Aesthetic Quotes

“Don't hate the media; become the media.”
― Jello Biafra, Become the Media

“The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the god of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“His voice was smoke on midnight air.”
― Giselle V. Steele, The Minutes Behind Us

“Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions. To quarrel on its behalf is always a blunder.”
― Harold Bloom

“Man's first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void.”
― Barnett Newman

“We were never supposed to be in love; for everything that exists inside a heart eventually dies.”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“I've got a peculiar weakness for criminals and artists, neither takes life as it is. Any tragic story has to be in conflict with things as they are.”
― Stanley Kubrick

“Great beauty can be found in harmonious contrast variations, and brief uses of extremes.

Vastly.”
― Apsixaristw

“give me the light ; please take away the dark.”
― Eve Ainsworth, Tender

“Hidden in the broom cupboard of Rose Cottage are two grand gates that lead to the loveliest little house you've ever seen. Nutmouse Hall. Shh, don't tell anyone... No one knows it's there...not even Arthur and Lucy who live in Rose Cottage.

This is the home of Tumtum and Nutmeg...”
― Emily Bearn

“I'm trapped in a Salvador Dali painting”
― Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

“Liminal spaces deserve to be filled with Vaporwave. It's an auditory aesthetic that's fluid like time.”
― Jarod Kintz, Me and memes and memories

“The Manor made them,’ Ms. Vance said, as if explaining basic arithmetic to a toddler. ‘The building itself. It possesses extraordinarily strict aesthetic sensibilities.’ The floorboards shuddered violently beneath Miller’s boots, rattling the chandelier overhead. ‘See? It’s gagging.”
― Belinda Kelderhouse, The Twilight Home: Weird and wonderful tales of life and death at a rather unusual retirement home…

“The clock declared exercise hour. Its glass door swung open, the pendulum lunged forward, and the hands jumped ahead by exactly sixty minutes. ‘It isn’t interested in fitness,’ Ms. Vance said. ‘It’s punishing everyone for the décor.’ Patrons groaned and began stretching with resigned dread.”
― Belinda Kelderhouse, The Twilight Home: Weird and wonderful tales of life and death at a rather unusual retirement home…

“It was something of a stylistic experiment, pushing the time-tested vaporwave aesthetic more toward stained glass and dark wood.”
― Cliff Jones Jr., Dreck

“Just to think that you are killing an animal to eat, just the very idea, is unaesthetic.

I am not against it because the animal is killed... because that which is essential in the animal will live, it cannot be killed, and that which is nonessential, whether you kill it or not, is going to die. So that is irrelevant, that is not a point for me to consider.

The question is not that you have killed the animal and killing is not good, no. The question is that you have killed the animal -- you. Just to eat? While beautiful vegetarian food is available? If vegetarian food is not available, that's one thing. But the food IS available. Then why? Then why destroy a body? And if you can kill an animal, then why not be a cannibal? What is wrong with killing a man? The meat derived from a human body will be more in tune with you. Why not start eating human beings? That too is a question of aesthetics.

And the animals are brothers and sisters, because man has come from them. They are our family. To kill a man is only to kill an evolved animal, or to kill an animal is just to kill somebody who is not yet evolved but is on the way. It is the same. Whether you kill the child when he is in the first grade or whether you kill the young man when he has come to his last grade in the university, it does not make much difference. The animals are moving towards human beings, and human beings had once been animals.”
― Osho, The Diamond Sutra: The Buddha Also Said...

“We don't live in a world in which a cover can reflect the sense and style of the book. Today more than ever the cover shoulders an additional weight. Its function is more commercial than aesthetic. It succeeds or fails in the market.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Clothing of Books: An Essay

“Aesthetic pleasure needs no justification, because a life without such pleasure is one not worth living.”
― Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture

“Alles Schöne, von welcher Art es auch sein mag, ist an und für sich schön und in sich selbst vollendet. Das Lob bildet keinen Bestandteil seines Wesens, und es wird mithin durch dasselbe weder schlechter noch besser.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The dream clung to her ribs like ivy, wrapping around her lungs, her thoughts.”
― Arabella Sveinsdottir, In My Dreams: A Haunting Romantic Fantasy About Star-Crossed Lovers Lost in Dreams and Hunted in the Real World

“She had belonged there. In that life. With him.”
― Arabella Sveinsdottir, In My Dreams: A Haunting Romantic Fantasy About Star-Crossed Lovers Lost in Dreams and Hunted in the Real World

“My reflection--- or Zelda's reflection--- stared back at me.
Technically speaking, my body and my face were essentially the same as they'd always been. I still had the same smattering of freckles across the bridge of my nose, that same star-shaped birthmark just beneath my right ear that no amount of concealer--- or magic--- had ever been able to completely hide. I'd stopped dyeing my hair garish colors a few years back to let my natural auburn shine through, but my hair itself was the still the same wavy texture and thickness it had been in the seventeenth century and every decade since.
Yet despite everything about me that had not changed, the person I used to be would hardly recognize the person staring back at her now.”
― Jenna Levine, Road Trip With a Vampire

“Carswell's novels, Open the Door! (1920) and The Camomile (1922) sit both inside and outside the school of urban fiction. While the spaces of Glasgow thrum in their pages and are - as is frequent in other urban fiction - characterised by their contrast with alternative locales, interest in the city is also aesthetic. Glasgow here is also a city of artistic sensibilities and aspirations, of the avant-garde”
― Glenda Norquay, The International Companion to the Scottish Novel

“El viento de otoño silbó su inestable cancioncilla y ella, abstraída, comenzó a bailar.”
― Amara Muhurta, Momentos que se esfuman para crear otros

“Where morals are aesthetic, conviction is cosmetic.”
― RICHIE NORTON

“To the emblematic fulfillment of this hope I am somewhat encouraged by the new street signs of Paris boulevards, which, as if they sought to celebrate the Proustian sagesse that asserts "we are like giants plunged in time," flash a message picked out in little red lights (for danger? for delectation?) to those seeking safe passage to the median strip between opposing directions of traffic, a haven that must be attained before reaching the seemingly inaccessible other side: *traversez en deux temps*, the red lights direct us, *cross over time and time again*.”
― Richard Howard, In Search of Lost Time

“So dress in black. Let it absorb the light. Let it absorb the questions. Let it absorb the night.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“The duality of never wanting to see them again and still yearning for just one sight... that is the great cosmic joke, isn't it?

The heart is a stubborn traitor

You know that woman is a bad news.

You know she’s the poison, the beautiful disaster that burns the house down. But God, you miss the fire.

So you sit there in the dark, drinking whiskey, waiting for the phone to ring hoping for the torture to start all over again.

Because the torture is better than the nothingness. And we are all terrified of the nothingness.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“I dont trust anyone who claims they don’t talk to themselves.....

I immediately assume you’re either lying or a f*cking serial killer.

What do you mean your brain is just... quiet?

You mean to tell me you don’t pace in your room dead in the night rehearsing what you shoulda said in an argument three days ago?

I mean, I’ve won a hundred fights in my mind just walking down to the general store for a pack of gum.

If you aren't rehearsing your legal defense in the shower, you are entirely unprepared for the savage realities of this world man!”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”

“Hanging proudly above the marble mantelpiece was the source of the Manor’s indigestion: a massive, cheaply framed, mass‑produced 1970s oil painting. The canvas assaulted the eye with geometric shapes in saturated oranges and muddy greens, clashing so violently with the dignified mahogany paneling that Miller’s eyes strained trying to make sense of the chaos.”
― Belinda Kelderhouse, The Twilight Home: Weird and wonderful tales of life and death at a rather unusual retirement home…