Aesthetic quotes are a great way to make your day brighter. They can be short, sad, cute, deep or positive – but they all have one thing in common: they’re beautiful. We’ve gathered over 297 of the best aesthetic quotes for you to enjoy!
Contents
Aesthetic Quotes
- “Live life to the fullest and focus on the positive.” -Matt Cameron
- We cannot become what we want by remaining what we are. — Max Depree
- The unknown is also the realm of infinite potential. — Brianna Weist
- “It always rains the hardest for people who deserve the sun.” -J Cole
- “Life is not accumulation, it is about contribution.” – Stephen Covey
- Perfection is found in accepting your imperfections. — Bridgett Devoue
- “All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.” ― Susan Sontag
- “There is none more beautiful than the lover of beauty.” ― Raheel Farooq
- “You’re a beautiful boy, Clay, but that’s about it.” ― Bret Easton Ellis
- “Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic.” ― James Branch Cabell
- I have silences buried so deeply, I weep when they blossom. — Pavana Reddy
- “Don’t hate the media; become the media.” – Jello Biafra, Become the Media
- “Everything good is good because of the love it contains.” ― John K. Brown
- “What is the aesthetician but a mule hitched to the times?” ― Kenneth Koch
- “The local is the only universal, upon that all art is built.” ― John Dewey
- “One’s aesthetic changes once one has a child.” – Sara Suleri, Meatless Days
- “The beautiful is as useful as the useful… Perhaps more so.” ― Victor Hugo
- And like the moon, we must go through phases of emptiness to feel full again.
- “It’s hard to combine a simple life with a love of aesthetics.” ― Marty Rubin
- “There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism” ― Alan Hollinghurst
- “Feel what you need to feel and let it go. Do not let it consume you.” -Dhiman
- “A reverie is one soul’s river – a word is one heart’s vein.” – Laura Chouette
- “An artist paints to forget while a poet writes to remember.” – Laura Chouette
- “The big secret about art is that no one wants it to be true.” ― Adam Phillips
- You are the artist of your own life. Don’t hand the paintbrush to someone else.
- “The truth can hurt short term, but ignoring the truth can hurt you long term.”
- “The difference between a flower and a **** is perspective.” – Christian Baloga
- “In a single wave of meaning the triumphant purity of being.” ― Boris Pasternak
- The problem with being the strongest one is that no one offers you a hand. — m.t.
- It has ended for me many times and began again in the morning.” — Nayyirah Waheed
- “A person who values you wouldn’t ever put themselves in a position to lose you.”
- “How easy it is to love someone who is like a blooming flower.” – Debasish Mridha
- “An artist’s concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.” ― Kazuo Ishiguro
- “There’s something wrong with any art that makes a woman all bust” ― Djuna Barnes
- Feel what you need to feel and then let it go. Do not let it consume you. — Dhiman
- “Someday someone will break you so badly that you’ll become unbreakable.”-The Joker
- “Most people want beautiful things merely to impress others.” – Mokokoma Mokhonoana
- “Art is not there for us to enjoy, art is there is to save our life.” ― Neel Burton
- “Aestheticism is the garbage of intuitive feeling.” ― Kazimir Severinovich Malevich
- “Lose yourself in the aesthetic of being, and see where you land.” – Saim .A. Cheeda
- “Desire for beauty will endure and undermine the desire for truth.” ― Richard O. Prum
- “We always hide something of ourselves whenever we create something.” – Laura Chouette
- “Hera’s form shivered like a candle flame in the breeze” – Rick Riordan, The Lost Hero
- “Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.” ― Oscar Wilde
- “The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.” -Oprah Winfrey
Short Aesthetic Quotes
- You are the sun.
- It is what it is.
- No risk, no story.
- Trust the process.
- It’s never too late.
- I will do big things.
- See good in all things.
- Pain is never permanent.
- Be proud of your progress.
- What a plot twist you were.
- Every day is a fresh start.
- Better things are on the way.
- Always be kinder than you feel.
- Slow progress is still progress.
- “He’s either a madman or a poet.”
- I told the stars about you. — d.j.
- Never let your fear decide your fate.
- I have been wearing the ocean all day.
- Let it hurt then let it go. — r.h. Sin
- You can do anything but not everything.
- “Life is only as good as your mindset.”
- All the beautiful things are around you.
- Self-love isn’t selfish; it’s important.
- The sun will rise and we will try again.
- “Expect nothing. Appreciate everything.”
- “Your happiness depends on your mindset.”
- Sunsets prove the ending can be beautiful.
- Be a voice, not an echo. — Albert Einstein
- “Beauty is immortal.” ― Syed Buali Gillani
- What is coming is better than what has gone.
- “If it matters to you, you will find a way.”
- “Live by life’s blessings every single day.”
- “I’ll never finish falling in love with you.”
- Make your heart the prettiest thing about you.
- Seek to be whole, not perfect. — Oprah Winfrey
- Fear kills more dreams than failure ever will.
- Everything is hard before it is easy. — Goethe
- When you change, don’t announce it. Just bloom.
- “Don’t take it personally, It’s not about you.”
- We age not by years, but by stories. — Maza-Dohta
- When you focus on the good, the good gets better.
- “Happiness comes in waves. It’ll find you again.”
- “Human impotence necessitates art.” ― Teufel Damon
- “Look at all the beauty in your life and be happy.”
- “Some things break your heart, but clear your vision.”
- “Art is what appeals to the a priori.” ― Raheel Farooq
- Went outside and saw the moon. It made me think of you.
- I am mine. Before I am anyone else’s. — Nayyirah Waheed
- A few nice words can help a person more than you think.
- “Love is too much for our generation.” – Laura Chouette
- I couldn’t heal because I kept pretending I wasn’t hurt.
- “Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism.” ― James Elkins
- We accept the love we think we deserve. — Stephen Chbosky
- What good are wings without the courage to fly. — Atticus
- Be yourself, everyone else is already taken. — Oscar Wilde
- “Bread cannot feed the addicts of beauty.” ― Raheel Farooq
- Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.
- “Don’t come back when you see me doing better without you.”
- “Life is the dancer and you are the dance.” -Eckhart Tolle
- “Rules of taste enforce structures of power.” ― Susan Sontag
- “Some models are actually very weird-looking.” ― A.D. Aliwat
- I believe in you.’ Words that water flowers. — Michael Faudet
- “Don’t trust everything you see, even salt looks like sugar.”
- “Life is too short to spend it at war with yourself” -unknown
- “We all begin to loose once we stop hoping.” – Laura Chouette
- “A happy soul is the best shield for a cruel world.” – Atticus
- “Beauty if truly experienced is tragedy.” ― Syed Buali Gillani
- What defines us is how well we rise after falling. — Zig Zaglar
- “Nobody notices how hard I try to hold back my tears everyday.”
- “What we outlive becomes our cage eventually.” – Laura Chouette
- “Everything dies once – only love dies twice.” – Laura Chouette
- Whatever makes you feel the sun from the inside out. Chase that.
- “The right person will make you fall in love with yourself too.”
- “Love blends our souls in the most aesthetic enjoyment” – J.WOLF
- “Words hold the power to hurt deeper than wounds.” – @she.writess_
- “I couldn’t heal because I was pretending I wasn’t hurt.” -unknown
- “No medicine cures what happiness cannot.” -Gabriel García Márquez
- Live light. Travel light. Spread light. Be the light. — Yogi Bhajan
- If it’s out of your hands, it deserves freedom from your mind, too.
- “Life is a gift. Wake up every day and realize that.”
Sad Aesthetic Quotes
- “There is no greater wound than an unrequited love.” – Laura Chouette
- “Your first heartbreak isn’t the end of love, it’s the beginning.” – unknown
- “I’m not sad, I’m just a little bit empty.” – unknown
- “Sometimes, the only thing you can do is just keep swimming.” – Dory, Finding Nemo
- “It’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.” – Alfred Lord Tennyson
- “When you’re happy, you enjoy the music. But when you’re sad, you understand the lyrics.” – Frank Ocean
- “The greatest pain that comes from love is loving someone who doesn’t love you back.” – Unknown
- “I’m not crying because of you; you’re just a trigger. I’m crying because my heart hurts.” – Unknown
- “I’m not crying. I’m just sweating through my face.” – Unknown
- “The only thing that will make you happy is being happy with who you are.” -Goldie Hawn
- “You can not create something without love and expect it to be great.” – Laura Chouette
- “He had never believed that spirituality had to be anemic or aesthetic.” ― Irving Stone
- “Lose yourself in the aesthetic of being, and see how where you land.” – Saim .A. Cheeda
- Let’s start with today, we can let forever come as slow as it wants. — Tyler Knott Gregson
- “I love the waves of your lips the symmetries of your eyes the gazes the smiles” ― Jazalyn
- “Use your smile to change the world. Don’t let the world change your smile.” -Connor Franta
- “While we keep on dancing our souls delicately embrace.” – Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie
- One day you will look back to see that all along, you were blooming. — Morgan Harper Nichols
- “The future will look futuristic only because we will be trying to make it look futuristic.”
- We are all born so beautiful. The greatest tragedy is being convinced we are not. — Rupi Kaur
- “Happiness is more than doing fun things. It’s about doing meaningful things.” Maxime Lagace.
Cute Aesthetic Quotes
- “Happiness is the secret to all beauty. There is no beauty without happiness.” Chirstian Dior
- “You can’t force them to love you or want you, but one day, they will realize what they lost.”
- “Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.” ― Theodor W. Adorno
- Let it light up something sacred inside you. Let it burn everything in the way. — Brianna Weist
- “No man sings as beautifully as when his song is accompanied by a woman’s voice.” ― Roman Payne
- “I kept every letter – only to be reminded of the wrong one’s words can cause.” – Laura Chouette
- “The aesthetics aren’t merely a side note, they’re as important as anything else.” ― Sylvain Neuvel
- Do not let people’s compliments get to your head, and do not let people’s criticism get to your heart.
- But it’s there for us, trying the best it can; that’s what makes it so **** beautiful.”― Hiromu Arakawa
- “Show me what a people admire, and I will tell you everything about them that matters.” ― Jack McDevitt
- In so far as the mind sees things in the eternal aspect, it participates in eternity. — Baruch de Spinoza
- “Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.” ― Sophia Loren
- “I can not be a part of myself – for everything that creates my soul incompletes my heart.” – Laura Chouette
- “I am a lifetime of exploration You have a lifetime to spend wandering” – Rhiley Jade, Drowning in Starlight
- “The great has terror for its basis… The beautiful is founded on mere positive pleasure…” ― Edmund Burke
- “In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.” ― Baruch de Spinoza
- “In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.” ― Clarice Lispector
- “Appreciate the aesthetic and creativity of the nature and be grateful for being part of it.” ― M.F. Moonzajer
- “I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life.” ― Clive Bell
- “Any halfway clever ***** would decorate the highway to **** as beautiful as possible.” – Criss Jami, Healology
- “Great beauty can be found in harmonious contrast variations, and brief uses of extremes. Vastly.” – Apsixaristw
- “Love is too much for our generation – that’s why it dies in our hands but blooms at our feet.” – Laura Chouette
- “I kept every letter – only to be remembered of the wrong one’s words can cause (to the heart).” – Laura Chouette
- “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
- “I became an artist because I wanted to be an active participant in the conversation about art.” ― Kamand Kojouri
- “Fiction is as useful as truth, for giving us matter, upon which to exercise the judgment of value.” ― G.E. Moore
- Two things to remember in life. Take care of your thoughts when you’re alone and your words when you’re with people.
- “The beauty of the subject often deceives us into thinking that someone is a great photographer.” ― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
- “Loving someone you don’t see everyday is not a bad thing. It’s just proof that love is not in sight, but in the heart.”
- “Aesthetic sense is the twin of one’s instinct for self-preservation and is more reliable than ethics.” ― Joseph Brodsky
- “Pleading with those eyes, it’s obvious what I’m meant to do. I embrace the beauty and kiss it deeply.” ― Patrick Bryant
- “Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.” ― Roger Scruton
- “Autumn is a poem – while you fall for everything, you remember that there is something worth dying for.” ― Laura Chouette
- “I dared to dance along broken lines and I cut myself once again – only to rewrite your words with meaning.” – Laura Chouette
- “If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without ascending it, the work would have been permitted.” ― Franz Kafka
- “The happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except that they are so.” -William Ralph Inge
- “Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” -Marcel Proust
- One day you will listen to all the songs you used to love and you will understand why you found them so beautiful. — Brianna Weist
- “Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
Deep Aesthetic Quotes
- “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
- “Smile because it confuses people. Smile because it’s easier than explaining what’s killing you inside.” -The Joker, The Dark Knight.
- “We were never supposed to be in love; for everything that exists inside a heart eventually dies.” – Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie
- “Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.” ― Alfred North Whitehead
- “I think that’s what art is: art is communication made in the hope that interesting miscommunications will arise.” ― Misha Glouberman
- An artist’s concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.”― Kazuo Ishiguro
- Sometimes when I’m in Heaven, I get forgetful of Earth.”
- “Writing is a series of verbal suggestions designed to provoke a psychological reaction and an aesthetic experience.” – Stewart Stafford
- “Writing is a series of verbal suggestions designed to provoke a psychological reaction and an aesthetic experience.” ― Stewart Stafford
- “If you want to be happy, do not dwell in the past, do not worry about the future, focus on living fully in the present.” -Roy T. Bennett
- “The aesthetic can have its revenge upon ideology by revealing a power to complicate that is also a power to undermine.” ― Murray Krieger
- “Challenges are gifts that force us to search for a new center of gravity. Don’t fight them, just find a new way to stand.” – Oprah Winfrey
- “The essence of my work is to empower women to be innovative with their lifestyle, to turn it into a grand aesthetic adventure.” – Lebo Grand
- “What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.” ― Susan Sontag
- “There’s nothing like deep breaths after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore stomach for the right reasons.” -Stephen Chbosky
- “Aesthetic detachment will not stop the suffering of desire nor will the agonies of the boudoir cure the desire of suffering.” ― David Hosford
- “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
- “Social media is training us to compare our lives instead of appreciating everything we are. No wonder why every one is depressed.” -Bill Murray
- “Refinement creates beauty everywhere: it is the grossness of the spectator that discovers nothing but grossness in the object.” ― William Hazlitt
- “The machine aesthetic bought something familiar to modern experience, but remote from architecture, to bear on modern architecture.” ― Robin Evans
- “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 **** beautiful.” ― Hiromu Arakawa
- “To become what it is now art required a great sacrifice: the aesthetic paradigm that had given man all his most beautiful things.” – Michael Shindler
- “In the life of the individual, an aesthetic sensibility is both more authentic and more commendable than a political or religious one.” ― Tom Robbins
- “With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art.” ― Peter Weiss
- “It seems to me that a pleasurable Contemplation of Beauty has certainly an immeasurably greater value than mere Consciousness of Pleasure.” ― G.E. Moore
- “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
- “Es una triste verdad, pero hemos perdido la capacidad de dar nombres bonitos a las cosas. Los nombres lo son todo.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
- “Aesthetics is an important principle for either product design or business innovation to convey digital charm and deliver quality.” – Pearl Zhu, Quality Master
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “For we’ve all carried too much – maybe that’s why, when we lay down something, it feels like everything is leaving, and yet – too much remains.” – Laura Chouette
- “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
- “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
- Your most daring dreams will strike fear in your heart in ways you’ve never known. Sometimes, this is not a sign to turn away but to keep walking.” — Brianna Weist
- “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
- “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
Positive Aesthetic Quotes
- “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
- “You must never settle for someone who is not willing to swim in your tormented seas -You are worthy of more than they are willing to give” – Rhiley Jade, Drowning in Starlight
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- Stop waiting for Friday. for summer, for someone to fall in love with you, for life. Happiness is achieved when you stop waiting for it and make the most of the moment you are in now.
- “O’ melancholy, hectic chill for the human soul, herewith dismal presence, any spirit does descent.” – Nithin Purple, Halcyon Wings: ‘These Passions Feathers Are Gathering on a Winged Vision’
- “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
- “Be a reflection of what you would like to receive. If you want love, give love. If you want the truth, be truthful. If you want respect, give respect. What you give out will always return.”
- “I want to wear black all the time and learn to do wild eyeliner not only because that aesthetic is lovely to me, but also because I wish to instill fear in everyone around me.” – The Porg
- “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
- “Like my outfit? I’m going for the counterculture. By showing up to a punk rock concert in the least punk-aesthetic outfit possible, I’m the most punk person there.” – Alexandra Martin, Siren’s Call
- “Complexity is not an aesthetic criterion. It is a quality associated only with division and organization of labor.” – Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry
- “Instead of being regarded as intelligent or knowledgeable, many a woman would rather be regarded as beautiful or good in the kitchen; many a man, as handsome or good in bed.” – Mokokoma Mokhonoana
- “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
- “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
- “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
- Please don’t lose another precious moment distracted by the thought of who you could have been. There are no past potentials, only what was and what became of it; only what is and what soon will be. — Brianna Weist
- “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
- “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
- “I glared at Collith and wondered if God had created his angels beautiful for practical reasons, rather than aesthetic ones. A beautiful thing was much harder to destroy than an ugly thing.” – K.J. Sutton, Fortuna Sworn
- “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
- “But functional was not an aesthetic criterion that Flashjack, as a faery, had terribly high on his list of priorities; it was well below shiny and nowhere near weird.” – Hal Duncan, Scruffians! Stories of Better Sodomites
- “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
- “You can’t just give up on someone because the situation is not ideal. Great relationships aren’t great because they have no problems. They are great because both people care enough about the other person to make things work.”
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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 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
- “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
- “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 and the passion that she shows. The beauty of a woman grows with the passing years.” – Audrey Hepburn
- “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
- Who am I to deserve such sights, to witness this splendor? Who am I to be the recipient of such excess? Thank you for trusting me with this color, this light. Thank you for reminding me, always, what lives behind the dark. — Tyler Knott Gregson
- “A theology that can function as an aesthetic makes for a religion that worships the beautiful at the expense of all else and an aesthetic that can function as a theology makes for an art that is expressive only of goodness.” – Michael Shindler
- “Henceforth, toys are chemical in substance and color; 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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “Greenmantle took a swig of the wine directly from the bottle – when he’d selected it from the kitchen, he had thought it would look more aesthetically pathetic and desperate than carrying a solitary glass, and it did.” – Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven King
- “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
- “Color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, and 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
- “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
- “… shown beneath the map of the galaxy – was an outrageous confection of a planet: a striped marshmallow giant with a necklace of sugary rings, combed and braided by the resonant forces of a dozen glazed and candied moons.” – Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns
- “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 feel the same way about beauty?” ― Ted Chiang
- “i can’t ask you what you think about me due to the fear of the reply “I don’t ” so I’ll hide behind the timid smiles & simple hellos hoping that one day you’ll notice the shy girl sitting in the corner staring at you in awe – the perks of being invisible” – me <3
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “Even now I remember those pictures, like pictures in a storybook one loved as a child. Radiant meadows, mountains vaporous in the trembling distance; leaves ankle-deep on a gusty autumn road; bonfires and fog in the valleys; cellos, dark window panes, snow.” – Donna Tartt
- “The ability to live 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 functional, but the aesthetic, the decadent, the passionate.” ― Lebo Grand
- “The idea 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 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
- “Slate reached the thorn tree and leaped into the branches, climbing nimbly to the very top. The moonlight turned her thick, gray pelt to silver and her eyes shone like two tiny moons. The branch swayed beneath her and she balanced there without a trace of fear.” – Erin Hunter, The Blazing Star
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “There comes a day each September when you wake up and know the summer is over and fall has arrived. The slant of the sun looks different and something is in the air–a coolness, a hint of frosty mornings to follow. I woke early on the morning of September 24 and reached for a warmer petticoat.” – Ann Rinaldi, Time Enough for Drums
- “Sometimes I grow afraid of long flights and street signs and a heartbeat Of open endings and reflections and chipped coffee mugs Of jingling keys and unmade beds and choked sobs Of crescent moons and dead flowers and small insects But most of all I am afraid //Of you// -An abusive relationship” – Rhiley Jade, Drowning in Starlight
- “If there is anything like a unifying aesthetic principle in mathematics, it is this: simple is beautiful. Mathematicians enjoy thinking about the simplest possible things, and the simplest possible things are imaginary.” – Paul Lockhart, A Mathematician’s Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
- “In the popular imagination hairiness is like furriness, an index of bestiality, and as such an indication of aggressive sexuality. Men cultivate it, just as they are encouraged to develop competitive and aggressive instincts, women suppress it, just as they suppress all the aspects of their vigor and libido.” – Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch
- “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
- “We do not dislike everything that shines, but we do prefer a pensive luster 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 colors and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them.” ― Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
Wrapping Up
As you can see, aesthetic quotes can be short or long, deep or surface level. What matters most is that they speak to you and resonate on a personal level. Hopefully, these 297+ quotes have done just that! If you’re looking for more aesthetic inspo, be sure to check out our other quote round-ups. Until next time, friends!