"Esthetics" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Intuition. Studies in psychology and aesthetics. Chap, iv, "Belief: Its Varieties ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... charmed circle of New Orleans society—that lively, sparkling epitome and relic of the old regime. He has good letters and a fair name, and mingles in the Mystick Krewe, that curious club, possible nowhere else, that has raised mummery into the sphere of aesthetics. Perhaps he has worn the gray, perhaps the blue. It is only in the very arcana of exclusive passion it makes much difference. But gray or blue, or North or South in birth, he is in every essential a Southerner, as many, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... we are undeniably indebted for the first philosophic appreciation of the poet,) being debarred by their alienage from the tempting parliament of verbal commentary and conflict, have made themselves such ample amends by expatiations in the unfenced field of aesthetics and of that constructive criticism which is too often confined to the architecture of Castles in Spain, that we feel as if Dogberry had charged us in relation to them with that hopelessly bewildering commission to "comprehend all vagrom men" which we have hitherto considered applicable ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... whose enthusiasm for the beauty in Nature finds outward expression to compare with that of the city-man who comes out for a Sunday in the country, but Thoreau is that rare country-man and Debussy the city-man with his weekend flights into country-aesthetics. We would be inclined to say that Thoreau leaned towards substance and ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... flood of light has been thrown on the dark and nebulous places of the instrumental classics by various distinguished and highly competent musicians. It is sincerely to be hoped, in the interests of this branch of the aesthetics of vocal art, that those competent to speak with authority will do so, in order that in this direction also "the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... art to an expression of, and an appeal to, individual temperaments; it is the assertion of the sovereignty of the aesthetic conscience on exactly the same grounds as sovereignty is claimed for the moral conscience. AEsthetics deals with the morality of appeals addressed to the senses. That is, it estimates the success of such appeals in regard to the promotion of fuller and ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... them; and his sensations have had time to ripen slowly toward the true moment of projection, without being shaken and hurried, or huddled one atop of the other. We doubt if the picturesque can be profitably done by the job, for in aesthetics the proverb that half a loaf is better than no bread does not hold. An Italian festa, we suspect, if you make it a matter of business, will turn its business-side to you, and you will go away without having been admitted to the delightful ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... amusing story hailing from Munich. During the past year the professor of Aesthetics in the University, whose lectures are proverbially wearisome, delivered his lectures (as usual) to a scanty audience. There were five students in all, who, week by week, melted and grew "beautifully less," until at last but one was left. This solitary individual, however, ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe
... and mind as we know them in life. When we read Coleridge, Schlegel, and Gervinus, or even the admirable essay of Charles Lamb, or the eloquent appreciations of Mr. Swinburne, or such eulogists as Hazlitt and Knight, we are in a world of abstract aesthetics or of abstract ethics; we are not within sight of the man Shakspere, who became an actor for a livelihood in an age when the best actors played in inn-yards for rude audiences, mostly illiterate and not a little brutal; then added to his craft of acting the craft ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things. But the healthier state of mind surely is to lay no tax on any really intelligent manifestation of ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... imperial coins, copied and recopied by successive generations until the original meaning had completely vanished, while the semblance remained in debased outline. Nothing can be more fatal than to make a canon of art, to render precise and exact the laws of aesthetics. Great men, it is true, made the attempt. Leonardo, for instance, gives the recipe for drawing anger and despair. His "Trattato della Pintura"[19] describes the gestures appropriate for an orator addressing a multitude, and he gives rules for making a tempest ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... better than one decked with flowers is due to the same cause that makes you—though you may be staunch Republicans—see more beauty in a queen than in her rivals, though at the bar of an impartial aesthetics the latter would be judged the more beautiful. A certain something, a peculiar witchery, surrounds her—the witchery (excuse the word) of servility; this it is, and not your aesthetic judgment, which cheats you into believing ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... the important question of the binding of books, I shall have nothing to say of the history of the art, and very little of its aesthetics. The plainest and most practical hints will be aimed at, and if my experience shall prove of value to any, I shall be well rewarded for giving it here. For other matters readers will naturally consult some of the numerous manuals of book-binding ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... sense in architectural design, are now everywhere apparent. The responsibilities of architects are greater than they have ever before been; the growing demand of the times calls for intelligent studies in all that relates to architecture, whether it be in the realm of aesthetics, in sciences that relate to construction, in the nature and properties of the materials used, in the atmosphere that surrounds us, or in the availability of the thousand-and-one useful and ingenious inventions that tend to promote the ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... upon me was the rate of his walking. Differences in politics, in ethics and even in aesthetics need not arouse angry antagonism. One's opinion may change; one's tastes may alter—in fact they do. One's very conception of virtue is at the mercy of some felicitous temptation which may be sprung on one any day. All these things are perpetually on the swing. But a temperamental ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... among unbridled emotions; art becomes impressionism. What it then produces may indeed be picturesque, melodramatic, sensual, but it will not be beautiful because there will be no imaginative wholeness in it. In other words, the artist who divorces aesthetics from ethics does gain creative license, but he gains it at the expense of a balanced and harmonious expression. If you do not believe it, compare the Venus de Milo with the Venus de Medici or a Rubens fleshy, spilling-out-of-her-clothes Magdalen with ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... the professor that these are sequences of sounds, and nothing more.' Then she sighed. In the pause which followed, her husband, the famous critic, filled his glass, stretched his legs out, and began: 'You have embarked, I see, upon the ocean of aesthetics. For my part, to-night I was thinking how much better fitted for the stage Beaumarchais' play was than this musical mongrel—this operatic adaptation. The wit, observe, is lost. And Cherubino—that sparkling little enfant terrible—becomes a sentimental fellow—a ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... small group of early eighteenth-century critics who tended to reject the aesthetics based upon authority and pre-established definitions of the genres, and to evolve one logically from the nature of the human mind and the sources of its enjoyment; in other words, who turned attention from the objective work of art to the subjective response. These men, such as Dennis ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... as far as the prevailing taste has put these models before him, he is neither to take much blame to himself, nor to be in anywise disheartened for the future. That in as far as he shall utterly reverse his whole poetic method, whether in morals or in aesthetics, leave undone all that he has done, and do all that he has not done, he will become, what he evidently, by grace of God, can become if he will, namely, a lasting and ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... which Diderot wrote in 1751, his Letter on the Deaf and Dumb for the Use of those who Hear and Talk. This is not, like the Letter on the Blind, the examination of a case of the Intellect deprived of one or more of the senses. It is substantially a fragment, and a very important fragment, on AEsthetics, and as such there will be something to say about it in another chapter. But there are, perhaps, one or two points at which the Letter on the Deaf and Dumb touches the line of thought of the Letter ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... after his return—Hazlehurst gave himself very much to the study of aesthetics. The beautiful, the harmonious, alone attracted him; he could not endure anything approaching to coarseness. He wandered up and down the galleries of the Louvre, delighting more in the beautiful faces of the Italian masters, in the Nymphs and Muses of the old Greeks, than ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... teacher of the students of the Royal Academy, having been preceded by a clever, talkative, scientific expounder of aesthetics, who delighted to tell the young men how everything was done, how to copy this, and how to express that. A student came up to the new master, "How should I do this, sir?" "Suppose you try." Another, "What does this mean, Mr. Etty?" "Suppose you look." "But I ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... dress merely for themselves; they like to be admired, and they appreciate the value of dress from a flirtation point of view. Their taste is rather the outcome of a desire to please others than of a sense of aesthetics. It is relative, and not absolute. When once the finery has served its purpose, they are ready to renounce all the pomps and vanities of this wicked world. And if the moralist says that this argues some laxness of ideas before marriage, let him remember that it is equally ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... and spent a moment analyzing the aesthetics of the layout. It had a certain pleasing severity, the unconscious balance of complete functionalism. Soon Dalgetty went ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... went in for top-boots splendidly belegged and coquettishly beautified with what, had he been a lady, he might have described as an insertion of lace. At last came the boot-blacking parlor, late nineteenth century, commercial, practical, convenient, and an important factor in civic aesthetics. Not that the parlor is beautiful in itself. It is a cave without architectural pretensions, but it accomplishes unwittingly an important mission: it removes from public view the man who is ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... me! And those bisque figures that you get with every pound of tea you buy; and this, this, THIS," he whimpered, waving his hands at the decorated sewer-pipe with its gilded cat-tails. "Oh, speak to me of this; speak to me of art; speak to me of aesthetics. Cat-tails, GILDED. Of course, why not GILDED!" He wrung his hands. "'Somewhere people are happy. Somewhere little ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... the spread of the fine arts. Its sons have excelled in the solider graces, in the throw of the lariat, the manipulation of the esteemed .45, the intrepidity of the one-card draw, and the nocturnal stimulation of towns from undue lethargy; but, hitherto, it had not been famed as a stronghold of aesthetics. Lonny Briscoe's brush had removed that disability. Here, among the limestone rocks, the succulent cactus, and the drought-parched grass of that arid valley, had been born the Boy Artist. Why he came to woo art is beyond postulation. Beyond doubt, some ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... for the Remarks is both intrinsically and historically an important piece of criticism. It is still worth reading for more than one passage of discerning analysis and apt comment on scene, speech, or character, and for certain not unfruitful excursions into the field of general aesthetics; while historically it is a sort of landmark in Shakespearian literature. Standing chronologically almost midway between Dryden and Johnson, Kames, and Richardson, the Remarks shows decisively the direction in which criticism, under the steadily ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... the London policeman is not, as every one knows, founded on the principles of aesthetics. Neither has it been devised on utilitarian principles. Indeed we doubt whether the originator of it, (and we are happy to profess ignorance of his name), proceeded on any principle whatever, except the gratification of a wild and degraded ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... "Not so bad, what?" The usual conversation at his stepmother's table was, as he would have said, so pestilentially high-brow that he seldom troubled himself to follow it enough to join in. Arnold was in the habit of dubbing "high-brow" anything bearing on aesthetics; and Mrs. Marshall-Smith's conversational range hardly extending at all outside of aesthetics of one kind or another, communication between these two house-mates of years' standing was for the most part reduced ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... for the study of aesthetics or art criticism, fifty years ago, were to be found in German universities. Kugler's handbook of painting was the chief authority in use, rather academic, but correct enough in a general way. Ruskin, a more eloquent and discriminating ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... instruction, and all its departments of culture, women should be admitted on an equality with men, as to opportunities, positions and salaries. Miss Willard was then chosen dean of the Woman's College, and professor of aesthetics in the University. Mrs. Emily Huntington Miller was placed on the executive committee of the board, and Mrs. R. F. Queal, Mrs. Jennie Fowler Willing, Mrs. Mary Bannister Willard, and Mrs. L. L. Greenleaf were elected trustees. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... (of the sublime, the comic, the tragic, the humorous, etc.), or of the exposition of the supposed Zoology, Botany, and Mineralogy of Aesthetic, and of universal history judged from the aesthetic standpoint. The whole history of concrete art and literature has also been dragged into those Aesthetics and generally mangled; they contain judgments upon Homer and Dante, upon Ariosto and Shakespeare, upon Beethoven and Rossini, Michelangelo and Raphael. When all this has been deducted from them, our treatise will no longer be held to be too meagre, but, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... being so much sunk beneath the zones of sympathy that pity might seem harmless. And the judge had pursued him with a monstrous, relishing gaiety, horrible to be conceived, a trait for nightmares. It is one thing to spear a tiger, another to crush a toad; there are aesthetics even of the slaughter- house; and the loathsomeness of Duncan Jopp enveloped and infected the ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... poets, and their ideals. We shall perceive the difference between these two hemispheres of the Beautiful better if we think of Homer's "Helena" and Dante's "Beatrice," if we look at the "Venus of Milo" and a "Madonna" of Francia, than in reading the profoundest systems of aesthetics. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... mind, are still kept, by their aversion to crude technique and barbarism, closer to truth's natural probabilities. Their literatures show fewer obvious falsities and monstrosities than that of Germany. Think of the german literature of aesthetics, with the preposterousness of such an unaesthetic personage as Immanuel Kant enthroned in its centre! Think of german books on religions-philosophie, with the heart's battles translated into conceptual jargon and made dialectic. The most persistent setter ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... specially adapted to the conditions of a community like ours. Its title might have been "Rural AEsthetics for Men of Limited Means, or the Laws of Beauty considered in their Application to Small Estates." It is a volume happily conceived and happily executed, and meets a palpable and increasing want of our civilization. Whatever adds grace to the daily lives of a people, and awakens in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... tone of the society around him, was making a bold stroke—had persuaded his kind-hearted, simple friend to believe him a sincere penitent, and to introduce him as such to the ladies at Gothlands, from whom he caught the talk most pleasing to them. At present it was all ecclesiastical aesthetics, and discontent with the existing system, especially as regarded penitence; by and by, when his hold should be secure, he would persuade the heiress that she had been the prime instrument in his conversion, and that she had ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... specific knowledge or aptitude to the new field for investigation, he should be made aware of some of the wider questions which the study of poetry involves. The first of these questions has to do with the relations of the study of poetry to the general field of Aesthetics. ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... simpler than the composition of the pure spire. The aesthetics of its development and growth are characteristically natural and apparent. They are like the history of a flower from bud to bloom under a warm sun. Let us become botanists of Art for a while, and analyze those flowers of worship, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... gives his work an elegant shape; he decorates it with rosettes, with twists, with scrolls. Phanaeus Milon is no stranger to these culinary aesthetics. She turns the crust of her meat-pie into a splendid gourd, with ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... world. It happens to be a very good tune, from the musician's point of view, a tune that Handel would not have been ashamed to write, but that is not the point. Its emotional qualities are due to its associations. Perhaps that is how it has always been, with ballads. From the standard of pure aesthetics, one ought not to consider "associations" in judging a poem or a tune, but with a song like "Tipperary" you would be an inhuman prig if you didn't. We all have our "associations" with this particular tune. For me, ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... in all Mr. Reade writes, that in his failure he does not fall flat upon the compassion of his reader, as Mr. Dickens does with his "Golden Dustman." But it is a failure, nevertheless; and it must become a serious question in aesthetics how far the spellbound reader may be tortured with an interest which the power awakening it is not adequate to gratify. Is it generous, is it just in a novelist, to lift us up to a pitch of tragic frenzy, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... spiritual troubles. And after all, even in England, even in Germany and Russia, there are more adults than adolescents. As for the artist, he is preoccupied with problems that are so utterly unlike those of the ordinary adult man—problems of pure aesthetics which don't so much as present themselves to people like myself—that a description of his mental processes is as boring to the ordinary reader as a piece of pure mathematics. A serious book about artists regarded as ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... Alumni Oxonienses, Oscar Wilde described himself on leaving Oxford as a "Professor of AEsthetics, and a Critic of Art"—an announcement to me at once infinitely ludicrous and pathetic. "Ludicrous" because it betrays such complete ignorance of life all given over to men industrious with muck-rakes: "Gadarene swine," as Carlyle ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... end. I had long felt a deep desire to visit Munich, to study art, and to investigate fundamentally the wonderful and mysterious science of AEsthetics, of which I had heard so much. So I packed up and paid my bills, and passing through one town where there was in the hotel where I stopped, the last wolf ever killed in Germany, and freshly killed (I believe he has been slain two or three times since), and at another where ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... word Pram[a]n[a]ni, which in a book of aesthetics means proportions, in a book of logic means the proofs by which the truth of a proposition is ascertained. All proofs of truth are credentials of relationship. Individual facts have to produce such passports to show that they are not ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... body of articles on literature was contributed to the Encyclopedie by JEAN-FRANCOIS MARMONTEL. As early as 1719 a remarkable study in aesthetics had appeared—the Reflexions Critiques sur la Poesie et la Peinture, by the Abbe Dubos. Art is conceived as a satisfaction of the craving for vivid sensations and emotions apart from the painful consequences which commonly attend ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... the one philosophy of manhood in whose harness are no vulnerable parts. "The Palace of Art" presents the poet's perception of the failure of culture. Ethics, not aesthetics, compel manhood; and behind ethics, theology. God must live in life, if life shall put on goodness as ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... new clothes, lounge in stage attitudes on the one side, and an equal number of equally beautiful young butlers, coachmen, grooms and pages, in equally perfect liveries, appear to be discussing the aesthetics of an ideal and highly salaried service, at the other end of the same room. In the comparison there is all the brutal profanity of truth that shocks the reverence of romance; but in the respective relations of the great artist's ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... once. After his return to Macchia followed some years of apparent sterility, but later on, and especially during the last twenty years of his life, his literary activity became prodigious. Journalism, folklore, poetry, history, grammar, philology, ethnology, aesthetics, politics, morals—nothing came amiss to his gifted pen, and he was fruitful, say his admirers, even in his errors, Like other men inflamed with one single idea, he boldly ventured into domains of thought where specialists fear to tread. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... editor of the Morning Star, taunts me, as its promulgator, with living out of the world and knowing nothing of life and men. That great austere toiler, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, upbraids me,—but kindly, and more in sorrow than in anger,—for trifling with aesthetics and poetical fancies, while he himself, in that arsenal of his in Fleet Street, is bearing the burden and heat of the day. An intelligent American newspaper, the Nation, says that it is very easy to sit in one's study and find fault with ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... it is a brave one. It does not fall back on weak substitutes for reality; it does not throw the glamor of history and the aesthetics of industry around trades with the poor hope that they make up for the content which is not there; it does not foster the assumption that training in technique of industry or physical science can ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... love the artists, in every kind; even these, whose merits we are not quite able to appreciate. Sculptors, painters, crayon sketchers, or whatever branch of aesthetics they adopted, were certainly pleasanter people, as we saw them that evening, than the average whom we meet in ordinary society. They were not wholly confined within the sordid compass of practical life; they had a pursuit which, if followed ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... its buildings, has its own architectural rules, rules as unchangeable as anatomical peculiarities. Each group builds according to the same set of principles, conforming to the laws of a very elementary system of aesthetics; but often circumstances beyond the architect's control—the space at her disposal, the unevenness of the site, the nature of the material and other accidental causes—interfere with the worker's plans and disturb the structure. Then virtual regularity is translated into actual chaos; ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... nearly positive we mean the more nearly Organized. Everything merges away into everything else, but proportionately to its complexity, if unified, a thing seems strong, real, and distinct: so, in aesthetics, it is recognized that diversity in unity is higher beauty, or approximation to Beauty, than is simpler unity; so the logicians feel that agreement of diverse data constitute greater convincingness, or strength, than that of mere parallel ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... beauty to freedom. I hope that I shall succeed in convincing you that this matter of art is less foreign to the needs than to the tastes of our age; nay, that, to arrive at a solution even in the political problem, the road of aesthetics must be pursued, because it is through beauty that we arrive at freedom. But I cannot carry out this proof without my bringing to your remembrance the principles by which the reason ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... of its unexpected contacts, of the choice and rare personalities that drift on it as if on the sea; of the distinction that letters and art gave to it, the nobility and consolations there are in aesthetics, of the privileges they confer on individuals and (this was the first connected statement I caught) that Mills agreed with her in the general point of view as to the inner worth of individualities and in the particular ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... ago, had been surrounded with art-tinted hangings and photographs from Rossetti, and the austerity of her eighteenth-century reaction was now almost defiant. Her drawing-room, in its arid chastity, challenged you, as it were, to dare remember the aesthetics of South Kensington. ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... reaction could not forgive his political antecedents; and in 1873, on the fall of Thiers, he was removed before he could complete his plan for establishing a museum of copies to reproduce the masterpieces of painting. One well-deserved satisfaction was granted him in 1878 by the creation of a chair of AEsthetics and Art History in the College of France, which he was called by special decree to fill; and there he taught ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... all enlightened lawgivers; and the prosperity of nations is built upon it, for it is righteousness which exalteth them. Culture is desirable; but the welfare of nations is based on morals rather than on aesthetics. On this point Moses, or even Epictetus, is a greater authority than Goethe. All the ordinances of Moses tend to this end. They are the publication of natural religion,—that God is a rewarder of virtuous actions, and punishes ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... and has not now, any serious rival. In the profounder historic criticism, Germany exhibits her one great, peculiar, and original gift. In the criticism of art Germany has at least three memorable names; but save where history is concerned most modern German aesthetics are so clouded with metaphysical speculation as to leave the obscurity of a very difficult subject as thick as it was before. In France the beginnings of art-criticism were literary rather than philosophic, and with the exception of Cousin's worthless ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... west to Colorado, and into New Mexico. He was much more experienced in the road. He carried "Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread", "The Village Improvement Parade", etc. As is indicated in the title, he wrestled with a theory of American aesthetics. "Christmas, 1915", the third book in the series, appeared, applying the "Gospel of Beauty to the Photoplay". The ideas of Art and Democracy that develop in the first two books are used as the basic principles in "The Art of the Moving ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... obvious reasons for this. The analysis of language is the analysis of thought. Resolving complex forms of speech into simple ones, and again combining simple expressions into those which are complex, and investigating, alternately by logic and aesthetics, the varying properties of words and phrases, are operations which come nearer, perhaps, than any other in which we are engaged, towards subjecting spirit itself to the crucible of experiment. The study of grammar, the comparison of languages, the translation of thought from one language ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... all its difficult forms to awaken and enchain the interest, and to inspire the love of the man of genius or the ambitious student of aesthetics, has also those more simple ones for the delight of the humbler mind. Even the babe that lies in its mother's arms has within the yet narrow confines of its new-born soul the germ of musical sympathy. ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... our weak force still more available, we barricaded the approaches to the chief streets by constructing barriers or felling trees. It went to my heart to sacrifice, for this purpose, several of my beautiful lindens; but it was no time for aesthetics. As the giants lay on the ground, still scenting the air with their abundant bloom, I used to rein up my horse and watch the children playing hide-and-seek amongst their branches, or some quiet cow grazing ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... has been made the Sphinx of this particular occasion. Every one has determined to put you off the scent. The word, among other acceptations, has that of mal [evil], a substantive that signifies, in aesthetics, the opposite of good; of mal [pain, disease, complaint], a substantive that enters into a thousand pathological expressions; then malle [a mail-bag], and finally malle [a trunk], that box of various forms, covered with all kinds of skin, made of every sort of leather, ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... themselves either to generalities or to details, but Spencer addressed himself to everything. He dealt in logical, metaphysical, and ethical first principles, in cosmogony and geology, in physics, and chemistry after a fashion, in biology, psychology, sociology, politics, and aesthetics. Hardly any subject can be named which has not at least been touched on in some one of his many volumes. His erudition was prodigious. His civic conscience and his social courage both were admirable. His life was pure. He was devoted to truth ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... on this theme, fell into a reverie over Rembrandt's strange conception of Christian aesthetics. It is evident that in his mode of depicting Gospel scenes this painter still exhales a breath of the Old Testament; his church, even if he had meant to paint it as it was in his day, would still be a synagogue, so strong is ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... adds: "This term (i.e. poetic idea) belongs to Beethoven's epoch, and was used by him as frequently as was, for example, the expression 'poetic contents' by others—in opposition to works which only offer an harmonic and rhythmic play of tones. Writers on aesthetics of our day declaim against the latter term; with good reason, if it refer to programme-music; without reason, if they extend their negation to all Beethoven's music, and deny its poetic contents. Whence that tendency, which so frequently manifests ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... and old china, a "school" or "movement." It was aesthetic, and an early purchaser of Mr. William Morris's wall papers. It existed ten or twelve years before the public "caught on," as they say, to these delights. But, except one or two of the masters, the school were only playing at aesthetics, and laughing at their own performances. There was more fun than fashion in the cult, which was later revived, developed, and gossiped ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... since the earliest days. Emerson himself, though a man of unusual discernment and a diligent drinker from German spigots, nevertheless remained a dilettante in both aesthetics and metaphysics to the end of his days, and the incompleteness of his equipment never showed more plainly than in his criticism of books. Lowell, if anything, was even worse; his aesthetic theory, first and last, was nebulous and superficial, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... dispenses with all process and gains its end by a flash. A higher stage is known as vision; the highest is known as ecstasy. Intuition has its own place in general psychology, and has acquired peculiar significance in the domains of aesthetics, ethics, and theology; and the same root idea is preserved throughout—that of immediacy of insight. The characteristic of passivity on which certain mystics would insist is subsidiary—even if it is to be allowed at all. Its claims ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... writers, Aristotle and the late Greek, Longinus will take—a single hexameter to illustrate a minute trick of style or turn of phrase, as equally he will choose a long passage or the whole "Iliad," the whole "Odyssey," to illustrate a grand rule of poetic construction, a first principle of aesthetics. For an example—'Herein,' says Aristotle, starting to show that an Epic poem must have Unity of Subject—'Herein, to repeat what we have said before, we have a further proof of Homer's superiority to the rest. He did ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... little better than magnified busy bees, or gigantic ants, or overgrown social caterpillars. And although I say it myself, I have quite a reputation among our fellows, that I have earned by the confident way in which I lay down a great principle of science, aesthetics, or morals. I confess that I am perhaps a little given to generalize from a single fact; but my manner is imposing to the weaker brethren, and my credit for great wisdom is well established ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... sayings and doings of his second son, which had been the more disconcerting because they flowed from the young reactionary in such a gay flood of high spirits. Harry had no more shared the reverent attitude of his family toward household aesthetics than toward social values. A house was a place to keep the weather from you, he had said laughingly. If you could have it pretty and well-ordered without too much bother, well and good; but might the Lord protect him from everlastingly ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... on this path by establishing his beautiful theories on the analysis of the solar spectrum. M. Charles Henry, an original and remarkable spirit, occupied himself in his turn with these delicate problems by applying them directly to aesthetics, which Helmholtz and Chevreul had not thought of doing. M. Charles Henry had the idea of creating relations between this branch of science and the laws of painting. As a friend of several young painters he had a real influence over them, showing them that the new vision ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... in the Medical School of Paris, delivered a discursive lecture not long ago, in which he soared from the region of drugs, his well-known special province, into the thin atmosphere of aesthetics. It is the influence that surrounds his fortunate fellow-citizens, he declares, which alone preserves their intellectual supremacy. If a Parisian milliner, he says, remove to New York, she will so degenerate in the course of a couple of years that the squaw of a Choctaw chief would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... co-operative housing of New York is making a like history. It is true that the Philistines do not come in and dispossess the autochthonic groups; these will not sell to them; but they have imagined doing on a sophisticated and expensive scale what the aesthetics have done simply and cheaply. They are buying the pleasanter sites, and are building co-operatively; though they have already eliminated the studio and the central principle, and they build for the sole occupancy ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... of bordering, or page-edge, effects. Books and bound volumes that are placed on a photocopy machine or a scanner produce page-edge effects that are undesirable for two reasons: 1) the aesthetics of the image; after all, if the image is to be preserved, one does not necessarily want to keep all of its deficiencies; 2) compression (with the bordering problem THOMA illustrated, the compression ratio deteriorated tremendously). ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... the steward and chaplain with a boat load of "marketing" was a welcome surprise. The parson, whose unquestionable taste in the aesthetics of eating had been wisely secured by the steward, dilated with great gusto upon the juicy beefsteaks, the freshness of the fish, and the richness of the fruit. When, at breakfast, we enjoyed as salt-sea voyagers only could, the stores of fresh meat, fresh eggs, fresh butter, fresh ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... laboured at preparing it, collecting notes, seeking corroborative evidence. His Alpine climbing had taught him the elusiveness of isolated peaks of knowledge. He saw that rhetoric is dependent on aesthetics and aesthetics on psychology and sociology and philosophy, and all on anthropology; that there are no frontiers and no finality and no knowledge which is not relative and imperfect. It was all a question of different tops and points of view, and so the book was not finished when he died, ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... of seeming to wander off into the boundless domain of aesthetics, we must stop at this point for a moment to make sure that we are of one mind regarding the meaning of the phrase "artistic pleasure," in so far at least as it is ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... boy, listening to the same old stories night after night,—the same old stories! Something homely and warm and true was waking in him to-night that had been dead for years and years; this was no matter of aesthetics or taste, it was real, real. He wondered if people felt in this way who had homes, or those simple folk who ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... necessary in the natural sciences and also in aesthetics, because in both of these departments the sensuous is an essential element of the matter dealt with. In this respect we have made great progress in charts and maps. Sydow's hand and wall maps and Berghaus's physical atlas are most excellent means of ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... Texas legislature, composed chiefly of illiterate jabber- whacks who string out the sessions interminably for the sake of the $2 a day—imagine these fellows, each with a large pendulous ear to the earth, listening for the approach of some Pegasus to carry him to Congress—teaching the aesthetics of civilization to the divine philosophers of Greece and the god-like senators of Rome! Think of Perry J. Lewis pulling the Conscript Fathers over the coals—of Senator Bowser pointing out civic duties to Socrates; of Attorney-General Crane giving Julius Caesar a piece of his mind; of Charley Culberson ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... among old libraries in their boyhood are the most likely to cultivate pets of this kind. There is a rich variety of choice in the luxuriantly floral Gothic, the cold serene classic, and that prolific style combining both, which a popular writer on the AEsthetics of Art has stigmatised by the term "sensual," ordering all his votaries to abjure it accordingly. To intellects not far enough advanced to acknowledge the influence of such terms, or to comprehend ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... Times that the violation of the Adelphi was a thing to be prevented at all costs. Soberness of statement, a simple, direct, civic style, with only an underthrob of personal emotion, were what I must at all costs achieve. Not too much of mere aesthetics, either, nor of mere sentiment for the past. No more than a brief eulogy of 'those admirably proportioned streets so familiar to all students of eighteenth century architecture,' and perhaps a passing reference to 'the shades of Dr. Johnson, Garrick, Hannah More, Sir Joshua ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... not recover from the shock he gave me till the evening, when I saw the professor of philosophy and aesthetics. ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... precise accord with his own taste and fancy. All was on the basis of personal preference. His chiefs learned early that so rare an organism was best left alone to function in harmony with its own nature. The Column had not only its own philosophy and its own aesthetics, but its own politics: if it seemed to contravene other and more representative departments of the paper, never mind. Its conductor had such confidence in the validity of his personal predilections and in their identity with those ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... pretty cows look in a landscape," I said; for you know, even if you must come down, it is better to roll down an inclined plane than to drop over a precipice; and I thought, since I saw that descent was inevitable, I would at least engineer the party gently through aesthetics to puns. So I said, "How pretty cows look in a landscape, so calm and reflective, and sheep harmoniously happy in ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... probability which may belong to this theory, seems to us to be very loose scientifically, and philosophically most misleading."—"Pall Mall Gazette.") This is not at all improbable, as it is almost a lifetime since I attended to the philosophy of aesthetics, and did not then think that I should ever make use of my conclusions. Can you refer me to any one or two books (for my power of reading is not great) which would illumine me? or can you explain in one or two sentences how I err? Perhaps it would be best for me to explain what I mean by the sense ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... in one of his chapters, gives an account of his passage through what he is pleased to call neology and rationalism. He represents himself as having sounded the depths of German metaphysics, criticism, and aesthetics. But a man who is able to write a sentence in which Lessing's Works are spoken of as if the reading of them tended to make men "transcendentalists of the supra-nebulous order" no more deserves a scourging by angels for his devotion to German literature than Saint Jerome did for being a Ciceronian. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... order, refinement, and simplicity, he jumped to the conclusion that these were the characteristics of Nature herself, and that without them no beauty could exist. He was wrong. Nature is too large a thing to fit into a system of aesthetics; and beauty is often—perhaps more often than not—complex, obscure, fantastic, and strange. At the bottom of all Boileau's theories lay a hearty love of sound common sense. It was not, as has sometimes been asserted, imagination that he disliked, but singularity. He could write, for instance, ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... well, but it seems to the present writer that the moral density shown by some of these birthright Quakers, upon matters outside of their wonted and trodden ethical territories, is due to their long refusal to recognize aesthetic values, and to see discriminations in the field in which ethics and aesthetics are interwoven. ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... lay their own plots, and when all has been thus prepared, the right word is born in the purple, an inheritor of great opportunities, all its virtues magnified by the glamour of its high estate. Writers on philosophy, morals, or aesthetics, critics, essayists, and dealers in soliloquy generally, cannot hope, with their slighter means, to attain to comparable effects. They work at two removes from life; the terms that they handle are surrounded by the vapours of discussion, and are rewarded by no instinctive ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... at the conclusion of the 'historical' part of his Farbenlehre,4 he was drawn to study colour by his wish to gain some knowledge of the objective laws of aesthetics. He felt too close to poetry to be able to study it with sufficient detachment, so he turned to painting - an art with which he felt sufficiently familiar without being connected with it creatively ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... law—that which regulates the constitution of man,—Delsarte applies it to aesthetics; he designates man as "the object of art," and groups in series the organic agents that co-operate in the manifestation of human thought, sentiment and passion; declaring the purpose of these manifestations, ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... been mentioned that romanticism was not purely a matter of aesthetics, without relation to the movement of religious and political thought.[1] But it has also been pointed out that, as compared with what happened in Germany, English romanticism was almost entirely a literary or artistic, and hardly at all a practical force, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... and not at all Biblical. Shelley's feelings for the spirit of Beauty are exquisitely fine, but under the light of the Bible they are seen to be only latently religious. A more penetrating-vision will see in the Ideal Beauty a Moral Form, and then aesthetics will translate itself into ethics. The unmoral sentiment of a Shelley for Beauty may issue in another generation in the immoral sentiment of a Swinburne. Even thus the vision of the Aphrodite sank into the dream of a Venus. An Oscar Wilde's maunderings ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton |
