore no relation to the player ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... go. At the age of 25 I was the chief editor of a daily newspaper in Baltimore. During the same year I published my first book of criticism. Thereafter, for ten or twelve years, I moved steadily from practical journalism, with its dabbles in politics, economics and soon, toward purely aesthetic concerns, chiefly literature and music, but of late I have felt a strong pull in the other direction, and what interests me chiefly today is what may be called public psychology, ie., the nature of ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... hither and thither, in agony of expectation, in alternate paroxysm of joy and of terror and woe; often enough the opposite paroxysms simultaneous in the different groups, and men crushed down in despair met by men leaping into the air for very gladness:" Sulzer (whose sympathy is of very aesthetic type) "would not, for any consideration, have missed such a scene." [Briefe der Schweitzer Bodmer, Sulzer, Gessner; aus Gleim's literarischen Nachlasse: herausgegeben von Wilhelm Korte (Zurich, 1804), pp. 316-319.] The "scene" is much obliged ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... The fact is that in nearly all English poets there is a strong moral and philosophical strain, particularly in those of the period 1770-1830. They are deeply interested in political, scientific, and religious speculations in aesthetic questions only superficially, if at all Shelley, with the tap-roots of his emotions striking deep into politics and philosophy, is only an extreme instance of a national trait, which was unusually prominent in the early part of the nineteenth century ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... familiar stories of Field's rollicking life in Denver was at the expense of Oscar Wilde, then on his widely advertised visit to America. As the reader may remember, this was when the aesthetic craze and the burlesques inseparable from it were at their height. Anticipating Wilde's appearance in Denver by one day, and making shrewdly worded announcements through the Tribune in keeping with his project, Field secured the finest landau in town and was driven through ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... not merely startle: they also delight. The delicate perfection of workmanship, the light strength and grace of objects, the power manifest to obtain the best results with the least material, the achieving of mechanical ends by the simplest possible means, the comprehension of irregularity as aesthetic value, the shapeliness and perfect taste of everything, the sense displayed of harmony in tints or colours,—all this must convince you at once that our Occident has much to learn from this remote civilization, not only in matters of art and ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... enthusiasm of the archaeological restorer of the dead past. Soon there will be nothing left except the lying dreams of history, the miserable wreckage of our museums and picture- galleries, and the carefully guarded interiors of our aesthetic drawing-rooms, unreal and foolish, fitting witnesses of the life of corruption that goes on there, so pinched and meagre and cowardly, with its concealment and ignoring, rather than restraint of, natural longings; which does ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... the female was created and endowed with the capacity of appreciating such ornaments. I differ only in the conviction that the male Argus pheasant acquired his beauty gradually, through the preference of the females during many generations for the more highly ornamented males; the aesthetic capacity of the females having been advanced through exercise or habit, just as our own taste is gradually improved. In the male through the fortunate chance of a few feathers being left unchanged, we can distinctly trace how simple spots with a little fulvous shading on ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... painter than El Greco, but custom stales one's admiration for him: the Cretan, sensual and tragic, proffers the mystery of his soul like a standing sacrifice. The artist, painter, poet, or musician, by his decoration, sublime or beautiful, satisfies the aesthetic sense; but that is akin to the sexual instinct, and shares its barbarity: he lays before you also the greater gift of himself. To pursue his secret has something of the fascination of a detective story. It is a riddle which shares with the universe the merit of having no answer. The most insignificant ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... even the paper on the walls and the hangings at the window were of most delicate and careful choice. No rich drawing-room could show more taste in its arrangements, or have a more soothing effect on a mind to which the sense of aesthetic fitness ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... discovery of the mistakes of those who, for a century before, were thought to have discovered faults in the Poet. For numbers of the errors of taste in Shakespeare have turned out to be striking touches of character; the aesthetic deformities imputed to his poetry have proved the moral deformities of certain of his persons; and what had been denounced as a fault was ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... Wayland—Patchin's Mills—Blood's Depot—Cohocton. And to north and south of our route were names such as Ossian, Stony Brook Glen, Loon Lake, Rough & Ready, Doly's Corners, and Neil Creek. I confess that there was a Perkinsville to go through—a beautiful spot, too, for which one felt that sort of aesthetic pity one feels for a beautiful girl married to a man, say, of the name of Podgers. Perkinsville! It was as though you said—the beautiful Mrs. Podgers. But there was consolation in the sound of Wayland, with its far ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... with ease; in short, that the furniture conforms to his bodily requirements, as the chair and bed of the "wee teenty bear" suited exactly the little old woman of Southey's tale. Last of all, the aesthetic pleasure, the appreciation of beauty by the mind, decides the choice in cases of equal utility and comfort. The artistic considerations are so many that furniture has become a branch of art, like sculpture or painting, with a large literature and ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... a pretty full translation of Schiller's AESTHETIC LETTERS, which we read together, as well as the second part of FAUST, in Gladstone Terrace, he helping me with the German. There is no keepsake I should more value than the MS. of that translation. They were the best days I ever had with him, little dreaming all ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... so we are thrown back on their works, and our mental picture of them takes on a dim and shadowy grandeur, very unlike what we see when we look within into our familiar and commonplace selves. Nor do Englishmen often plume themselves on their aesthetic or imaginative gifts. The achievements of Wren, or Purcell, or Keats may arouse in them admiration and pride, but never a sense of kinship. When they recognize themselves in the national literature, it is not Hamlet, or Lear, or Clarissa, or Ravenswood that holds up the mirror; ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... as if rationally cognizant of their pursuit. He would not return to his wonted vocation at the distillery, but carried his venison home, where his father, a very old man, with still the fervors of an aesthetic pride, pointed out with approbation the evidence of a fair shot in the wound at the base of the buck's ear, and his mother, active, wiry, practical-minded, noted the abundance of fat. "He fed hisself well whilst he war about it," she commented, "an' now he'll feed us well. ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... conceived and executed, always dealing with biblical characters or incidents; and (3) the more universalized type drawn from every field of pictorial art, representing not only biblical personages and events, but also typifying aesthetic and moral values of every range adapted to the understanding and appreciation of ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... In general, her aesthetic tastes had remained unchanged since the days of Mendelssohn, Landseer, and Lablache. She still delighted in the roulades of Italian opera; she still demanded a high standard in the execution of a pianoforte duet. Her views on painting were decided; Sir Edwin, she declared, was ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... 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 invective are not relished best in free countries. No danger attends their exercise; ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... while Hill attacked her upon the question of socialism—some instinct told him to spare her a direct assault upon her religion—she was gathering resolution to undertake what she told herself was his aesthetic education. She was a year or two older than he, though the thought never occurred to him. The loan of News from Nowhere was the beginning of a series of cross loans. Upon some absurd first principle of his, Hill had never "wasted time" Upon poetry, and it seemed an ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... marked the last few years, the sureness of her original taste in dress had somewhat deserted her. Her natural instinct was for trimness and closeness; but of late her ideals had been somewhat confused by a new and more important dressmaker with 'aesthetic' notions, who had been recommended to her by the good-natured and artistic wife of one of the College professors. Under the guidance of this expert, she had chosen a 'Watteau sacque' from a fashion-plate, not quite daring, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... penny paper to a Paradise meet for him is a matter of congratulation to all but his creditors. He really is now in the only true Monastery of Thelema, and is simply dressed in an eye-glass and a cincture of pandanus flowers. The natives worship him, and he is the First AEsthetic Beach-comber. ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... turn how greatly Ruskin and Morris have influenced handicraft: how much these men and their co-workers have modified the appearance of our streets and houses, our materials, textiles, utensils, and all other useful things in which it is possible to shock or to please the aesthetic taste, without otherwise affecting the value of these articles for ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... the inspiration is the chief thing. The man who inspires is better than the man who reveals, and in revealing unnerves." She was silent, and he added, "I suppose it is the difference between the aesthetic and the practical, and so they appeal to the aesthetic or the ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... but no imagination, and vice versa. The terms are not synonymous. Reading poetry helps to develop the aesthetic sense; pictures help also, and nature. I must necessarily take into account the pupil's trend of temperament while ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... pack of aerial cowboys; when, on your way home, you have deliberately disobeyed orders and loafed a long way behind the other members of your group in order to watch the pretty sunset, and, as a punishment for this aesthetic indulgence, have been overtaken by darkness and compelled to land in strange country, only to have your machine immediately surrounded by German soldiers; then, having taken the desperate resolve that they shall not have possession of your old battle-scarred ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... of books, music, and pictures ought to touch every life at some point. Some aesthetic pleasures, it is true, are won only {133} after long study and preparation, but the best art is universal in its appeal. So far as books are concerned, our free libraries have made us familiar with this view. The visitor should know the rules of the nearest library, and ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... rears its crest (erigit se) with so great majesty to the sky, that it inspires a feeling of awe even in those who look at it from afar." Such a view may well be got from the hills of Harbledown, a village about two miles from Canterbury, containing in itself many objects of antiquarian and aesthetic interest. It stands on the road by which Chaucer's pilgrims wended their way to the shrine of St. Thomas, and it is almost certainly referred to in the lines in ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... remarkable photographs recently published by Dr. Alan H. Gardiner.[91] The wonderful eyes will be seen to make the statue sparkle and live. To the concrete mind of the Egyptian this triumph of art was regarded not as a mere technical success or aesthetic achievement. The artist was considered to have made the statue really live; in fact, literally and actually converted it into a "living image". The eyes themselves were regarded as one of the chief sources of the vitality ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... time when Needlecraft as an Art was dead. During the earlier part of the century taste was bad, during the middle it was beyond criticism, and from then to the time of the "greenery-yallery" aesthetic revival all and everything made by woman's fingers ought to be buried, burnt, or otherwise destroyed. Indeed, if that drastic process could be carried out from the time good Queen Adelaide reigned to the early ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... the mental, moral, and aesthetic ideals of hundreds of thousands of readers is much greater than he often realizes. When he considers the extent to which most men and women are unconsciously guided in their ideas and aspirations by what they read in newspapers and magazines, he ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... of utility, order is an aesthetic duty. It is needed to satisfy the sense of beauty. Its violation offends the eye, insults the taste. The aesthetic nature craves and claims culture. It has abundant provision made for it in external nature; but so large a part of life must be passed within ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... 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 ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... dollars for something that will keep him warm, however much such a service may be worth to him. Coats of another grade have a second utility combined with this one, since they are made of better cloth and are more comely in appearance. Utilities of an aesthetic kind are combined with the crude qualities represented by the cheapest coats. The supply of coats of this grade is such that they must be offered for twenty dollars in order to induce some one to take the final or marginal one. What does this mean? It ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... him and throw it into the sea. But, as it was, she smiled faintly, and admired openly, and then went to the glass to look at her own nut- brown tresses. Never had she been so dissatisfied with them, and yet her hair was considered lovely, and an aesthetic hair-dresser had once called ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... gulls, and one solitary old farmhouse standing just where that spick-and-span summer hotel, with its balconies and cupolas, stands now. So it was nineteen years ago, and so it may be again, perhaps, nine hundred years hence; but meanwhile, what a pretty array of modern aesthetic cottages, and plank walks, and bridges, and bathing-houses, and pleasure-boats! And what an admirable concourse of well-dressed and pleasurably inclined men and women! After all, my countrymen are the finest-looking ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... but of stones shaped by nature only. Until you can feel, and keenly feel, that stones have character, that stones have tones and values, the whole artistic meaning of a Japanese garden cannot be revealed to you. In the foreigner, however aesthetic he may be, this feeling needs to be cultivated by study. It is inborn in the Japanese; the soul of the race comprehends Nature infinitely better than we do, at least in her visible forms. But although, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... common sense. To have the mastery of an instrument elevates the aesthetic sense, in any case; and is even a help in life. And I, for my part, gentlemen ... I propose to read with the young person the CAPITAL of Marx, and the history of human culture. And to take up chemistry and physics ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... retrospectively sentimental over the delights, aesthetic and physical, of ancient stage-coach days. Those days are not so ancient as many fancy. The first stage-coach which ran directly from Philadelphia to New York in 1766—and primitive enough it was—was ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... he spoke pleased her again for she smiled bewitchingly, effacing me completely. I think we're going to be very good friends,' she said, moving up on the divan a little nearer to him. 'Of course, it takes more than the aesthetic appeal to bring two sensible people together,' she murmured. 'It is not the eye which must catch the reflection, but the mind. You've thought a good deal—and studied? Men are so vapid nowadays.' She sighed. 'I hope some day you will think I'm ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... somewhat earlier date lends however support to the view that the wall-painting of the Babylonians had some real artistic excellence. We can scarcely suppose that there was any very material difference, in respect of taste and aesthetic power, between the two cognate nations, or that the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar fell very greatly short of the Assyrians under Asshur-bani-pal. It is evident that the same subjects—war scenes and hunting scenes—approved ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... between heathen and Christian morality; between intellectual Greek philosophy and practical modern science; between the aesthetic ideal and ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... wings, and all complete. A visitor, indigenous to the region, looking pensively at the figure, asked the lady of the house "if that was a statoo of her deceased infant?" What a delicious, though somewhat voluminous biography, social, educational, and aesthetic in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Normandy" and "Girofle-Girofla" and "Fra Diavola." Better than that, these were the days of "Pinafore" and "The Pirates of Penzance" and of "Patience." This last was needed in the Midland town, as elsewhere, for the "aesthetic movement" had reached thus far from London, and terrible things were being done to honest old furniture. Maidens sawed what-nots in two, and gilded the remains. They took the rockers from rocking-chairs and gilded the inadequate legs; they ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... Paris; from 1851 was engaged in dramatic and other criticism, and established his reputation as a stylist of unusual brilliance. "When I read Saint-Victor I put on blue spectacles," said Lamartine; author of several works on historical and aesthetic subjects (e. g. "Anciens et Modernes," "Hommes et Dieux") was for a number of years General Inspector of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... opinion, upon the strength of a colossal statue of which fragments have been found that might well have fitted the King of the Gods. Others think it the temple of Venus, the Venus Physica (the beautiful in nature, say aesthetic philosophers) being the patroness of Pompeii. We shall frequently, hereafter, meet with the name of this goddess. Several detached limbs in stone and in bronze, which are not broken at the extremity as though they belonged to a statue, but are polished on ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... beautiful results may be got on smallest grounds and with the least outlay. Its private educative value, too, is probably largest thus, because thus we disseminate as a home delight a practical knowledge of aesthetic principles among those who may at any time find it expedient to become wage-earning gardeners on the home ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... to a shade about clothes, and has a nice taste in hats. One wonders how he acquired it. His patriotic proclivity, his hostility to national costumes other than English, his preference for uncoloured complexions—this one may understand; but his aesthetic instinct is a problem for Weismann. As the interpreter of the conventions, he is of a cast-iron rigidity, for is he not a child of Mrs. Grundy—his mother's own boy? He has no exceptions—it is "one law and one measure." He is the scavenger of manners, as the ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... longing for the flesh of Egypt? No. So far so good. The pots themselves were the objects of their admiration. During that remarkable run of theirs through the howling wilderness they, one and all, to a man, betrayed the true aesthetic tendency. They raved incessantly for the girl—I beg pardon—the land they had left behind them. The land that contained ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... and story has been said of the scramble for gold in the early days after the discovery, and so little attention given to the artistic and aesthetic sense of the pioneers, that the general impression made by the famous old mining towns of California, when seen for the first time, may be worth recording. In the massive stone hotels and stores of that period, as well as in the careful construction of dwelling houses, they exhibited ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... it in double-faced Janus, who was their real 'Angel of the Odd.' Perhaps it is my ignorance which is at fault—if so, I pray you correct me. The subtle Neo-Platonists must have apotheosized such a savor to all aesthetic bliss. Mostly do I feel its charm when there come before me pictures true to life of far lands and lives, of valley and river, sea and shore. Then I forget the narrow office and the shop-lined street, the rattling cars and hurried hotel-lodgment, and think what it would be if nature, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... my 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 ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... laboratory and struck up quite a friendship with a Japanese colorist on the staff. Also, he was fortunate in meeting and knowing Mr. Cavalier, the artist of animal life, and from him the boy learned a great deal of the picturesque and aesthetic elements of the life which he painted and modeled with such surpassing skill. Scores of other workers, writers, and scientists of all kinds had rooms in the wonderfully interesting workshops ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... path of self-restraint and verification, however, he is making for a region surpassing wonder. In the range of that invisible light, gross objects cease to be a barrier, and force and matter become less aesthetic. When the veil is suddenly lifted, upon the vision hitherto unsuspected, he may for a moment lose his accustomed self-restraint and, exclaim "not 'as ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... me—her letter to excuse her insolence, which she does like a prim chit—throws a light on the girl she is. She will set him aiming at power to trick her out in the decorations. She will not keep him to his labours to consolidate the power. She will pervert the aesthetic in him, through her hold on his material nature, his vanity, his luxuriousness. She is one of the young women who begin timidly, and when they see that they enjoy comparative impunity, grow intrepid in dissipation, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to the native ground of preaching, approach the religious problem, now, not from the aesthetic or the scientific, but from the moral angle. Here we are dealing with the most poignant of all human experiences. For it is in this intensely personal world of moral failure and divided will that men are most acutely aware of themselves and hence of their need of that other-than-self beyond. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... opposite was cast in a different mould. He was tall, spare, almost aesthetic. The clean-shaven face, the well-moulded nose and chin hinted at a refinement which his shabby threadbare suit and his collarless shirt freakishly accentuated. Now and again he would raise his deep-set eyes from the book he was reading, survey the absorbed ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... 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, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... out the most attractive prospects as affording healthier conditions, brighter and pleasanter homes, and as enabling useful production to go on with efficiency under conditions in which the life of the worker may be passed in surroundings which will give some satisfaction to the aesthetic sense. These schemes include the formation of (i) industrial villages in the neighbourhood of towns, of which the one at Lancaster, referred to in the next chapter (p. 145), may be taken as a type, and (ii) new villages established, or old villages ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... criticism 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 ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... my own suggestion that she began to leave the dishes piled up in the sink until morning. When the room is otherwise immaculate, a tray of neatly piled plates, even if unwashed, does not disturb my aesthetic sense. ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... shallow and insensitive spirits who make use of the existence of these new forms, to display—as if it were a proof of aesthetic superiority—their contempt for all that is old, should alone lead us ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... 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 ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... of that kind. Upon some faults, often combined with a literary temperament, he was perhaps inclined to be rather too severe. He could feel nothing but hearty contempt for a man who lapped himself in aesthetic indulgences, and boasted of luxurious indifference to the great problems of the day. Such an excess of sensibility, again, as makes a man nervously unwilling to reveal his real thoughts, or to take part in a frank discussion of principles, would be an obstacle ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... in the pleasure grounds at Holkham, and I had an aesthetic love for their gorgeous plumes. As I hunted under and amongst the shrubs, I secretly prayed that my search might be rewarded. Nor had I a doubt, when successful, that my prayer had been ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... the health and safety, there can be little question; but when it comes to indefinite words like "comfort" or "well-being," too wide a field is left for the imagination. It has recently been decided that the aesthetic part of life does not necessarily concern the comfort or well-being of the people. That is to say, laws forbidding the use of land for the erection of hideous signs, or forbidding the height of buildings at an inartistic excess have been declared ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... allied her with Cesare. She was now able at least to survey him in a detached manner, with an impersonal comprehension of his good qualities and aesthetic shortcomings; and in pointing out to Gheta the lavish beauty of her—Lavinia's—surroundings, she engendered in herself a slight proprietary pride. She met Abrego y Mochales at the basin with a direct bright smile, standing ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... frowned at her and went by with his shoulders hunched up as if he were cold. He had never known such girls, or heard them talk, or seen the inside of the houses in which they lived; but he believed them all to be artificial and, in an aesthetic sense, perverted. He saw them enslaved by desire of merchandise and manufactured articles, effective only in making life complicated and insincere and in embroidering it with ugly and meaningless trivialities. They were enough, he thought, to make one almost forget woman as she existed ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... passages; but we see too plainly that he has dwelt too fondly upon those passages, and worked them up with especial care. We need not be prudish in our judgment of impassioned poetry; but when the passion has this false ring, the ethical coincides with the aesthetic objection. ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... rudiments of art ought to control them. In no country in the world does the same ugly display mar the appearance of railway stations; and considering what myriad eyes daily rest on station premises it is well worth while on aesthetic grounds to make their appearance as pleasant and as little vulgar as possible. The question of revenue to the companies need not be ignored for proper and efficient control would produce order, moderation, neatness, artistic ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... South then, who provided the rest of the troupe, three or four posture-girls, Stradi the pianist, and a Madame Somebody, who gave readings and sang. "Concert" was the heading in large caps on the bills, "Balacchi Brothers will give their aesthetic tableaux vivants in the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... legitimate end of acquisition, which alone it is incumbent on the theory to take account of. Such consumption may of course be conceived to serve the consumer's physical wants—his physical comfort—or his so-called higher wants—spiritual, aesthetic, intellectual, or what not; the latter class of wants being served indirectly by an expenditure of goods, after the fashion familiar ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... 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, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... the simpler biological aspects of the sex: "It was not what the woman had in common with a rabbit that was important, but her difference. On one hand that difference was moral, but on the other aesthetic; and I had been absorbed by the latter." "I couldn't get it into my head that loveliness, which had a trick of staying in the mind at points of death when all service was forgotten, was rightly considered to be of less importance than the sweat ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... that the experiment has proved successful, that the patients do not suffer, and that the office of superintendent is not rendered unendurable. Regarded from an economic point of view, it has been found practicable to provide buildings at a cost of between L80 and L90 per bed, which, though not aesthetic, are carefully planned for the care and oversight of the inmates. This includes not only the land, but ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... Sainte-Beuve, David d'Angers, and others—"studied and felt the real Middle Ages in their architecture, in their chronicles, and in their picturesque vivacity." Nor should we overlook in connection with romanticism Cousin's aesthetic teaching, according to which, God being the source of all beauty as well as of all truth, religion, and morality, "the highest aim of art is to awaken in its own way the feeling of the infinite." Like all reformers the romanticists were stronger in ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... prosaic to throw money away, because it is prosaic to throw anything away; it is negative; it is a confession of indifference, that is, it is a confession of failure. The most prosaic thing about the house is the dustbin, and the one great objection to the new fastidious and aesthetic homestead is simply that in such a moral menage the dustbin must be bigger than the house. If a man could undertake to make use of all things in his dustbin he would be a broader genius than Shakespeare. When science began to use by-products; ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... it originally because (owing to circumstances too complicated to set forth) it was offered at a great bargain: bought it with much grumbling at its ugliness, its antiquity, its incommodity, and who now, at the end of twenty years, had become conscious of a real aesthetic passion for it, so that he knew all its points and would tell you just where to stand to see them in combination and just the hour when the shadows of its various protuberances which fell so softly upon the warm, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... of the turmoil they have left behind them, I wonder? Each generation torn by the same anguish which the worries of love bring?—And what is love for?—Just to surround the re-creative instinct with glamour and render it aesthetic? ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... old little urban and local governing bodies, we find, have long since been superseded by great provincial municipalities for all the more serious administrative purposes, but they still survive to discharge a number of curious minor functions, and not the least among these is this sort of aesthetic ostracism. Every year every minor local governing body pulls down a building selected by local plebiscite, and the greater Government pays a slight compensation to the owner, and resumes possession of the land it occupies. ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... cynically. We may urge, like many sceptics of the last century, that Christianity should be kept "for the use of the poor," and renounced in the esoteric creed of the educated. Or we may urge the literary and aesthetic beauty of the old training, and wish it to be preserved to discipline the imagination, though we may reject its value as a historical statement ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... musician, and the composer of the argument of an opera, 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 Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... bearing the products of field and garden to the 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 man's ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... studio mantelpiece" of No. 7; no young lady author had ever commented on "the unaffected simplicity" with which Mr. Pitman received her in the midst of his "treasures." It is an omission I would gladly supply, but our business is only with the backward parts and "abject rear" of this aesthetic dwelling. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had a logical mind, and failed to see that ownership had any bearing on a purely aesthetic question. He defined his position. "I do not think the dog is ugly because he belongs to the prince. I only mean the prince has an ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... preparations for tea. Her voice was feeble, but there was a triumphant effectiveness about the high notes which perplexed the listener sorely. He seated himself in the new easy-chair—procured to satisfy the supposed aesthetic tastes of Miss ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... 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 just but ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... enthusiast, that he has an irritating and ungentlemanly habit of seeing blemishes in the greatest, a pottering and peddling fancy for discovering beauties in the most insignificant; that he lacks the exclusiveness and the fastidiousness of intellectual aristocracy, the fervour and rapture of aesthetic passion. To this, one can answer little more than, "It may be so." Certainly the critic of this kind will very rarely be able to indulge in the engouement which is the apparent delight of some of his class. He will deal very cautiously in superlatives, and his commendations, ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... reckoning, what will the sum of its achievement be? What will it leave of things visible? Will it leave a London preserved and beautified, or will it but add abundantly to the lumps of dishonest statuary, the scars and masses of ill-conceived rebuilding which testify to the aesthetic degradation of the Victorian period? Will a great constellation of artists redeem the ambitious sentimentalities and genteel skilfulness that find their fitting mausoleum in the Tate Gallery? Will our literature escape at last from pretentiousness and timidity, our philosophy from the foolish ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Forrest; and, as Graham noted, she was cool enough to note him on his horse beside Forrest. Also, Graham realized that the turning of her head and the waving of her arm was only partly in bravado, was more in aesthetic wisdom of the picture she composed, and was, most of all, sheer joy of daring and emprise of the blood and the flesh and the ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... Francis Chantrey was a thorough Englishman. Heaven endowed him with genius, and his sound sense enabled him to take the precious gift as a blessing. Sheffield, that reared him, had no cause to be uneasy on his account; the prudence and shrewdness of the North were admirably mingled with the aesthetic qualities of the South. In the pocketbook which accompanied the sculptor on his Italian tour, notes were found referring to the objects of art visited on the way, and in the same tablet were accurate accounts of expenditure and the current prices of marble. Avoiding ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... from European practice without much regard to the duties of the officer. A forester handles trees in mass formations,—sometimes for timber production, sometimes for the protection of water-sheds, sometimes for aesthetic effect or park purposes,—but ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... life, intensely real in its picture of a young architect whose ideals in the beginning were, at their highest, aesthetic rather than spiritual. It is an unusual ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... Beauty of the world, as exhibited in the manifold objects, sounds, perfumes, motions of Nature, is created for a nobler purpose than only to delight the senses and please the aesthetic faculties. I believe it is the distant source whence flow all our dear daily affections. We know, that, according to the suggestions of our merely human passions and instincts, we ease our hearts of Love by heaping treasures and the choicest gifts of fancy in the laps of those ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... loved friend. Even to her eyes they looked beautiful. The girl of the period, when she writes to her friend, usually dips the handle of her sunshade in a basin of ink, and scrawls characters monstrous in size and form, an insult to the paper-maker's art and shocking to man's aesthetic feelings. Now from the first Fan had spontaneously written a small hand, with fine web-like lines and flourishes, which gave it a very curious and delicate appearance; for, unlike the sloping prim Italian hand, it was all irregular, ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... no perceptible advance during the last quarter of a century, yet there is that in the Rev. Alexander Dyce's treatment of his poet which would warn us to pause before accepting his word as final. As a test of his aesthetic judgment we may turn to the "Songs from the Plays of Shakespeare" with which this volume concludes. It had been as well, in a work of this sort, to include all the songs; but he gives us a selection only, and an uncommonly bad selection. I have ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch |
