Quotes about Aesthetics

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.

Details are always vulgar

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid.

The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us...it is outside the proper sphere of art.

Better to take pleasure in a rose than to put its root under a microscope.

And unless one decorates one's house for oneself alone, best leave it bare, for other people are all wall-eyed.

If you foolishly ignore beauty, then you will soon find yourself without it.

Taste is the common sense of genius.

By nature, men desire the beautiful.

The beautiful is just as useful as the useful.

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch. The brotherhood of man on earth wil be possible on a basis of kitsch.

What a difference! Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient! when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular and infinitely boring