132 Inspiring Aesthetic Quotes For A Daily Dose Of Inspiration

“What cannot be borne in reality, becomes a source of pleasure when it is transposed into the visual and somatic fiction of the dramatic spectacle.” ― Claude Calame

“The answer to these questions is tied to the public's attitude about suicide. For many people, suicide is morally reprehensible. It's against their religion, or against their culture, or contrary to their personal values. Like other unpleasant subjects - incest, disease, discrimination - it's avoided.” ― John Bateson

“We want people to represent us in politics—and in love and economics too. When people represent us fully, they are ourselves and are not ourselves. When an object is simultaneously the same as and different from the person concerned with it—or considering it—aesthetics is there.” ― Eli Siegel

“If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without ascending it, the work would have been permitted.” ― Franz Kafka

“Appreciate the aesthetic and creativity of the nature and be grateful for being part of it.” ― M.F. Moonzajer

“Art is what appeals to the a priori.” ― Raheel Farooq

“Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.” ― Harold Bloom

“I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life.” ― Clive Bell

“Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke

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

“To speak of sparing anything because it is beautiful is to waste one’s breath and incur ridicule in the bargain. The aesthetic sense- the power to enjoy through the eye, and the ear, and the imagination- is just as important a factor in the scheme of human happiness as the corporeal sense of eating and drinking; but there has never been a time when the world would admit it.” ― John Van Dyke

“I think it’s more accurate to think of aesthetics as a key ingredient in a recipe, as opposed to the icing on the cake.” ― Stephen P. Anderson

"Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naiveté rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man – the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined." – Friedrich Nietzsche

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

"Any great art wor… Revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world – the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air." – Leonard Bernstein

“To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.” — Osho

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.” ― Susan Sontag

“I want to say something about bad writing. I'm proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Great. I am proud of Philip Guston's bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire's mamma's boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which's something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b.” ― Ariana Reines

“Girls have always been told that their value is tied to their appearance; their accomplishments are always magnified if they're pretty and diminished if they're not. Even worse, some girls get the message that they can get through life relying on just their looks, and then they never develop their minds. [...]
Being pretty is fundamentally a passive quality; even what you work at it, you're working at being passive.” ― Ted Chiang

“Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones... Successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.” ― Harold Bloom