"Aesthetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... It was not that my father ever forgot the latter; indeed, behind his love for symbolical worship lay a passionate and almost Puritan evangelicalism. But he did not speak easily and openly of spiritual experience. I was myself profoundly attracted as a boy by the aesthetic side of religion, and loved its solemnities with all my heart; but it was not till I made friends with Bishop Wilkinson at the age of seventeen that I had any idea of spiritual religion and the practice ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... want anything eccentric or foolish," Patty said to Nan, regarding the appointments, "but I do want it aesthetic and artistic." ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... 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 and most prosperous-appearing people on the globe. They ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... Master who should try to train the aesthetic sense of his pupils by making them learn by heart a string of propositions in which he had set out the artistic merits of sundry masterpieces of painting and sculpture, would expose himself to well-merited ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... sculpture. Romanticism blossomed in 1830, and bore fruit for ten years. The religious reaction was a punier thing; the great Abbe, who was the Newman of France, was himself unable to remain within the fantastic church that he built out of medieval ruins. In England, and especially in Oxford, the aesthetic admiration of the Past was promptly transmuted into religion. Doctrines which men thought dead were resuscitated; and from Oxford came, not poetry or painting, but the sermons of Newman, the Tracts, the whole religious force which has transformed and revivified ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... to any place where Berenice was, even though it were a church. He went with some secret misgiving lest the service should move him more than he wished; but to his satisfaction he found that while he felt aesthetic pleasure, he was inclined to be critical about the doctrine of the ritual. His satisfaction, he reflected, would have been thought amusing by Mrs. Staggchase; but it at least assured him that he had not been mistaken in ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... obliged to him for the final arrangement of a text to my Tannhauser which could be sung and which was regarded on all sides as 'acceptable.' But I cannot remember ever having been attracted by anything poetic or even aesthetic in his nature. His value, however, as an experienced, warm-hearted, staunchly devoted friend at all times, especially in periods of the greatest distress, made itself more and more clearly felt. I can hardly remember ever meeting a man of such sound judgment on the ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... regret, all pleasure from poetry of any kind, including Shakespeare. In connection with pleasure from poetry, I may add that in 1822 a vivid delight in scenery was first awakened in my mind, during a riding tour on the borders of Wales, and this has lasted longer than any other aesthetic pleasure. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... flowers, books, a piano; 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 is ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... unconsciously anxious to be out of the way of his guest, and consciously anxious not to neglect him, but nothing was said on either side. The old lady knitted and dozed, and his lordship sat and drank, now and then mingling the aesthetic with the sensual, and holding his glass to the light to enjoy its colour and brilliancy,—doing his poor best to encourage the presence of what ideas he counted agreeable, and prevent the intrusion of their opposites. And still ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... spend Sunday at her place in the country, I broke an old habit and said I'd go. When last I had visited her house she worshipped success in the arts, and her recipe was to have a few successes to talk and a lot of us unsuccessful persons to listen. At that time her aesthetic was easy to understand. "Every great statue," she said, "is set up in a public place. Every great picture brings a high price. Every great book has a large sale. That is what greatness in art means." Her own brand of talk was not in conflict ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... approve nor disapprove—dancing should all have its meaning, as the Greek Orchises had. These dances to the Greeks would have meant only one thing—I do not know if they would have wished this to take place in public, they were an aesthetic and refined people, so I think not. We Russians are the only so-called civilised nation who are brutal enough for that; but we are far from being civilised really. Orgies are natural to us—they are not to the French or the English. Savage ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... sense of the aesthetic, which is closely akin to religious feeling, the American Indian stands alone. In accord with his nature and beliefs, he does not pretend to imitate the inimitable, or to reproduce exactly the work of the Great Artist. That which is beautiful must not be trafficked ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... pantheon, so will one find the flaws of all State forms in the Holy Roman German Empire. That this eclecticism will reach a point hitherto unsuspected is guaranteed in particular by the politico-aesthetic gourmanderie of a German king, who thinks he can play all the parts of monarchy, both of the feudal and the bureaucratic, both of the absolute and the constitutional, of the autocratic as of the democratic, ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... the positive way 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 clever enough for you ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... is behind all the processes of art, though she rarely becomes a conscious artist, except in delicate and impassioned modes of living. Indeed, matters are cruelly complicated for her if the entanglements of destiny drag her forward into the deliberate aesthetic effort. Strange, wistful, bitter and sweet, she troubles and quickens the soul of man, as earthly or as heavenly lover redeeming him from the spiritual sloth which is more to be dreaded than any ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... be dragged into this circle of dissipation. It is possible to go to church with substantially the same object with which one goes to a place of amusement—in the hope of being excited, of having the feelings stirred and the aesthetic sense gratified or, at the least, consuming an hour which might otherwise lie heavy on the hands. With shame be it said, there are churches enough and preachers enough ready to meet this state of mind half-way. With ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... matter of strict chronology, somewhat earlier. But the chief tendencies may be divided into seven periods. They are (1) The decay of Victorianism and the growth of a purely decorative art, (2) The rise and decline of the AEsthetic Philosophy, (3) The muscular influence of Henley, (4) The Celtic revival in Ireland, (5) Rudyard Kipling and the ascendency of mechanism in art, (6) John Masefield and the return of the rhymed narrative, (7) The ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... breath! Moreover, the spiritually-minded seem always to be possessed of a great secret. This air of interior knowledge, of the perception of that which is hidden from the uninitiated, is a common mark of all refinement, aesthetic as well as moral. In studying the face of Leonardo da Vinci's 'Mona Lisa,' for instance, one will find that it is this interior insight that explains the so-called "cryptic smile." In the case of aesthetic refinement, the secret discloses itself as at bottom delicacy, ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... make a better use of the opening you afford me if I were to direct your mind to a loftier theme than that of art. It would appear to be unseasonable to go in search of a code for the aesthetic world, when the moral world offers matter of so much higher interest, and when the spirit of philosophical inquiry is so stringently challenged by the circumstances of our times to occupy itself with the most perfect of all works of art—the establishment ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... when it means a short prose narrative, which presents artistically a bit of real life; the primary object of which is to amuse, though it may also depict a character, plead a cause, or point a moral; this amusement is neither of that aesthetic order which we derive from poetry, nor of that cheap sort which we gain from a broad burlesque: it is the simple yet intellectual pleasure derived from listening ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... compunctions, any special concern for 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 of ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... that, from an aesthetic point of view, the Englishman, devoid of high lights and shadows, coated with drab, and super-humanly steady on his feet, is not too attractive. But for the wearing, tearing, slow, and dreadful business ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... exclude from the Public Schools! thereby denying alike the lessons of history and its Christian duty. These United States, or no existing nation (relatively to the age), has never attained the point of artistic, aesthetic, social or material perfection of the Greco-Roman States; yet they fell, as I have just said, to slavery and ruin, not so much from the blows of the barbarians, as from the dissolving influence of a material civilization, resulting inevitably ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... Without birth-control, indeed, it could frequently have no existence at all, and even at the best seldom be free from disconcerting possibilities fatal to its very essence. Against these disconcerting possibilities is often placed, on the other side, the un-aesthetic nature of the contraceptives associated with birth-control. Yet, it must be remembered, they are of a part with the whole of our civilised human life. We at no point enter the spiritual save through the material. ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... The house was not large, it was what might now be described as a "bijou residence," but though out of repair, it had been decorated with the utmost magnificence by Beaujon, and Balzac's discriminating eye quickly discerned its aesthetic possibilities. ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... the lowest part of a wall, upon its plinth. Their feet touched the soil, their eyes were on a level with those that looked at them; we might say that they formed an endless procession round every hall and chamber. The reasons for such an arrangement are to be sought for, not in any aesthetic tendency of the Assyrian artist, but in the simple fact that only in the stone cuirass, within which the lower parts of the brick walls were shut up, could he find the kindly material for his chisel. Nowhere else in the whole building could the stone, without ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... even ugly, their efforts may seem to us, we are bound to recognize in them the same motives that actuated the builders of the Parthenon or of St. Peter's at Rome. This awakening and gratification of the aesthetic sense seems to be the first advance from a condition of mere animal existence, in which food, shelter, and comfort are the only considerations, to tastes and desires that are higher and, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... beside his horse and some piece of artillery, which I copied from a print. It was of course an awful daub, but in connection with it I heard for the first time a new word,—the word "taste" used in its aesthetic sense. One of the neighbour women was calling at the house, and seeing my picture said to Mother, "What taste that boy has." That application of the word made an impression on me that ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... the company of those Boston authors who first inspired it with the life so vigorous yet. It was not given us all to be born in Boston, but when we find ourselves in the "Atlantic" we all seem to suffer a sea-change, an aesthetic renaissance; a livelier literary conscience stirs in us; we have its fame at heart; we must do our best for Maga's name as well as for our own hope; we are naturalized Bostonians in the finest and highest sense. With greater reverence and ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... cultivating our tastes, in refining them, and in defining them. We cannot be too strenuous in defining them; and, as long as we are young, the catholicity of youth will preserve us from a bigoted narrowness. In aesthetic matters—and I imagine we both understand that we are dealing with these—the youngest youth has no tastes; it has merely appetites. All is fish that comes to its net; if anything, it prefers the gaudier of the finny tribes; it is only when it becomes sophisticated that its appetites turn into tastes, ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... most common, but not by any means the most aesthetic means of table illumination, because of its heating and glaring qualities. Wax candles are extremely pretty with tissue shades to match the prevailing tint of the other decorations, besides giving an opportunity for displaying all manner of pretty conceits in candelabra. About twenty-six candles ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... 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 granted by a ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... Hosie walked excitedly up and down the dingy room, whose sole pretension in an aesthetic way was the breeze-blown "yachting girl" of a soap company's calendar, sailing her bounding craft ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... masters of the tragic stage. When we remember that a training in music and poetry formed a prominent part of the education of every wellborn Athenian, we cannot be surprised at finding in Aristotle, and to a less extent in Plato, considerable traces of a tradition of technical language and even of aesthetic theory. ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... in the neighbourhood of City Hall Park and Broadway that evening, awoke with a start from his meditations to find himself being addressed by a young lady. The young lady had large grey eyes and a slim figure. She appealed to the aesthetic ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... each view of each of these there is some jarring feature, something that we have to ignore in order to thoroughly lose ourselves in the beauty of the scene. The Court of Honour was practically blameless; the aesthetic sense of the beholder was as fully and unreservedly satisfied as in looking at a masterpiece of painting or sculpture, and at the same time was soothed and elevated by a sense of amplitude and grandeur such as no single ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... delicate and superior persons would refuse to see the force in that kitchen garden comparison, because it is not connected with any of the ordinary maritime sentiments as stated in books and songs. The aesthetic amateur would say that he knew what large and philosophical thoughts he ought to have by the boundless deep. He would say that he was not a greengrocer who would think first of greens. To which I should reply, like Hamlet, apropos of a parallel profession, "I would you were so ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... tool. Yet we define education in terms of imagination when we say that education is the unfolding and perfecting of the human spirit; or, that education is a setting-up in the heart of the child of a moral and aesthetic revelation of the universe; for the human spirit which we are trying to establish is not a fact, but a gracious possibility ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... harmonies of line and color over the panels; and the sculptors who carve antique heads over the doorways of palace cars make the place merry with studio jokes from the Berlin Academy. It is evident that a community of artists like this, furnishing the aesthetic department to an immense manufactory, will also elevate the tone of the industrial society outside, if they can but be kept free from vice and supplied with means of culture; more of which anon. Meantime, as a kind of standard of what the manufacturers themselves ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... to bear was that other classes of "men" made up to him, after the men of distinction, those whom the dons considered the best men, had withdrawn and left him to pursue his own way. The men who loafed considered him their natural prey; the aesthetic men who wrote bad verses opened their arms, and were ready to welcome him as their own. And perhaps among these classes he might have found disinterested friendship, for nobody any longer sought Warrender on account of what he could ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... beautiful through these bars?" I reflected as I walked. "Is not this the effect of the aesthetic law of contrasts, according to which azure stands out prominently beside black? Or is it not, perhaps, a manifestation of some other, higher law, according to which the infinite may be conceived by the human mind only when it is brought within certain boundaries, for instance, when it is enclosed ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... said the Architect, "Just think what I have done, Designing such aesthetic homes!" But answer came there none— And this was scarcely odd, because They'd ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 27, 1892 • Various
... He is not like the man who, because he couldn't afford both, gave up metaphysics for an automobile, and when he ran over a man blamed metaphysics. He would not have us get over-excited about physical disturbance but have it accepted as a part of any progress in culture, moral, spiritual or aesthetic. If a poet retires to the mountain-side, to avoid the vulgar unculture of men, and their physical disturbance, so that he may better catch a nobler theme for his symphony, Emerson tells him that "man's culture can spare nothing, wants all material, converts all impediments into instruments, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... of existence, which arose through contact with Italian culture. The men of learning—poets, artists, scholars—who soon gathered about the French court received immediate recognition from the king's sister, who had studied all languages, was gay, brilliant, and aesthetic. While her mother and brother were in harmony with the age, no better, no worse than their environment, Marguerite aspired to the most elevated morals and ideals; thus, she is a type of all that is refined, ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... eatable beach-grapes and papaws. If you're fond of wild cassava and can prepare it so it won't poison you, you can make an eatable paste. If you like oily cabbage, the top of any palmetto will furnish it. But, my poor friend, there's little here to tempt one's appetite or satisfy one's aesthetic hunger for flowers. Our Northern meadows are far more gorgeous from June to October; and our wild fruits are far more delicious than what one finds growing ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... Then, I see, by certain tiny marks and cracks, that these walls have lately been done over, and that they were also redecorated another time not long before. This proves that Miss Van Allen has money enough to gratify her whims and she chooses to spend it in satisfying her aesthetic preferences. Further, the walls have been carefully cared for, showing an interested and capable housekeeperly instinct and traits of extreme orderliness and tidiness. Cleverness, even, for here, you see, is a place, where a bit of the plaster has been defaced by a knock or scratch, ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... aesthetic emotions which it sent through her young soul the first time she said it, did not in any way interfere with the sweet satisfaction she had in leaning across the aisle and wrinkling up her nose at her ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... monotonous uniformity that tempestuous feelings found no entrance;—all was as calm and quiet as could be. So our hearts naturally craved the life-bringing shock of the passionate emotion in English literature. Ours was not the aesthetic enjoyment of literary art, but the jubilant welcome by stagnation of a turbulent wave, even though it should stir up to the surface the slime of ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... A very leisurely aesthetic, fragrant occupation is this picking browse. It should never be cut, but pulled, stripped or broken. I have seen a Senator, ex-Governor, and a wealthy banker enjoying themselves hugely at it, varying the occupation by hacking small timber with their G.W. hatchets, like so many boys let loose ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... our humanity. The function of the sexual elements in our physical frame is so central that unless they be truly managed health and strength are impossible. Their relation is no less vital to our mental and aesthetic life, and they appear to control almost absolutely our nervous stability. No man or woman attains to fullness and harmony of life if the sexual nature be either neglected or mismanaged. No society is strong and happy unless this part of life ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... warning issues with no uncertain sound, because this great battle for preservation and conservation cannot be won by gentle tones, nor by appeals to the aesthetic instincts of those who have no sense of beauty, or enjoyment of Nature. It is necessary to sound a loud alarm, to present the facts in very strong language, backed up by irrefutable statistics and by photographs ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... present-day 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 novel ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... substance by and from which it was being delicately elaborated? Suppose, I argued, I remove the gaping shell, I shall no longer be able to enjoy the rare, the unique pleasure of presiding over the gradual perfection of a pearl, an aesthetic advantage to which I alone had been made free. Could present possession of a little sphere of carbonate of lime, polished and sooty black, compensate for the continuance of the chaste joy of watching one of the most covert and intimate processes of Nature? Balancing ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... the batsman 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 Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... little less sensible and aesthetic," exclaimed "our eldest," "and come here and drink a cup of tea! See here, Henrik, a cup of strong warm tea, which will do your head good. But this evening and to-morrow morning you must take ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... less interesting in winter because scents were so much less sweet and less complex than in summer. But the whole of the writings showed a serene exaltation of mind. There was not a touch of repining or resignation about them. He spoke much of the aesthetic pleasure that he received from an increased power of disentangling the component elements of a scent, such as came from his garden on a warm summer day. Some of the writings that were shown me were religious in character, in which the man spoke of a constant sense of the nearness of ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... filled with a sense of harmony and peace. This method seems most applicable to the attainment of moral qualities. An evil passion can be quelled by the use of the word denoting the contrary virtue. The power of the word depends largely upon its aesthetic and moral associations. Words like joy, strength, love, purity, denoting the highest ideals of the human mind, possess great potency and are capable, thus used, of dispelling mental states in which their opposites predominate. The name Reflective Suggestion, which Baudouin ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... and cheers.] We have not always even the happy chance to be a municipal dignitary, with a costume which I will not at present characterize. [Laughter.] We are not all of us masters of hounds; and I think that the robes of a peer, unattractive in their aesthetic aspect, have lost something of their popularity. [Laughter.] Again, the black velvet coat, with which we are accustomed to associate deep thought and artistic instincts, has become ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... proudly make a boast of lack of culture, and where artistic and aesthetic feeling, if freely expressed, makes one's hearers more likely than not, ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... a plaintive ditty on her ciniloi and sing whilst she beats on her bamboo sticks an accompaniment that tortures well-tuned ears. For the rest, if her beauty soon fades, her ugliness does not create the least feeling of disgust amongst the Sakais of the masculine gender, who have aesthetic ideas peculiarly ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... Indeed, considering the character of some of my own books, such an attempt would be gross inconsistency. But, while I appreciate its importance in a philological view, I am inclined to set little store on its aesthetic value, especially in poetry. Three parts of the emendations made upon poets are mere alterations, some of which, had they been suggested to the author by his Maecenas or Africanus, he would probably have adopted. Moreover, those who are most exact in laying down rules ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... times it will carelessly dangle With an air of aesthetic repose, At others will point to an angle Inclined to the tip of his nose; When it rests on the side of his head, he Will smile at whatever befalls, When pushed o'er his brow, we make ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 8, 1892 • Various
... are indeed only of value to primitive man because they are related, as he swiftly and necessarily finds out, to his food supply. He has, it would seem, little sensitiveness to the aesthetic impulse of the beauty of a spring morning, to the pathos of autumn. What he realizes first and foremost is, that at certain times the animals, and still more the plants, which form his food, appear, at certain ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... these walls have rung with lunatic screams after months and years of hollow-eyed watching for the ship that never came? It might have been different, of course, had Malmsworth been able to appreciate the aesthetic values of life, as Mr. Wordsley did. But doubtless these lovely miles and miles of crystalline oceans had been but ...
— The Marooner • Charles A. Stearns
... should put something of value to the reader, whether of value as a discovery and an enlargement of wisdom or of value as a new emphasis laid upon old and sound morals; secondly, that this thing added or renewed in human life should be presented in such a manner as to give permanent aesthetic pleasure. ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... writer, born in 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 Fine ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... its subject, or to both together. From the point of view of style, a healthy work of art is one whose style recognises the beauty of the material it employs, be that material one of words or of bronze, of colour or of ivory, and uses that beauty as a factor in producing the aesthetic effect. From the point of view of subject, a healthy work of art is one the choice of whose subject is conditioned by the temperament of the artist, and comes directly out of it. In fine, a healthy work of art is one that has both perfection and personality. ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... somewhat surprised one day by the visit of Adolphe de Rothschild, who came to give me an order for his bust. I commenced the work immediately. But I had not properly considered this admirable man—he had nothing of the aesthetic, but the contrary. I tried nevertheless, and I brought all my will to bear in order to succeed in this first order, of which I was so proud. Twice I dashed the bust which I had commenced on the ground, and after a third attempt I definitely gave up, stammering ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... pleasures, however keen, are so interwoven with restlessness, shame, or dissatisfaction, or so inevitably accompanied by a revulsion of feeling, disgust or loathing, that they must be sharply discounted in our calculus. Whereas intellectual, aesthetic, religious pleasures are generally free from such intermixture of pain, and so, though milder, on the whole preferable even in their immediacy and apart from ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... attainable only by a very few human beings, the spectacular sense is born,'." I was quoting. "'Life is no longer good or evil. It is a perpetual play of forces without beginning or end. The freed Intellect merges itself with the World-Will and partakes of its essence, which is not a moral essence but an aesthetic ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... something must be said to bridge over the 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 ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... not, of course, ensure husbands for them all; but it will certainly tend to increase the number of marriages. Nor is it primarily for that sociological reason that I plead for a return to the old system of education. I plead for it, first and last, on aesthetic grounds. Let the Graces be cultivated for their ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... into a German auditorium or Hoersaal, as the lecture-rooms in the universities are called, will show much that is characteristic. But little care is bestowed on the decoration of the apartment. Whatever aesthetic culture the nation may have, it finds little manifestation in the things of daily life, and elegance seems little less than banished from the precincts of the learned world. The academic halls present to the view nothing but dingy walls, rough floors coated with the dust and mud of days or weeks, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... of studying every part in every play in which she was concerned, so she was as ready as though she had been the understudy. Miss Herbert was not a remarkable actress, but her appearance was wonderful indeed. She was very tall, with pale gold hair and the spiritual, ethereal look which the aesthetic movement loved. When mother wanted to flatter me very highly, she said that I looked like Miss Herbert! Rossetti founded many of his pictures on her, and she and Mrs. "Janie" Morris were his favorite types. When any one was the object of Rossetti's devotion, there ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... aesthetic crockery, or Francesco de Rimini, I think you would rather have liked him; a sort of fellow who would lend you his dogs, or his gun, or his horse, or his ballet-dancer, or his credit—humph!—at a moment's ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... roughest and rudest make slung across the shoulders by a piece of thin cord? And such shot! irregular pellets of raw iron and lead, of which all I can say is that dying by such help would be far from an aesthetic operation. And yet these same soldiers, as a mere pastime, are employed in a service which requires no mean bravery. When not fighting the two-legged enemies of their country, they are engaged waging war against the four-legged ones, ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... Miss Baylis, the teacher of history and literature, but Miss Dalton the gymnasium and physical culture teacher, and Miss Powell who had charge of the little girls, sided with Mrs. Bonnell as did Monsieur Santelle, and old Herr Professor Stenzel. Even Miss Juliet Atwell, who came twice each week for aesthetic dancing, and several other stunts, openly worshiped at the Bonnell's shrine. Herr Stenzel's admiration had more than once proved an embarrassing proposition to the lady, for Herr Stenzel loved the flesh pots of Leslie Manor and knew right well who presided over them. But Mrs. Bonnell was equal ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... the rural home beautiful and attractive are unequaled in the city for any except the very rich. It is not necessary that the farmhouse shall be crowded for space; its outlook and surroundings can be arranged to give it an aesthetic quality wholly impossible in the ordinary city home. That this is true is proved by many inexpensive farmhouses that are a delight to the eye. On the other hand, it must be admitted that a large proportion ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... remain. They looked down into the hall, where, I take it, there was always a certain congregation of retainers, much lounging and waiting and passing to and fro, with a door open into the court. The court, as I said just now, was not the grassy, aesthetic spot which you may find it at present of a summer's day: there were beasts tethered in it, and hustling men-at-arms, and the earth was trampled into puddles. But my lord or my lady, looking down from the chamber-door, could pick out ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... or so ago you used to go to melodramas, real melodramas. There are aesthetic revivals of melodrama in Boston, I hear. There was nothing aesthetic about the ones I mean, and the enjoyment of them was untainted by the malady of thought. Come along now. We'll dive through Park Row and turn here down Frankfort Street. Few do turn down Frankfort ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... social,—which unifies his multitudinous experiences. So long as personification elucidates a true, a scientific principle, so long as it is not pressed to tortuous lengths which actually give false impressions, so long as it is kept within the bounds of aesthetic decency, so long as it is recognized as a play device and does not confuse a child's thinking,—so long as it is justified. No more. It is a useful intellectual tool and a charming device for play. Kipling ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... 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 ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... called the aesthetic tool in the carpenter's kit. It is the most difficult tool to handle and the most satisfactory when thoroughly mastered. How to care for and handle it will be referred to in a subsequent chapter. We are now concerned with ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... make a happy compromise between vertical and horizontal lines. It was a problem which probably presented itself to them in the question how they were to treat the different storeys of the building. Structural difficulties would be continually at war with their aesthetic ambitions, and the heavy stone vault made structural difficulties a serious matter. There was a growing desire for space, for height and width, for light and colour. With every increase of height and width the burden of the vault became more oppressive; with every enlargement ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... the newest French novel—and evidently, from the attitude of the reader, "good"—consort happily with the special tone of the room, a consistent air of selection and suppression, one of the finer aesthetic evolutions. If Mrs. Dyott was fond of ancient French furniture and distinctly difficult about it, her inmates could be fond—with whatever critical cocks of charming dark-braided heads over slender sloping shoulders—of modern French authors. Nothing bad passed for half an hour— nothing ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... means of attaining that moderate share of stored-away fat which seems to indicate a state of nutritive prosperity and to be essential to those physical needs, such as protection and padding, which fat subserves, no less than to its aesthetic value, as rounding the ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... animals there literally and habitually occurs a sexual selection; and this fact is not a matter of inference, but, as I have said, a matter of observation. The inference only begins where, from this observable fact, it is argued,—1st, that the sexual selection has reference to an aesthetic taste on the part of the animals themselves; and 2nd, that, supposing the selection to be determined by such a taste, the cause thus given is adequate to explain the phenomena of beauty which are presented by these animals. I will ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... certain sensations in their auditors. Moreover, subsequent hearings will reveal the fact that this sensation is aroused always in the same place, and in the same manner. The beauty of the voice may be temporarily affected in the case of a singer, or an instrument of less aesthetic tone-quality be used by the instrumentalist, but the result ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... friend) sometimes spoils its cause by going in for too much. There are other forms of culture beside physical science; and I should be profoundly sorry to see the fact forgotten, or even to observe a tendency to starve, or cripple, literary, or aesthetic, culture for the sake of science. Such a narrow view of the nature of education has nothing to do with my firm conviction that a complete and thorough scientific culture ought to be introduced into all schools. By this, however, I do not mean that every schoolboy should be taught ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... succeeded. For one of my age I had more than an average love of business. Indeed, I deliberately set about learning to play the guitar well enough to become eligible for membership in the Banjo Club—and this for no more aesthetic purpose than to place myself in line for the position of manager, to which I was ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... hardly say that we are not aesthetic here in the bush. In point of fact, we have no sympathy whatever with aestheticism or high art culture. We are, to put it shortly, Goths, barbarians, antithetics, what you will. The country is not aesthetic either; it is ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... frontispiece of Edward Shaw's The Modern Architect, published in Boston in 1855 (fig. 19). The double calipers of the woodturner (fig. 20) have by far the most appealing and ingenious design of all such devices. Designed for convenience, few tools illustrate better the aesthetic of the purely functional than this pair ...
— Woodworking Tools 1600-1900 • Peter C. Welsh
... habited, for all the world like anybody else, in the grey tweed suit of the common British tourist, surmounted by the light felt hat (or bowler), to match, of the modern English country gentleman. Even the soft silk necktie of a delicate aesthetic hue that adorned his open throat didn't proclaim him at once a painter by trade. It showed him merely as a man of taste, with a decided eye ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... residence in Concord I had driven up with some friends to an aesthetic tea at Mr. Emerson's. It was in the winter, and a great wood-fire blazed upon the hospitable hearth. There were various men and women of note assembled, and I, who listened attentively to all the fine things that were said, was for some time scarcely aware of a man who sat upon the edge of ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... fragments of the ruined cabinet, but was rewarded by no hollow ring. It was a most undutifully matter-of-fact and prosaic piece of furniture in its interior, however much it may have pleased the aesthetic sense outwardly. He gave it up after a time, and finished dressing. "Nothing in that but firewood," he announced to Jones, who had been watching his researches with some surprise. "Pile it up in ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... dulness. This childlike and prosaic mind is beginning to wane in the world of science. Men of science are beginning to see themselves, as the fine phrase is, in the part; they are beginning to be proud of their humility. They are beginning to be aesthetic, like the rest of the world, beginning to spell truth with a capital T, beginning to talk of the creeds they imagine themselves to have destroyed, of the discoveries that their forbears made. Like the modern English, they are beginning to be soft about their own hardness. They are becoming ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Years of the Reign of King Charles I..(1813), 13-15. Herbert was a kinsman and protege of the Pembroke family, who had travelled much in the East, published an account of his travels, and had acquired quiet and aesthetic tastes. He had been in various posts of Parliamentary employment, procured for him by Philip, Earl of Pembroke; but, having accompanied that Earl when he went to Newcastle as one of the Commissioners to take charge ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... also a memorial to G.B. Armstrong (1822-1871), a citizen of Chicago, who founded the railway mail service of the United States. A city art commission approves all works of art before they become the property of the city, and at the request of the mayor acts in various ways for the city's aesthetic betterment. The Architectural Club labours for the same end. A Municipal Art League (organized in 1899) has done good work in arousing civic pride; it has undertaken, among other things, campaigns against bill-board advertisements,[11] ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... walk down a real hill we do not feel that we commit a more wicked act than when we walked up it....Roman architecture is classic to become in its Byzantine developments completely decadent, and St. Mark's is the perfected type of decadence in art. ... We have to recognize that decadence is an aesthetic and not a moral conception. The power of words is great but they need not befool us. ... We are not called upon to air our moral indignation over the bass end of the musical clef." I recommend the entire chapter to such men as Lombroso Levi, Max Nordau and Heinrich Pudor, who have yet to learn ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... abnormal things in modern magazines. It is the normal things that I am not allowed to say. I can write in some solemn quarterly an elaborate article explaining that God is the devil; I can write in some cultured weekly an aesthetic fancy describing how I should like to eat boiled baby. The thing I must not write is rational criticism of the men and institutions ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... and loftiest inspirations, and religion is indebted to poetry for its subtlest and most luminous interpretations." No doubt a man may be truly, deeply religious who has little or no development on the aesthetic side, to whom poetry makes no special appeal. But it is certain that he whose soul is deaf to the "concord of sweet sounds" misses a mighty aid in the spiritual life. For a hymn is a wing by which the spirit soars above earthly cares and trials into a purer air and a clearer sunshine. ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... through it successfully. The Canyon was widening now and an occasional cedar tree could be seen. Enoch was vaguely conscious, too, that the colors of the walls were more brilliant. But the ardors of the rapids gave small opportunity for aesthetic observations. ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... class which "prefers the angry ranting of ill- meaning demagogues to the advantages of solid education." That, however, the working-men appreciate solid education when they can get it unmixed with the interested cant of the bourgeoisie, the frequent lectures upon scientific, aesthetic, and economic subjects prove which are delivered especially in the Socialist institutes, and very well attended. I have often heard working-men, whose fustian jackets scarcely held together, speak upon geological, ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... kind is not impossible, is proved by the existence in man of an aesthetic faculty along with normal perception. Our eye perceives the features of the living being, merely as assembled, not as mutually organized. The intention of life, the simple movement that runs through ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... worship. Jeroboam's symbolism led straight to Ahab's unblushing pagan worship of the hideous Sidonian Baal. The craving for symbolical and sensuous accessories of worship, which is strong in most Churches in this aesthetic generation, is perilous. Material aids to worship there must be, so long as we are in the flesh, but the fewer and simpler they are the better, for they are aids which ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... much ceremony into the lake, from richly decorated boats. The building with the five golden domes was, of course, the temple, sacred to Kuhlacan, in which the god was daily worshipped. Earle, whose aesthetic sense was stirred by the beauty of the fountain and the wonderful workmanship of the figure surmounting it, directed Dick's particular attention to it and descanted at some length upon the taste of the design; and Dick, while listening to his companion, ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... sense), for Chesterton to be paradoxical. Ruggedness is a form of beauty, but it is a beauty that is quite different from the commonly accepted grounds. A mountain is rugged and it is beautiful, a woman is beautiful; but the two features of the aesthetic are quite different. It is the same with poetry. There is (and Browning proved it) a 'beautifulness' in the rugged; it is a sense of ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... perhaps because, according to the ingenious suggestion of the Poet Laureate, they admit at once of more daring flights of the imagination and of stronger realism than classical art can bear. But it may well be doubted whether the wonder and delight which every man of the most modest aesthetic capacity owes to them can in the end keep pace with the slower growing appreciation of the universality and sanity of classical work. But this is an old dispute not likely to be settled this year or next. Nor does it affect the ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... distant horizon, Rose-Marie dashed at the child and bore it, despite its vigorous opposition, in through the portals of Elsinore. The child's furious screams had already announced the fact of its discovery, and the almost hysterical parents raced down the lawn to meet their restored offspring. The aesthetic value of the scene was marred in some degree by Rose-Marie's difficulty in holding the struggling infant, which was borne wrong-end foremost towards the agitated bosom of its family. "Our own little Erik come back to us," ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... an atmosphere of aesthetic emotion which he quite mistook for holiness. He was a dandy in the care of his Soul, and tricked himself out to catch the ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... "Differences of Taste in Generations." Changes of standard in the arts are always taking place, but it is only with advancing years, perhaps, that we begin to be embarrassed by the recurrence of them. In early youth we fight for the new forms of art, for the new aesthetic shibboleths, and in that happy ardour of battle we have no time or inclination to regret the demigods whom we dispossess. But the years glide on, and, behold! one morning, we wake up to find our own predilections treated with contempt, and the objects of our own idolatry consigned ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... between a man and woman? We physiologists know what these relations are. You study the anatomy of the eye; where does the enigmatical glance you talk about come in there? That's all romantic, nonsensical, aesthetic rot. We had much better go and look ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... of which are common in Australia, India, and the Molucca Islands. These pretty and interesting creatures are in point of fact parrots which have practically made themselves into humming-birds by long continuance in the poetical habit of visiting flowers for food. Like Mr. Oscar Wilde in his aesthetic days, they breakfast off a lily. Flitting about from tree to tree with great rapidity, they thrust their long extensible tongues, pencilled with honey-gathering hairs, into the tubes of many big tropical blossoms. The lories, indeed, live entirely on nectar, and they are so common in the region ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... will produce in seventy-five or one hundred years the most magnificent style of man and woman the world ever saw. They will have the wit of one race, the eloquence of another race, the kindness of another, the generosity of another, the aesthetic taste of another, the high moral character of another, and when that man and woman step forth, their brain and nerve and muscle an intertwining of the fibres of all nationalities, nothing but the new electric photographic apparatus, that can see clear through body ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... temple for the teaching of justice; a temple for the upbuild of mankind. Let us then hold its form to our imagination, pearly white as the palaces of the South, straight in its construction as rectitude, and let us present it to an admiring world, not only for aesthetic culture but ethical grandeur, religious progress, and political righteousness; and let us say to all, be he high or low, "who touches a stone in yon God-given edifice" is guilty of vandalism, is an iconoclast not at any time to be tolerated. He is tampering with the rights and privileges ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... 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
... falling in the gutter on special occasions, had mentioned this fact to anyone, but all the interested denizens of that particular square could tell by the unusual air of bustle and activity which pervaded the Hart domicile. Lillian, the aesthetic, who furnished theme for many spirited discussions, leaned airily out of the window; her auburn (red) tresses carefully done in curl papers. Martha, the practical, flourished the broom and duster with unwonted ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... students, and the rudest of furniture. What need is there of the beautiful for those who are without eyes, or who have eyes that see not? But the blind have a keen appreciation of the beautiful, and ample provision has been made by the founders of St. Dunstan's for satisfying the aesthetic craving of ...
— Through St. Dunstan's to Light • James H. Rawlinson
... sewage plant all find convenient foothold here. The excursionists have ferreted out whatever beaches and groves there may be. One need not regret that the harbor is not appreciated, but only that it has not been developed along aesthetic as well as ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... most part the deliberate creations of scientific writers; while the very men who should concern themselves with this matter stand aloof, and leave it to those who by nature and profession are least sensitive to the aesthetic requirements. We would therefore encourage those who possess the word-making faculty to exercise it freely; and we hope in the future that suggestions from our members may help men of science and inventors in their search ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 1 (Oct 1919) • Society for Pure English
... the moral indifference of those times; but Leo X, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, heir of the traditions in companionship and the humanities which had made Florence illustrious,—Leo, cultivated, brilliant, clean in his personal life, had assembled around him men reasonably good. His aesthetic inclinations were running him deeply in debt, and to fill the bankrupt treasury, His Holiness commissioned Tetzel to sell indulgences—a practice repugnant to moral instinct, to the dignity of the Church, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle |
