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1 " We sing lyrical excess, exacerbated expressionism, imponed objectivity,inventiveness, meta-baroque, extravaganza, super metaphor, sublimity, strident, exposure, super-pone, noise, super-objectivity, zillionism, fragmentation and aesthetics of facts, suractivism. "
― Lepota L. Cosmo
2 " In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens -- a ruin, sometimes even a dead tree -- the act of leaving parts of the garden untended, and calling attention to its margins, seems to undermine any pretense to perfect power or wisdom on the part of the gardener. The margins of our gardens can be tropes too, but figures of irony rather than transcendence -- antidotes, in fact, to our hubris. It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment. "
― Michael Pollan , Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
3 " The way in which art creates desire, I guess that’s everywhere. Is there anyone who hasn’t come out of a movie or a play or a concert filled with an unnameable hunger? … To stand in front of one of [Louis Sullivan’s] buildings and look up, or in front, say, of the facade of Notre Dame, is both to have a hunger satisfied that you maybe didn’t know you had, and also to have a new hunger awakened in you. I say “unnameable,” but there’s a certain kind of balance achieved in certain works of art that feels like satiety, a place to rest, and there are others that are like a tear in the cosmos, that open up something raw in us, wonder or terror or longing. I suppose that’s why people who write about aesthetics want to distinguish between the beautiful and sublime… Beauty sends out ripples, like a pebble tossed in a pond, and the ripples as they spread seem to evoke among other things a stirring of curiosity. The aesthetic effect of a Vermeer painting is a bit like that. Some paradox of stillness and motion. Desire appeased and awakened. "
4 " Every book adds a grain of humility and humanity to the communal ground that we tread. Writing is the one method that the modern shaman employs to interpret reality and create messages that will provide a beacon of light to other members of our tribe. So long as ignorance, misery, and confusion remain on earth, and people look to expand their state of awareness, books that contribute to the aesthetics of despair, a world composed of mist and shadows cannot be useless. Writing is a personal effort to coexist with the banality, tedium, and anguish of living a fated life. Writing is a shamanistic act of faith because seeking to link thoughts together in order to understand how one fits into nature’s wonderland is a quest for unity and wholeness, the ultimate medicinal poultices that all self-disciplined shaman and alchemistic writers aspire to achieve. "
5 " What is so incredible and essential about an authentic cultural scene is it rejects a value system based on consumption and productivity and instead celebrates creation, critical thought, aesthetics and expression. That can’t be mass marketed. "
― Claire Vaye Watkins
6 " One interesting thing is the idea that people have of a kind of science of Aesthetics. I would almost like to talk of what could be meant by Aesthetics.You might think Aesthetics is a science telling us what's beautiful - almost too ridiculous for words. I suppose it ought to include also what sort of coffee tastes well. I see roughly this - there is a realm of utterance of delight, when you taste pleasant food or smell a pleasant smell, etc., then there is a realm of Art which is quite different, though often you may make the same face when you hear a piece of music as when you taste good food. (Though you may cry at something you like very much.)Supposing you meet someone in the street and he tells you he has lost his greatest friend, in a voice extremely expressive of his emotion. You might say: 'It was extraordinarily beautiful, the way he expressed himself.' Supposing you then asked: 'What similarity has my admiring this person with my eating vanilla ice and like it?' To compare them seems almost disgusting. (But you can connect them by intermediate cases.) Suppose someone says 'But this is a quite different kind of delight.' But did you learn two meanings of 'delight'? You use the same word on both occasions. There is some connection between these delights. Although in the first case the emotion of delight would in our judgement hardly count. "
― Ludwig Wittgenstein , Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief
7 " Charred, blackened, and cooked, the morsel was brought to the mouth and chewed, contemplated, and swallowed with relish. There was no sauce or seasoning and no consideration for aesthetics or art. Yet the combination of meat and fire yielded something revolutionary. Cooked meat made man happy. "
― Tony Federico , Paleo Grilling: A Modern Caveman's Guide to Cooking with Fire
8 " I love football. I love the aesthetics of football. I love the athleticism of football. I love the movement of the players, the antics of the coaches. I love the dynamism of the fans. I love their passion for their badge and the colour of their team and their country. I love the noise and the buzz and the electricity in the stadium. I love the songs. I love the way the ball moves and then it flows and the way a teams fortune rises and falls through a game and through a season. But what I love about football is that it brings people together across religious divides, geographic divides, political divides. I love the fact that for ninety minutes in a rectangular piece of grass, people can forget hopefully, whatever might be going on in their life, and rejoice in this communal celebration of humanity. The biggest diverse, invasive or pervasive culture that human kinds knows is football and I love the fact that at the altar of football human kind can come worship and celebrate. "
― Andy Harper
9 " There would be no history as we know it, no religion, no metaphysics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any “social contract” or covenant with the postulate of the divine. This instauration of trust, this entrance of man into the city of man, is that between word and world. "
― George Steiner , Real Presences
10 " The universe and the events in it are thus perfect examples to imitate. However, no matter how perfect the example is, everyone will draw and interpret objects according to their abilities. Charles Lako, commenting on aesthetics once said, that the magnificent scene at sunset would remind a farmer of the rather unaesthetic thought of dinner; the physicist, not of beauty or ugliness, but of the rightness or wrongness of the analysis of a matter. Thus, for Lalo, the sunset is beautiful only for those who are aware of beauty. Therefore, only those who see with God and hear with God can appreciate the beauty that spreads throughout existence as their senses are tuned to the spiritual realms. "
― M. Fethullah Gülen , Speech and Power of Expression: On Language, Esthetics, and Belief
11 " Liturgy puts us to work along with all the others who have been and are being put to work in the world by and with Jesus following our spiritually-forming text. Liturgy keeps us in touch with all the action that has been and is being generated by the Spirit as given witness in the biblical text. Liturgy prevents the narrative form of Scripture from being reduced to private individualized consumption.Understood this way, 'liturgical' has little to do with choreography in the chancel or an aesthetics of the sublime. It is obedient, participatory, listening to Holy Scripture in the company of the holy community through time (our two-thousand years of responding to this text) and in space (our friends in christ all over the world). High-church Anglicans, revivalistic Baptists, hands-in-the-air praising charismatics, and Quakers sitting in a bare room in silence are all required to read and live this text liturgically, participating in the holy community's reading of Holy Scripture. there is nothing 'churchy' or elitist about it; it is a vast and dramatic 'story-ing,' making sure that we are taking our place in the story and letting everyone else have their parts in the story also, making sure that we don't leave anything or anyone out of the story. Without sufficient liturgical support and structure we are very apt to edit the story down to fit our individual tastes and predispositions. "
― Eugene H. Peterson , Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (Spiritual Theology #2)
12 " BARQI: AESTHETICS IS ONLY THE LOWEST FORM OF PERCEPTION OF THE REAL. "
― Idries Shah , The Way of the Sufi
13 " ...and it's that time of the day when the fatigue sets in. No, not the physical type of fatigue that goes with a stretching of limbs or a session in my sauna ~which in fact is sparkling signifying it's existence for sheer aesthetics rather that practical use!It was that mental fatigue , when my soul was exhausted and weary; that I needed a shot of Gatorade;just to calm my nerves,stopping me from hallucinationsand let me fall asleep! "
14 " ...and it's that time of the day when the fatigue sets in. No, not the physical type of fatigue that goes with a stretching of limbs or a session in my sauna;which in fact is sparkling signifying it's existence for sheer aesthetics rather that practical use!It was that mental fatigue , when my soul was exhausted and weary; that I needed a shot of Gatorade;just to calm my nerves,stopping me from hallucinationsand let me fall asleep! "
15 " The whole aesthetics of computers very much feeds into my OCD. They fill my head with obsessionalities and my actions become very repetitive. It seems quite inimical to the dreamy state out of which fiction comes which seems so much less causally repetitive than the way one works on computers. "
16 " Leonardo Da Vinci combined art and science and aesthetics and engineering, that kind of unity is needed once again. "
17 " But aesthetics is not religion, and the origins of religion lie somewhere completely different. They lie anyway, these roses smell too sweet and the deep roar of the breaking waves is too splendid, to do justice to such weighty matters now. "
18 " I do appreciate the '80s as an era, the general sounds and aesthetics of the era. The Cure, that whole kind of image is really kind of amazing, I think. The power ballads and how everything sparkles and words are really dramatic. Huge drums, things like that. I do really find it inspiring. "
19 " Don't talk to me about aesthetics or tradition. Talk to me about what sells and what's good right now. And what the American people like is to think the underdog still has a chance. "
― George Steinbrenner
20 " Design is a way of life, a point of view. It involves the whole complex of visual communications: talent, creative ability, manual skill, and technical knowledge. Aesthetics and economics, technology and psychology are intrinsically related to the process. "