"Aesthetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Morris excelled. He educated the popular taste by bringing forth the beauties of the simpler forms of the floral and vegetable world; he delighted especially in displaying the acanthus in varied conventional forms. Every rug he designed bears witness to his enthusiasm for harmony. Too aesthetic, some critics declare him to have been; but no one can deny the importance of his creations, for England needed to be awakened to a knowledge of her own inability to appreciate artistic decoration of the home, especially ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... human 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
... case of marble buildings, by some application or other, so as to contrast less glaringly with the painted portions? The latter supposition receives some confirmation from Vitruvius, a Roman writer on architecture of the age of Augustus, and seems to some modern writers to be demanded by aesthetic considerations. On the other hand, the evidence of the Olympia buildings points the other way. Perhaps the actual practice varied. As for the coloring of Ionic architecture, we know that the capital of the column was painted, but otherwise our ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... of all delight— Of all delectables conglomerate That stay the starved brain and rejuvenate The Mental Man! The aesthetic appetite— So long enhungered that the "inards" fight And growl gutwise—its pangs thou dost abate And all so amiably alleviate, Joy pats his belly as a hobo might Who haply hath obtained a cherry pie With ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... see the quantity that some of the Bretons managed to appropriate in an incredibly short space of time at the table d'hote. H.C., who was accustomed to the aesthetic table of his aunt, Lady Maria, more than once had to retire to his room, and recover his composure, and wonder whether his own appetite would ever return to him. And once or twice when I unfeelingly drew attention to an opposite neighbour and wondered what Lady Maria ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... modern schools consider mental development as the sole object of educational endeavor. Physical growth is an equally essential part of child life. Therefore the direction of physical growth becomes just as vital a part of the educational machinery. Aesthetic and spiritual growth require like emphasis. Each phase of child ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... 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 interludes," ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... the peasant spirits. Observe, I do not suggest that they are intentionally old-fashioned. I do not believe them to be sympathetic at all to those self-conscious revivals of peasant arts which are now being recommended to the poor by a certain type of philanthropists. They make no aesthetic choice. They do not deliberate which of the ancestral customs it would be "nice" for them to follow; but, other things being equal, they incline to go on in the way that has been usual in their families. It is a tendency that sways them, not a thought-out scheme of the way ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... endeavored to bring out the fact that this is one of the few instances where the aesthetic design of a structure of this sort is of prime importance, and cost a secondary consideration. There is, therefore, no use in comparing its cost with that of a structure in no way its equal in this respect and the ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 - A Concrete Water Tower, Paper No. 1173 • A. Kempkey
... of Melanesia show generally fenced fields, terrace farming on mountain sides, irrigation canals, fertilized soils, well trimmed shade trees and beautiful flower gardens,[968] proof that the cultivation of the ground has advanced to the aesthetic stage, as it has in insular Japan. In Tonga the coco-palm plantations are weeded and manured. Here, after a devastating war, the victorious chief devotes his attention to the cultivation of the land, which soon assumes a beautiful and flourishing appearance.[969] In ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... the champions I had overthrown, but to a certain hogskin belt buckled next the skin. The sweat of months was upon it, toil had defaced it, and it was not a creation such as would appeal to the aesthetic mind; but it was plethoric. There was the arcanum; each yellow grain conduced to my exaltation, and the sum of these grains was the sum of my mightiness. Had they been less, just so would have been my stature; more, and I should ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... same. In order that a comparison may be effective either for ornament or for use, there must be, between the two acts or objects, a similarity in some points, and a dissimilarity in others. The comparison for moral or aesthetic purposes is like an algebraic equation in mathematical science; if the two sides are in all their features the same, or in all their features different, you may manipulate the signs till the sun go down, ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... of my 'Old Gold' story, or else 'The Buried God,' and she thinks me an idealizing ignoramus upon whom she can impose. Her sepulchral name is at least not Italian; probably she is a sharp countrywoman of mine, turning, by means of the present aesthetic craze, an ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... sympathy. Paint us an angel, if you can, with a floating violet robe, and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house, those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... over the sun in a splendid effort painted such sublime sunsets above Mount Elgon as I had never dreamed of. And the music of hundreds of African birds along the river's edge greeted us with the cool, delightful dawn. Purely from an aesthetic standpoint, our days on the Nzoia were ones never to be forgotten, while from the standpoint of the man who loves to see wild game and doesn't care much about killing it, the bright, clear days on the Nzoia were ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... necessities of a less civilized people, but composed of certain signs, which, in accordance with the simplest elements of language, actually conveyed the sentiments of the race of men then existing."—Millington's Translation of Schlegel's AEsthetic Works, p. 455. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... left no portrait, nor even so much as an outline in black from which something might be made up by an imaginative artist. I have judges, majors, and attorneys, all properly labelled, in the other room, who would be much improved by a slight dash of the aesthetic element; however, I suppose it can't ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... that while such a contemplation of, or oscillation between, mutually destructive tenets may for a time minister to some kind of aesthetic enjoyment, the healthy mind cannot permanently find satisfaction while thus suspended in mid-air; nor are we appreciably advanced by the temper which, after pointing out some alleged fundamental antinomy, "quietly accepts"—i.e., in practice ignores—it. Problems of this ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... 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 ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... added that with an audience like the Athenian, whose aesthetic sensitiveness was doubtless far greater than that of any modern assembly, delivery counted for much. Aeschines' fine voice was a real danger to Demosthenes, and Demosthenes himself spoke of delivery, ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... patience all the time,' he replied, half laughing. 'It was maddening to see her sitting there so cool and crisp in her yellow tea-gown—well, what garment was it?' as I uttered a dissenting ejaculation: 'something flimsy and aesthetic. I thought her smooth sentences would ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... bodice, for one dinner dress, and my high black silk to fall back upon for another. Worn open in front, with a lace handkerchief and a locket, it does really very nicely. Then I've got three afternoon dresses, the grey you gave me, the sage-greeny aesthetic one, and the peacock-blue with the satin box-pleats. It's a charming dress, the peacock-blue; it looks as if it might have stepped straight out of a genuine Titian. It came home from Miss Wells's this morning. Wait five minutes, like a dear boy, and I'll run and put it on and let you ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... them 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, ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... gone out of use during the first third of the century, were now getting to be somewhat in fashion again. Many people now appreciated the pleasure which these animals had given to the world since the beginning of history, and whose place, in an aesthetic sense, no inanimate machine could supply. As Roland Clewe swung himself from the saddle at the foot of a broad flight of steps, the house door was opened and a ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... so often to train ourselves by studying the practice of workmen like Gautier and Hugo and imitating the virtues of work like Hernani and Quatre-Vingt-Treize and l'Education Sentimentale—we have heard so much of the aesthetic impeccability of Young France and the section of Young England that affects its qualities and reproduces its fashions—that it is hard to refrain from asking if, when all is said, we should not do well to look for models nearer home? if in place of such moulds of form as Mademoiselle ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... for all their lives; But for iron the Magnet felt no whim, Though he charmed iron, it charmed not him, From needles and nails and knives he'd turn, For he'd set his love on a Silver Churn! His most aesthetic, Very magnetic Fancy took this turn - "If I can wheedle A knife or needle, Why not a ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... and there will be regular meetings every Thursday evening during the winter and spring. At these meetings various subjects of interest will occupy the attention of the members, both of a practical and aesthetic character. ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 1, No. 10, October 1895. - French Farmhouses. • Various
... sounds in some of his epithets, perhaps in his best-known name—Iacchus, Bacchus. The masks suspended on base or cornice, so familiar an ornament in later Greek architecture, are the little faces hanging from the vines, and moving in the wind, to scare the birds. That garland of ivy, the aesthetic value of which is so great in the later imagery of Dionysus and his descendants, the leaves of which, floating from his hair, become so noble in the hands of Titian and Tintoret, was actually worn on the head for coolness; his earliest ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... West Kensington, say, and make it symbolic. Not artistic—Heaven—O Heaven forbid. My blood boils when I think of the affronts put by knock-kneed pictorial epicures on the strong, honest, ugly, patient shapes of necessary things: the brave old bones of life. There are aesthetic pottering prigs who can look on a saucepan without one tear of joy or sadness: mongrel decadents that can see no dignity in the honourable scars of a kettle. So they concentrate all their house decoration on coloured windows that nobody looks out of, and vases of lilies that everybody ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... do not begin to be.' That pleased her again. All she was thinking of was the number of furs her aesthetic father took the trouble to keep on hand, not their value. I could have told her that those masses of rich furs constituted wealth—or would in my country—but she would not have understood that; those were not the kind of things that ranked as riches ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... him in sympathy with living things, and just to that extent barred him from the mechanistic conception of those of pure science. Goethe, like every great poet, saw the universe through the colored medium of his imagination, his emotional and aesthetic nature; in short, through his humanism, and not in the white light of the scientific reason. His contributions to literature were of the first order, but his contributions to science have not taken high rank. He was a "prophet of the soul," ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... interesting young girls are grouped around Marguerite Verne in the spacious bay-window of the library. One, a bewitching brunette, dressed in slight mourning, is indeed a pretty picture to contemplate. Louise Rutherford possesses a face and form which bespeaks a high degree of idealism—an aesthetic nature that is lofty and inspiring. As she turns toward the fair young hostess, there is an expressive look of sympathy that leads one to know they ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... on the step, I was able to get a view through the slats of the Venetian blind of the front ground-floor sitting-room. I could scarcely restrain a cry of pure aesthetic delight at what I saw within. Price was sitting on a horse-hair sofa with an arm round the waist of a rather good-looking girl. Her eyes were fixed on his. It was Edwin and Angelina ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... ideal, an ideal which oppresses and kills. I must admit that I am somewhat estranged from the great men of the past, considered as examples for the conduct of life. For the most part I am disappointed in them. I admire them on aesthetic grounds, but I cannot endure the intolerance and the fanaticism they so often display. Many of the gods whom they worshipped have to-day become dangerous idols. Mankind, I fear, will fail to fulfil its lofty destiny unless it can transcend these ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... wish to expound the principles of chess strategy, we cannot exclude chess tactics from the field of our observations. If here and there the results of our deliberations bear some analogy to actual warfare, we may certainly give way to a kind of aesthetic satisfaction in that our own occupation has some parallel in real life, but we must never fashion our principles in accordance ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... years with the word 'Art' in its German sense; with 'High Art,' 'Symbolic Art,' 'Ecclesiastical Art,' 'Dramatic Art,' 'Tragic Art,' and so forth; and every well-educated person is expected, nowadays, to know something about Art. Yet in spite of all translations of German 'AEsthetic' treatises, and 'Kunstnovellen,' the mass of the British people cares very little about the matter, and sits contented under the imputation of 'bad taste.' Our stage, long since dead, does not revive; our poetry is dying; ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... 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
... chronic insanity with regard to music. It is the only Pegasus which now carries me far up into the blue. Thank God for this blessing of mine." I should be glad if I had room for her account of an evening under the weird spell of Ole Bull. Her moral sense was keener than her aesthetic, but her aesthetic sense was for keener than that of the average mortal. Sometimes she felt, as Paul would have said, "in a strait betwixt two"; in 1847 she writes Mr. Francis G. Shaw: "I am now wholly in the dispensation of art, and therefore theologians ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... open and his wits awake. He was happy as he dexterously performed the tour de maitre of the old barber-surgeons, or applied the spica bandage and taught his scholars to do it, so neatly and symmetrically that the aesthetic missionary from the older centre of civilization would bend over it in blissful contemplation, as if it were a sunflower. Dr. Lewis had many other tastes, and was a favorite, not only with students, but in a wide circle, professional, antiquarian, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... purple panorama brought no emotions, as pride of country or aesthetic associations; and even the bracing savor of the gale upon the eminence seemed laden, to his hard regard, with the corruptions and excesses of a debauched government and a rank society. The river, to him, ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... laborious, and he determined to erect a grist mill; but the stream that ran through the clayey channel of the Seine petite was too feeble to turn the ponderous wheels. So he was obliged to move twelve miles to the east, where flowed another small stream bearing the aesthetic name "Grease River." This was not large enough either for his purposes, so with stupendous enterprise he cut a canal nine miles long, and through it decoyed the waters of the little Seine into the arms of the "Greasy" paramour. At this mill was ground the grain ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... defamed the Christians, he passes to the examination of the Christian doctrine, in its form, its method, and its substance. His aesthetic sense, ruined with the idolatry of form, and unable to appreciate the thought, regards the Gospels as defective and rude through simplicity.(179) The method of Christian teaching also seems to him to be defective, as lacking philosophy ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... in spite of all her vanity and securities, any common maid-servant of positive, robust temper could fling her down this bottomless pit of insufficiency, by the slightest movement of jeering or contempt. And all the while the pensive, tortured woman piled up her own defences of aesthetic knowledge, and culture, and world-visions, and disinterestedness. Yet she could never stop up the terrible gap ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... 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 ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... almost identical in point of fundamental principles. Both worshiped nature, but the Peruvians were far ahead of the Ainus in civilization, and their religion, as far as ritual and ceremony are concerned, far surpassed that of the "Hairy Men" when viewed from an aesthetic standpoint. Ethically, I am inclined to believe the religion of the Ainus is just as high as was that ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... 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. ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... 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 ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... continue to be read, admired, and edited, is in itself a high proof of the eminence of Johnson's intellect; because, as serious criticism, they can hardly appear to the modern reader to be very far removed from the futile. Johnson's aesthetic judgments are almost invariably subtle, or solid, or bold; they have always some good quality to recommend them—except one: they are never right. That is an unfortunate deficiency; but no one can doubt that Johnson has made up for it, and that his wit has saved ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... properties of nature, has man no other relation to his external environment than the utilitarian? The moral influence has been just suggested; the exploitation of this rich vein has for some time past engaged the attention of evolutionary moralists. Our more immediate concern is with the aesthetic influences. And in nature there is beauty as well as utility. Nor is the beauty a by-product of utility; it exists on its own account, and asserts itself in its own right. As Emerson puts it—"it is its ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... was speedily checked. On the 6th Andrews was still in Boston, and making up his mind to stay on account of his property, but still anxious to secure a pass for his wife, whose personal fears—she was an aesthetic person, an amateur artist whose landscapes Lord Percy had admired—were greater than her interest in her husband's safety. She did safely get away, amid the miserable procession that her husband describes. "You'll see parents that are lucky enough to procure papers, with bundles in one ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... his art, Drer's personality is at once so imposing and so attractive, and has been so endeared to us by familiarity, that something of this personal attachment has been transferred to our aesthetic judgment. The letters from Venice and the Diary of his journey in the Netherlands, which form the contents of this volume, are indeed the singularly fortunate means for this pleasant intercourse with the man himself. They reveal Drer ...
— Memoirs of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries - [This is our volunteer's translation of the title] • Albrecht Durer
... imperfect word a value that it does not possess. When we do this our judgment of poetry is inert; we are not getting pleasure from his work because it is poetry, but for quite other reasons. It may be a quite wholesome pleasure, but it is not the high aesthetic pleasure which the people who experience it generally believe to be the richest and most vivid of all pleasures because it is experienced by a mental state that is more eager and masterful than any other. Nor is our judgment acute when we praise a poet's work because ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater
... misapprehended themselves, contradicted themselves, obeyed primal impulses, and then deluded themselves with sophistications upon the springs of action. In a word, unaware of what they are doing, men allow their aesthetic and dramatic senses to shape their conceptions ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... to his own passion. It then became known what manner of man this was who had grown up here in the companionship of forests, mountains, and wild animals; that these scenes had highly developed in him the love of beauty, the aesthetic sense, delicacy of appreciation, refinement of feeling; and that, in his solitary wanderings and musings, the primitive man, self-taught, had evolved for himself a philosophy and a system of things. And it was a sufficient system, so long as it was not disturbed by external skepticism. When the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... time, there came to me a lean, lithe stranger. I knew him for a poet by his unshorn locks and his luminous eyes, the pallor of his face and his exquisitely sensitive hands. As he looked about my eyrie with aesthetic glance, almost his first words were: "What a background for a novel!" He seemed to relish it all—the impending crag that might topple any day or hour; the modest side door that had become my front door because the rest of the building was gone; the ivy-roofed, geranium-walled conservatory wherein ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... 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 ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... largely with the 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 curves of ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... counted the great mills as we drove up Essex Street—having come over the bridge by the roaring dam that tamed the proud Merrimac to spinning cotton—Pacific, Atlantic, Washington, Pemberton; but this was an idle, aesthetic pleasure. We did not think about the mill-people; they seemed as far from us as the coal-miners of a vague West, or the down-gatherers on the crags of shores whose names we did not think it worth while to remember. One January evening, we were forced ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... age, its mere classification of brute force, with the bold recognition of human equality which ended in the socialism of Wyclif and the Lollards. Tintoret found himself facing a new caste-spirit in the Renascence, a classification of mankind founded on aesthetic refinement and intellectual power; and it is hard not to see in the greatest of his works a protest as energetic as theirs for the common rights of men. Into the grandeur of the Venice about him, her ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... between the modern and the classical aesthetic mind is the greater precision and definiteness of the latter. The modern genius is Gothic, and demands in art a certain vagueness and spirituality like that of music, refusing to be grasped and formulated. Hence for us (and this is undoubtedly an improvement) there must always be something about ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... did not touch Walter's aesthetic feelings. With him there were other considerations. Fancy was used to seeing everything nude—fathers, humanity—so there was ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... her—somewhere—generally, when there is nothing more exciting on hand, across the way to that bric-a-brac-shop of a house, where the tawdry elegant, always weary Mrs. Babbington Brooks holds forth in an ultra-aesthetic style peculiarly her own. There they spend the entire evening in what mamma softly calls "a sweet communion of congenial souls," which, being translated according to methods of the earth, earthy, means ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... variety on board may be, the traveller will probably find that four days on the Volga are quite enough for all practical and aesthetic purposes, and instead of going on to Astrakhan he will quit the steamer at Tsaritsin. Here he will find a railway of about fifty miles in length, connecting the Volga and the Don. I say advisedly a railway, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... that such costly and equivocal success as the British arms achieved over the Boers had nothing to do with Gorcum's feelings. The town's aesthetic ideals were honestly outraged, and it took the simplest means ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... 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 ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... twenty to wear parti-coloured ties and a squashy hat, to be late for dinner on account of the sunset, and to catch art from Burne-Jones to Praxiteles. At twenty-two he went to Italy with some cousins, and there he absorbed into one aesthetic whole olive-trees, blue sky, frescoes, country inns, saints, peasants, mosaics, statues, beggars. He came back with the air of a prophet who would either remodel Sawston or reject it. All the energies and enthusiasms of ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... which it has been sentenced for life, a pair of large, handsome moustaches will provide a proper entourage—a nest, so to speak, on which the nose rests contentedly, almost like a setting hen; if my nose retreats backward into my face, the aesthetic solution is obviously galways. A stout gentleman can do wonders with his appearance by adopting a pointed beard, and a suit of clothes, shirt, necktie, and stockings with pronounced vertical stripes. A thin one, on the other hand, becomes at once substantial in effect, ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... the Roman 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, if not in the person of his people, then in his own person, if not for the ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... found some warm friends, in whose houses he could come and go at pleasure. He enjoyed keenly the privilege of daily association with high-minded and refined women; their eager activity of intellect stimulated him, their exquisite ethereal grace and their delicately chiseled beauty satisfied his aesthetic cravings, and the responsive vivacity of their nature prepared him ever new surprises. He felt a strange fascination in the presence of these women, and the conviction grew upon him that their type of womanhood was superior to any he had ...
— A Good-For-Nothing - 1876 • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... stem, this orchid attracts us by its flaunted beauty and decorative form from tip to root, not less than the aesthetic little bees for which its adornment and mechanism are so marvellously adapted. Doubtless the heavy, oily odor is an additional ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... hand, all that goes with the aesthetic side of education, with imaginative literature and the cult of beauty. Here women are, or at least ought to be, the superiors of men. Women were in primitive times the first story-tellers. They are still so at the cradle side. The original college woman was the witch, with her incantations ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... a 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 war and the appearance of "The Georgians." It may be interesting to trace ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... person's occupation, I was surprised when Locus referred to him, familiarly, as "Flashy Joe," adding that he was widely known, if not respected, and that he would, probably, be entitled some day to have his portrait placed in a gallery of which he, Locus, knew, but into which my aesthetic researches have not ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... efficient table utensils repelled him. "They are so useful, so abominably enduring," he thought. The mahogany trimmings of doors and columns seemed to announce from every overpolished surface a pompous self-sufficiency. Each table proclaimed the aesthetic level of the second class through the lifeless leaves of a rubber plant and two imitation cut-glass dishes of tough fruit. The stewards, casually hovering, lacked the democracy which might have humanized ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... times; and Greek Art is the heirloom of the whole human race; and that work was to assert in drama, lyric, sculpture, music, gymnastic, the dignity of man—the dignity of man which they perceived for the most part with their intense aesthetic sense, through the beautiful in man. Man with them was divine, inasmuch as he could perceive beauty and be beautiful himself. Beauty might be physical, aesthetic, intellectual, moral. But in proportion as a thing was perfect it revealed its own perfection ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... that there was time to go and see Rubens's picture of——, at the church of——. This seemed to us a droll contrast to the cry at our stations, "Fifteen minutes for refreshments!" It offered such aesthetic refreshment in place of carnal oysters, that purely for the frolic we went to see. We were hurried across some sort of square into the church, saw the picture, admired it, came away, and forgot it,—clear and clean forgot it! My ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... develop the aesthetic feeling in themselves. They cannot go to sleep in their clothes, see cracks full of bugs on the walls, breathe bad air, walk on a floor that has been spat upon, cook their meals over an oil stove. They seek as far as possible to restrain and ennoble the sexual instinct.... ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... Even in an aesthetic point of view, however, the war has done a great deal of enduring mischief, by causing the devastation of great tracts of woodland scenery, in which this part of Virginia would appear to be very rich. Around all the encampments, and everywhere along the road, we saw the bare sites of what ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... decreed a bain for B., which bain meant immersion in a large tin tub partially filled with not quite luke-warm water. I, on the contrary, obtained a speck of zinc ointment on a minute piece of cotton, and considered myself peculiarly fortunate. Which details cannot possibly offend the reader's aesthetic sense to a greater degree than have already certain minutiae connected with the sanitary arrangements of The Directeur's little home for homeless boys and girls—therefore I will not trouble to beg the reader's pardon; but will proceed with ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... of her aesthetic studio Miss Sommerton made a heroic resolve to work hard. Her life was to be consecrated to art. She would win reluctant recognition from the masters. Under all this wave of heroic resolution was an under-current of determination to get even with the artist who ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... leaving something unsaid the beholder is given a chance to complete the idea and thus a great masterpiece irresistibly rivets your attention until you seem to become actually a part of it. A vacuum is there for you to enter and fill up the full measure of your aesthetic emotion. ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... 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
... pleased certain wise Old Gentlemen to take their sport simply, and to take pride in the simplicity. They considered the magnificence of modern camps and clubs vulgar, and as savoring somewhat of riches newly acquired; and they experienced an almost aesthetic satisfaction in the contrast between the rough cleanliness of certain little lodges along the Chesapeake and its tributary tide-water streams, and the elegance of the Charles Street mansions which they had, for ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... combinations with the driver sitting on the coffin. Disrespectful I think they are. I can't fancy how people can bring themselves to be buried in combinations." She flattened her voice in a manner she used to intimate aesthetic feeling. "I do like them glass hearses," she said. "So refined ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... above the stove-pipe hole supported two glass vases and a French clock under a glass bell; through the open door, across the oil-cloth of the hallway, she saw the white-painted pine balusters of the steep, cramped stairs. It was clear that neither Putney nor his wife had been touched by the aesthetic craze; the parlour was in the tastelessness of fifteen years before; but after the decoration of South Hatboro', she found a delicious repose in it. Her eyes dwelt with relief on the wall-paper of French grey, sprigged with small gilt flowers, and broken ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... 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 ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... one's aesthetic sense was the clerk himself. Squatting behind his wretched desk, Elias Droom peered across the litter of papers and books with snaky but polite eyes, almost as inviting as the spider who, with wily but insidious decorum, draws the guileless ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... the use of literary masterpieces for grammatical purposes should supplant or even interfere with their proper use and real value as works of art. It will, however, doubtless be found helpful to alternate the regular reading and aesthetic study of literature with a grammatical study, so that, while the mind is being enriched and the artistic sense quickened, there may also be the useful acquisition of arousing a keen observation of all grammatical forms and usages. Now and then it has been deemed best to omit explanations, and ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... these bread-and-butter calls. One afternoon in March, he went into the shop of a famous picture-dealer, to look over an exhibition then advertised, and had nearly finished his patient examination of each picture, which always involved quite as much mental gymnastics as aesthetic pleasure to Peter, when he heard ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... must look uncouth in such an Oriental setting; you feel you ought at least not to stand up in a place like that; I mean for aesthetic ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... constant study of our national literature. Byron was his chief master in those early poetic days. He never ceased to honour him as the one poet who combined a constructive imagination with the more technical qualities of his art; and the result of this period of aesthetic training was a volume of short poems produced, we are told, when he was only twelve, in which the Byronic influence ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... such shape and disposition as shall make them comfortable in it and let them hear well in it. If it be a public office, it should be so disposed as is most convenient for the clerks in their daily avocations; and so on; all this being utterly irrespective of external appearance or aesthetic considerations of any kind, and all being done solidly, securely, and at ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... horse-races. When he was in Germany, he went to concerts and to the opera. He belonged to a long list of sporting-clubs and hunting-clubs, and was a good boxer. He had so many natural interests that he had no affectations. At Harvard he kept away from the aesthetic circle that had already discovered Francis Thompson. He liked no poetry but German poetry. Physical energy was the thing he was full to the brim of, and music was one of its natural forms of expression. He had a healthy love of sport and art, of eating and drinking. When he was in Germany, ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... they must safeguard the future supply, if they would meet the requirements of a conservation which shall raise the standards of life and lower the cost of living. That is a conservation embracing both the aesthetic and the economic, the only kind worth while. It is a conservation wherein the arable areas and the so-called waste lands and waters have a very intimate interrelation of interests. And, I submit, Gentlemen, that the American people ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... for poetry at all. He has been called the poet's poet—a phrase honourable but a little misleading, inasmuch as it first suggests that he is not the poet of the great majority of readers who cannot pretend to be poets themselves, and secondly insinuates a kind of intellectual and aesthetic Pharisaism in those who do admire him, which may be justly resented by those who do not. Let us rather say that he is the poet of all others for those who seek in poetry only poetical qualities, and we shall say not only what is more than enough to establish ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... I saw the gleam of tears on her long lashes. My uncle had, then, meant something to her! No one, in speech or manner, could have suggested the adventuress less; Uncle Bash was a gentleman, a man of aesthetic tastes, and the girl was adorable. More remarkable things had happened in the history of love and marriage than that two such persons, meeting in a far corner of the world, would honestly care for each other. My respect for Uncle ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... 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
... a neat and aesthetic apartment in a fashionable apartment-house, and it might have been supposed that she was hardly prepared to set up an asylum for fugitive Kickapoos. But that intrepid woman never faltered. Her answer went whirling by wire before she had paused to think of the ways ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... 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 the ideas that the larger masses of men hold, and ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... man's account, and, as soon as he had gone, paraded at leisure, and con amore, and after the manner of an artist of aesthetic taste, before the mirror. Somehow he seemed to look better than ever in the suit, for his cheeks had now taken on a still more interesting air, and his chin an added seductiveness, while his white collar lent ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... 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
... cleared of vulgar noise, Is dedicate to calm aesthetic joys, That he is limply lolling Amidst the lilies that toil not nor spin, Given quite to dandy scorn, and dainty sin, And languor, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... 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 Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... they have been destined to play the part of mediator between different times and different peoples; and the East and the West, the past and the present, meet here and join hands. In such festivals as this, it is not a matter of gaining aesthetic victories; it is a matter of bringing together all that is great and noble and eternal in the art of different ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... is wanted here, not merely or chiefly for the metre, but for the balance, for the aesthetic logic. Perhaps "golden" was the word which would set off ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... man," he thought; "but when it is in a primitive state, one looks down upon and despises it, whether he is carried away with or withstands it. But when this same bestiality hides itself under a so-called aesthetic, poetic cover, and demands to be worshiped, then, deifying the beast, one gives himself up to it, without distinguishing between the good and the bad. Then it ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy |
