aesthetics

And is not all of life material- based on the material- permeated by the material? Should not one learn, gladly, to utilize the beauty of the fine material? I do not speak of the gross crudities of soporific television, of loud brash convertibles and vulgar display- but rather of grace and line and refinement- and there are wonderful and exciting things that only money can buy, such as theater tickets, books, paintings, travel, lovely clothes- and why deny them when one can have them? The only problem is to work, to stay awake mentally and physically, and NEVER become mentally, physically, spiritually flabby or over complacent!

Aestheticism is the garbage of intuitive feeling.

In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.

Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic

I became an artist because I wanted to be an active participant in the conversation about art.

To speak of sparing anything because it is beautiful is to waste one__ 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.

The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.

We want people to represent us in politics__nd 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__r considering it__esthetics is there.

Everything good is good because of the love it contains.

What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters.

The writer has to die to give birth to the intellectual in the service of the wretched of the earth.

Show me what a people admire, and I will tell you everything about them that matters.

Now I myself, I cheerfully admit, feel that enormity in Kensington Gardens as something quite natural. I feel it so because I have been brought up, so to speak, under its shadow; and stared at the graven images of Raphael and Shakespeare almost before I knew their names; and long before I saw anything funny in their figures being carved, on a smaller scale, under the feet of Prince Albert. I even took a certain childish pleasure in the gilding of the canopy and spire, as if in the golden palace of what was, to Peter Pan and all children, something of a fairy garden. So do the Christians of Jerusalem take pleasure, and possibly a childish pleasure, in the gilding of a better palace, besides a nobler garden, ornamented with a somewhat worthier aim. But the point is that the people of Kensington, whatever they might think about the Holy Sepulchre, do not think anything at all about the Albert Memorial. They are quite unconscious of how strange a thing it is; and that simply because they are used to it. The religious groups in Jerusalem are also accustomed to their coloured background; and they are surely none the worse if they still feel rather more of the meaning of the colours. It may be said that they retain their childish illusion about their Albert Memorial. I confess I cannot manage to regard Palestine as a place where a special curse was laid on those who can become like little children. And I never could understand why such critics who agree that the kingdom of heaven is for children, should forbid it to be the only sort of kingdom that children would really like; a kingdom with real crowns of gold or even of tinsel. But that is another question, which I shall discuss in another place; the point is for the moment that such people would be quite as much surprised at the place of tinsel in our lives as we are at its place in theirs. If we are critical of the petty things they do to glorify great things, they would find quite as much to criticise (as in Kensington Gardens) in the great things we do to glorify petty things. And if we wonder at the way in which they seem to gild the lily, they would wonder quite as much at the way we gild the weed.

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.

I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life.

No man sings as beautifully as when his song is accompanied by a woman__ voice.