I have this feeling that you might be one artsy, ethereal soul if you've landed on this page. Perhaps romantic as well. Or, I might be wrong. Let me know. However, it's definitely not in everyone's interest to search for aesthetic quotes or simply beautiful quotes as one's preferred leisure activity. Let's be honest. The majority perhaps doesn't even understand the concept of aesthetics. Though I must admit, it's a rather tricky concept to grasp. It's philosophy, after all.
When one thing about something is aesthetic, the mind instantly goes to something beautiful and of one's taste. One might think that an Instagram feed can be aesthetic. Or the sunset, a Victorian-style cafe, a candle, an art piece, or Halloween decor. But it's not only an appreciation of the visual appeal. The term is also used in other fields, such as literature, gastronomy, and music. Ultimately, it can refer to anything that can arouse our greatest admiration.
The internet is full of inspiring quotations about beauty, deep aesthetic quotes, or short aesthetic quotes, whichever you prefer and feel that day. And all of these aesthetic quotes can allusively point to one important message: beauty is very much an individual thing. For many, beauty intervenes with the feelings it evokes and the emotions it provokes.
Numerous inspiring, positive aesthetic quotes are written, some perhaps voiced, about art, nature, music, objects, people, spirituality, and life itself. Below, we've gathered a lengthy list of beautiful quotes for you that we hope will provide you with the inspiration you were looking for. And hopefully, match your aesthetics! Also, what is your favorite aesthetic quote? Let us know!
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“Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.” ― Sophia Loren
“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.” ― Alfred North Whitehead
“A taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.” ― Theodor W. Adorno
“What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.” ― Susan Sontag
“Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of ‘character.’” ― Susan Sontag
“Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
“I became an artist because I wanted to be an active participant in the conversation about art.” ― Kamand Kojouri
“We are living in a moment where we have broken the equilibrium of the planet. We are not paying attention to our intuitive side. We only pay attention to our reason. We have become an urban animal.” ― Sebastião Salgado
“Your skin has a memory. In ten, twenty, thirty years from now, your skin will show the results of how it was treated today. So treat it kindly and with respect.” ― Jana Elston
“Beauty exists merely in the mind which contemplates things; and each mind perceives a different beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others.” ― David Hume
"Learn to enjoy every minute of your life. Be happy now. Don’t wait for something outside of yourself to make you happy in the future. Think how really precious is the time you have to spend, whether it’s at work or with your family. Every minute should be enjoyed and savored." – Earl Nightigale
“Nothing's perfect, the world's not perfect. But it's there for us, trying the best it can; that's what makes it so damn beautiful.” ― Hiromu Arakawa
“In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.” ― Baruch de Spinoza
“Aesthetics have substantial political consequences. How one views oneself as beautiful or not beautiful or desirable or not desirable has deep consequences in terms of one’s feelings of self-worth and one’s capacity to be a political agent.” ― Cornel West
“Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.” ― Roger Scruton
“In the life of the individual, an aesthetic sensibility is both more authentic and more commendable than a political or religious one.” ― Tom Robbins
“I think that's what art is: art is communication made in the hope that interesting miscommunications will arise.” ― Misha Glouberman
“Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.” ― Theodor W. Adorno
“The aesthetic can have its revenge upon ideology by revealing a power to complicate that is also a power to undermine.” ― Murray Krieger
“Around the world, men and women who are blessed with beauty are like tower clocks: though they are few, they hardly escape people’s notice.” ― Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu
“Had you asked me then, I would have told you it was aesthetic, that I wished to understand death in stages. That the death of an animal yielded such pleasure and experience to me that I had only begun to understand it, and wished to save the experience of human death for my mature understanding. But it was moral. Because all aesthetic decisions are moral, really.” ― Anne Rice
“The beauty of the subject often deceives us into thinking that someone is a great photographer.” ― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“Autumn is a poem - while you fall for everything, you remember that there is something worth dying for.” ― Laura Chouette
“But neither art nor aesthetics is alone in being doomed to this melancholy destiny of living not beyond their means, but beyond their ends.” ― Jean Baudrillard
“Aesthetic detachment will not stop the suffering of desire nor will the agonies of the boudoir cure the desire of suffering.” ― David Hosford
“The machine aesthetic bought something familiar to modern experience, but remote from architecture, to bear on modern architecture.” ― Robin Evans
“The philosophical attitudes of awe and wonder of the Ancient Greeks and the Enlightenment Philosophy of Kant have been inverted into the "modern" moods of terror and boredom.” ― Michael R.D. James
“If I was asked to get rid of the Zen aesthetic and just keep one quality necessary to create art, I would say it’s trust. When you learn to trust yourself implicitly, you no longer need to prove something through your art. You simply allow it to come out, to be as it is. This is when creating art becomes effortless. It happens just as you grow your hair. It grows.” ― John Daido Loori
“The aesthetics aren’t merely a side note, they’re as important as anything else.” ― Sylvain Neuvel
“Refinement creates beauty everywhere: it is the grossness of the spectator that discovers nothing but grossness in the object.” ― William Hazlitt
“The starry sky began to shine, when assigned night spread with its ‘moon lamp’ for all of the wistful thoughts, lay below the tormented Earth’s nocturnal light and those splendid visions caught my pounding spirits.” ― Nithin Purple
“The historical division between the beautiful and the sublime indicates that an aesthetic experience is not necessarily linked to beauty, but can also be induced by the unpleasant, unbalanced, distorted, or even hideous.” ― Kristine H. Harper
“In the psychology of aesthetics, there is a name for the moment between the anxiety of confronting something new and the satisfying click of understanding it. It is called an ’aesthetic aha.” ― Derek Thompson
“Aesthetic sense is the twin of one's instinct for self-preservation and is more reliable than ethics.” ― Joseph Brodsky
“It’s better to have a hunger and appreciation for beauty than to be merely beautiful. In the end, life is richer that way. She may learn that.” ― Susan Vreeland
“Writing is a series of verbal suggestions designed to provoke a psychological reaction and an aesthetic experience.” ― Stewart Stafford
“The philosophical study of beauty, art, and the splendor of nature nurtures a person’s fertile mind by exposing a person to the puzzling world of the beautiful, elegant, ugly, and grotesque. Human beings ability to experience sublime pleasure emanates from a variety of sensory experiences and a person’s ability to make discriminatory observations and judgment in taste and sentiment.” ― Kilroy J. Oldster
“According to this view, all that matters to art appreciation is beauty of form. The logical extreme of aestheticism turns out to be homicidal art.” ― John McAteer
“When you watch Olympic athletes in competition, does your self-esteem plummet? Of course not. On the contrary, you feel wonder and admiration; you're inspired that such exceptional individuals exist. So why can't we feels the same way about beauty?” ― Ted Chiang
“People who insist upon dressing casually also want to think casually. And in a fallen world, thinking casually means being wrong more often than not.” ― Douglas Wilson
“It seems to me that a pleasurable Contemplation of Beauty has certainly an immeasurably greater value than mere Consciousness of Pleasure.” ― G.E. Moore
“No man sings as beautifully as when his song is accompanied by a woman’s voice.” ― Roman Payne
“Show me what a people admire, and I will tell you everything about them that matters.” ― Jack McDevitt
“The line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times.” ― Donna Tartt
“The future will look futuristic only because we will be trying to make it look futuristic.”
“The value of a work of art cannot ultimately turn on the more or less of its subservience to ideology; for painting can be grandly subservient to the half-truths of the moment, doggedly servile, and yet be no less intense.” ― T.J. Clark
"I hate that aesthetic game of the eye and the mind, played by these connoisseurs, these mandarins who “appreciate” beauty. What is beauty, anyway? There’s no such thing. I never “appreciate,” any more than I “like.” I love, or I hate." – Pablo Picasso
“Color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul.” ― Wassily Kandinsky
“In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.” ― Clarice Lispector
“God's pleasure the beauty creation possesses in his regard underlies the distinct being of creation, and so beauty is the first and truest word concerning all that appears within being; beauty is the showing of what is; God looked upon what he had wrought and saw that it was good.” ― David Bentley Hart
“At last everything was satisfactorily arranged, and I could not help admiring the setting: these mingled touches betrayed on a small scale the inspiration of a poet, the research of a scientist, the good taste of an artist, the gourmet’s fondness for good food, and the love of flowers, which concealed in their delicate shadows a hint of the love of women” ― August Strindberg
“They walked on rather aimlessly. He hoped she wouldn’t notice he was touched, because he wouldn’t have known how to explain why. Here lay the great discrepancy between aesthetic truth and sleazy reality.” ― Patrick White
“Let a thing be but a sort of punctual surprise, like the first cache of violets in March, let it be delicate, painted and gratuitous, hinting that the Creator is solely occupied with aesthetic considerations, and combines disparate objects simply because they look so well together, and that thing will admirably fill the role of a flower.” ― Hope Mirrlees
“What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant.” ― Murray Gell-Mann
“With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art.” ― Peter Weiss
“In the past an artist produced things that were necessary socially; they were instruments, albeit of a special kind, that helped the dead reach eternity, spells to be cast, prayers to be liturgically fleshed... The aesthetic component of those instruments enhanced their function but was never central, never an independent, nonutilitarian thing.” ― Stanisław Lem
“Japanese aesthetics (in contrast to Western aesthetics) is more concerned with process than with product, with the actual construction of a self than with self-expression.” ― Donald Ritchie
“The ability to live a sensual lifestyle signals that an individual has become adept at overcoming the constraints of daily life and has entered into a privileged world where the key to entry is no longer the functional, but the aesthetic, the decadent, the passionate.” ― Lebo Grand
“Henceforth, toys are chemical in substance and colour; their very material introduces one to a coenaethesis of use, not pleasure. These toys die in fact very quickly, and once dead, they have no posthumous life for the child.” ― Roland Barthes
“I love the waves of your lips the symmetries of your eyes the gazes the smiles.” ― Jazalyn
“There is an expression in Japanese that says that someone who makes things of poor quality is in fact worse than a thief because he doesn't make things that will last or provide true satisfaction. A thief at least redistributes the wealth of a society.” ― Andrew Juniper
“I think my show was more beautiful. Like, it would have made for prettier pictures on Insta. But now, we're gonna have way better memes.” ― Carlos Hernandez
“In simple words, ‘Beauty’ is what gladdens the heart. Neither a symmetrical face nor a shapely body – If the sight of you generates happiness, you’re beautiful.” ― Adeel Ahmed Khan
“A six-week trip to China in 1973 convinced me—if I needed convincing—that the autonomy of the aesthetic is something to be protected, and cherished, as indispensable nourishment to intelligence. But a decade-long residence in the 1960s, with its inexorable conversion of moral and political radicalisms into “style,” has convinced me of the perils of over- generalizing the aesthetic view of the world.” ― Susan Sontag
“The flower is strong in its beauty as it can be forgotten, set aside, or destroyed. The ambitious do not know beauty. The feeling of essence is beauty.” ― Jiddu Krishnamurti
“The great has terror for its basis... The beautiful is founded on mere positive pleasure...” ― Edmund Burke
“The ideal of “working exactly” is also inherent in the historical disciplines. Art historians pursue it, above all, in order to avoid the baleful contact with aesthetics; and often exert themselves merely to say what happened after what– and nothing more than that.” ― Heinrich Wölfflin
“We pay a small fortune for a variegated monstera whose epidermis is unevenly colored. However, we pay a small fortune for skin creams that promise to make our epidermis evenly colored.” ― Khang Kijarro Nguyen
“Pleading with those eyes, it’s obvious what I’m meant to do. I embrace the beauty and kiss it deeply.” ― Patrick Bryant
“What finite beings say about transcendence is the semblance of transcendence; but as Kant well knew, it is a necessary semblance. Hence the incomparable metaphysical relevance of the rescue of semblance, the object of esthetics.” ― Theodor W. Adorno
“We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.” ― Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
“Fiction is as useful as truth, for giving us matter, upon which to exercise the judgment of value.” ― G.E. Moore
“How convenient it is to declare that everything is totally ugly within the habit of the époque, rather than applying oneself to extract from it the dark and cryptic beauty, however faint and invisible it is.” ― Charles Baudelaire
“It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.” ― Walter Pater
“People are nice to me because of how I like, and part of me likes that, but part of me feels guilty because I haven't done anything to deserve it.” ― Ted Chiang
“There was a product which seemed attractive, expensive, portable, beautiful and simple. Everybody talked about its beauty but they bought it for it’s simplicity.” ― Amit Kalantri
“What cannot be borne in reality, becomes a source of pleasure when it is transposed into the visual and somatic fiction of the dramatic spectacle.” ― Claude Calame
“The answer to these questions is tied to the public's attitude about suicide. For many people, suicide is morally reprehensible. It's against their religion, or against their culture, or contrary to their personal values. Like other unpleasant subjects - incest, disease, discrimination - it's avoided.” ― John Bateson
“We want people to represent us in politics—and in love and economics too. When people represent us fully, they are ourselves and are not ourselves. When an object is simultaneously the same as and different from the person concerned with it—or considering it—aesthetics is there.” ― Eli Siegel
“If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without ascending it, the work would have been permitted.” ― Franz Kafka
“Appreciate the aesthetic and creativity of the nature and be grateful for being part of it.” ― M.F. Moonzajer
“Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.” ― Harold Bloom
“I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life.” ― Clive Bell
“Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
“High standards generally - about workmanship and creation of objects, about what is owed in friendship, about the quality of art and much else - far from being snobbish, are required to maintain decency in life.” ― Joseph Epstein
“To speak of sparing anything because it is beautiful is to waste one’s breath and incur ridicule in the bargain. The aesthetic sense- the power to enjoy through the eye, and the ear, and the imagination- is just as important a factor in the scheme of human happiness as the corporeal sense of eating and drinking; but there has never been a time when the world would admit it.” ― John Van Dyke
“I think it’s more accurate to think of aesthetics as a key ingredient in a recipe, as opposed to the icing on the cake.” ― Stephen P. Anderson
"Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naiveté 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." – Friedrich Nietzsche
"Aesthetics have substantial political consequences. How one views oneself as beautiful or not beautiful or desirable or not desirable has deep consequences in terms of one’s feelings of self-worth and one’s capacity to be a political agent." – Cornel West
"Any great art wor… Revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world – the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air." – Leonard Bernstein
“To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.” — Osho
“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.” ― Susan Sontag
“I want to say something about bad writing. I'm proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Great. I am proud of Philip Guston's bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire's mamma's boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which's something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b.” ― Ariana Reines
“Girls have always been told that their value is tied to their appearance; their accomplishments are always magnified if they're pretty and diminished if they're not. Even worse, some girls get the message that they can get through life relying on just their looks, and then they never develop their minds. [...]
Being pretty is fundamentally a passive quality; even what you work at it, you're working at being passive.” ― Ted Chiang
“Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones... Successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.” ― Harold Bloom
“To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.” ― Arthur Conan Doyle
“Art becomes so specialized as to be comprehensible only to artists, and they complain bitterly of public indifference to their work. Competition arises. The wild battle for success becomes more and more material. Small groups who have fought their way to the top of the chaotic world of art and picture-making entrench themselves in the territory they have won. The public, left far behind, looks on bewildered, loses interest and turns away.” ― Wassily Kandinsky
“In here, Phryne, is the nursery. Do you like babies? Phryne laughed. No, not at all. they are not aesthetic like a puppy or a kitten. In fact, they always look drunk to me. look at that one you'd swear he had been hitting the gin.” ― Kerry Greenwood
“We do not dislike everything that shines, but we do prefer a pensive lustre to a shallow brilliance, a murky light that, whether in a stone or an artifact, bespeaks a sheen of antiquity... we do love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colours and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them.” ― Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
“We should worry again about the connection between play-starved education and eroded mechanisms for political debate, if worry can lead beyond deadlocks. Too often, academic essays pursue analysis and critique but stop short of speculation about remedies, as if intellectual work excluded an element of creativity. In fact, essays that remain risk-averse miss the potential of the genre to "assay," or try out, ideas.” ― Doris Sommer
“In a Fisherian world, animals are slaves to evolutionary fashion, evolving extravagant and arbitrary displays and tastes that are all ‘meaningless’; they do not involve anything other than perceived qualities.” ― Richard O. Prum
“I'd discovered that the range of beauty in breasts is wide; while one should never lightly say that a pair is ugly, one can easily say that a pair of breasts is beautiful. Hedgehogs are beautiful sometimes; so are baby pigs.” ― Mo Yan
"The beauty of a woman is not in a facial mode but the true beauty in a woman is reflected in her soul. It is the caring that she lovingly gives the passion that she shows. The beauty of a woman grows with the passing years." – Audrey Hepburn
“Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and... It is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal.” ― Louis de Bernières
