Aesthetic Theory Quotes

“If in keeping with Hegel’s insight all feeling related to an aesthetic object has an accidental aspect, usually that of psychological projection, then what the work demands from its beholder is knowledge, and indeed, knowledge that does justice to it: The work wants its truth and untruth to be grasped.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

“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

“That aesthetic theory has received so little attention from the world is not due to the unimportance of the subject of which it treats, but rather to lack of an adequate motive for speculating upon it, and to the small success of the occasional efforts to deal with it. Absolute curiosity, and love of comprehension for its own sake, are not passions we have much leisure to indulge: they require not only freedom from affairs but, what is more rare, freedom from prepossessions and from the hatred of all ideas that do not make for the habitual goal of our thought.”
― George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory