aesthetics quotes

Beauty without expression is boring.

It’s not a science when you are judging art, but we’d be remiss to say you can’t look at something and say, ‚This is more well done than that.‘

Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

The fact that the colors in the flower have evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; that means insects can see the colors. That adds a question: does this aesthetic sense we have also exist in lower forms of life?

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

I’m big on what’s in good taste.

There are definitely designers that I love, people I love to work with. And who they are as people matters. Are they good people? Do they treat their staff well? Do they treat my staff well? Are they young? Can I give them a boost? But when all of that is equal… is it cute?

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

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.

Frank Lloyd Wright… his things were beautiful but not very functional.

There is nothing that makes its way more directly into the soul than beauty.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

The good is the beautiful.

Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite.

That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

All art is quite useless.

To do a dull thing with style-now that’s what I call art.

The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.

Girls are soft and pretty.

We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.

Blushing is the color of virtue.