Appreciate the beauty of everything around you by reading these aesthetic quotes.
As we grow older, sometimes, we forget the value of beauty and its impact on us. We tend to only focus on the practicality and utility of things that make things convenient for us. Thus, we forget the vital role that aesthetics plays in our lives.
So, if you need some reminders on why we need beauty in our everyday lives, this collection is perfect for you.
We’re positive that the quotes below will enlighten you on the aesthetics of life, art, and science, so add them to your must-reads now!
Start reading here.
And don’t forget to check out these positive quotes and inspirational quotes.
Best Aesthetic Quotes
1. “Aesthetic matters are fundamental for the harmonious development of both society and the individual.” – Friedrich Schiller
2. “The aesthetics aren’t merely a side note. They’re as important as anything else.” – Sylvain Neuvel
3. “Aesthetic freedom is like free speech. It is, indeed, a form of free speech.” – George Edward Woodberry
4. “Aesthetics, rather than reason, shapes our thought processes. First comes aesthetics, then logic.” – Daniel Tammet
5. “Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.” – Alfred North Whitehead
6. “All I can say about the work I try to do is that the aesthetic is in reality itself.” – Helen Levitt
7. “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
8. “Art is the aesthetic ordering of experience to express meanings in symbolic terms.” – Daniel Bell
9. “Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.” – Roger Scruton
10. “Aesthetics is both politics and philosophy, a series of agreements and disagreements between subjective minds.” – Jimenez Lai
11. “The aesthetic experience has to be given, and beauty is a regular experience of every person, every person who is not clinically depressed!” – Peter Schjeldahl
12. “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
13. “The aesthetic can have its revenge upon ideology by revealing a power to complicate that is also a power to undermine.” – Murray Krieger
14. “When an idea, person, or a small thought gives us happiness, we can say that it is divine and aesthetic.” – Anonymous
15. “Beauty is a combination of qualities. I don’t think one can deny that certain people or things feel aesthetically pleasing. But without an equally pleasing being behind that form, there is no beauty there.” – Teri Hatcher
Inspirational Aesthetic Quotes
16. “Aesthetics make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety, and change.” – Frank Harris
17. “Any great artwork 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
18. “Color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard. The eyes are the hammers. 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
19. “It’s better to have a hunger and appreciation for beauty than to be merely beautiful. In the end, life is richer that way.” – Susan Vreeland
20. “Creating is about sharing ideas, sharing aesthetics, sharing what you believe in with other people.” – Shepard Fairey
21. “If you are living a life that feels right to you, if you’re willing to take creative chances or a creative path that feels like it’s mostly in keeping with your sensibilities, you know, aesthetic and artistic, then that’s what matters.” – Tracy Chapman
22. “‘Tis the perception of the beautiful, a fine extension of the faculties, platonic, universal, wonderful, drawn from the stars, and filtered through the skies, Without which life would be extremely dull.” – Lord Byron
Also read: Simplicity Quotes
Short Aesthetic Quotes
23. “Aestheticism is the garbage of intuitive feeling.” – Kazimir Malevich
24. “Aesthetics is for the artist like ornithology is for the birds.” – Barnett Newman
25. “Aesthetics is the mother of ethics.” – Joseph Brodsky
26. “Aesthetics and ethics concern the relationship between art and morality.” – Anonymous
27. “A rich poet from Harvard has no sense in his mind, except the aesthetic.” – Beatrice Wood
28. “It’s hard to combine a simple life with a love of aesthetics.” – Marty Rubin
29. “The aesthetic principle is the same in every art, only the material differs.” – Robert Schumann
30. “I always loved aesthetics. Not particularly fashion, but an idea of beauty.” – Miuccia Prada
31. “Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness.” – Brian Sewell
32. “Ethics and aesthetics are one.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
33. “Aesthetics is the study of ideal form or beauty. It is the philosophy of art.” – Will Durant
34. “I believe that one of the most powerful things of all is aesthetics.” – Kalle Lasn
35. “All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.” – John Ruskin
Also read: Short Quotes
Motivational Aesthetic Quotes to Appreciate the Beauty in Diversity
36. “Beauty is the main positive form of the aesthetic assimilation of reality, in which aesthetic ideal finds its direct expression.” – Karl Marx
37. “I don’t need to be so full of myself that I feel I am without flaw. I can feel beautiful and imperfect at the same time. I have a healthy relationship with my aesthetic insecurities.” – Lupita Nyong’o
38. “The more people explore the world, the more they realize in every country there’s a different aesthetic.” – Helena Christensen
Aesthetic Quotes for All Nature Lovers
39. “Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive, and even spiritual satisfaction.” – E.O. Wilson
40. “Appreciate the aesthetic and creativity of nature and be grateful for being part of it.” – M.F. Moonzajer
41. “To so enter into it in nature and art that the enjoyed meanings of life may become a part of living is the attitude of aesthetic appreciation.” – George Herbert Mead
42. “It’s odd that there is a high level of appreciation of nature. There is the aesthetic side that really loves nature and beauty.” – Jerry Garcia
Also read: Nature Quotes
Deep Aesthetic Quotes That Will Make You Reassess Beauty
43. “All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.” – Susan Sontag
44. “The aesthetic serviceability of objects of beauty is not greatly nor universally heightened by possession.” – Thorstein Veblen
45. “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
46. “Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so, as Nietzsche saw, out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favor of much more difficult ones. Successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.” – Harold Bloom
47. “Aesthetic considerations are a matter of luxury and indulgence rather than of necessity.” – Anonymous
48. “Aesthetic decay leaves traces and stories on the surface of the object.” – Kristine H. Harper
49. “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
50. “The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.” – Paul Klee
51. “There’s something about fear and aesthetics that goes hand in hand.” – Christopher Bollen
52. “In the life of the individual, an aesthetic sensibility is both more authentic and more commendable than a political or religious one.” – Tom Robbins
53. “To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one’s own moral aesthetic preferences.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
54. “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
55. “There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.” – Henry James
56. “But aesthetics is not religion, and the origins of religion lie somewhere completely different. They lie anyway, these roses smell too sweet and the deep roar of the breaking waves is too splendid to do justice to such weighty matters now.” – Rudolf Otto
Also read: Creativity Quotes
Positive Aesthetic Quotes to Show Its Importance to Art
57. “Aesthetic pleasure is not to be taken lightly. It’s very important for the spirit, and therefore, the health.” – Robert Bateman
58. “Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers. What we call art is a game.” – Octavio Paz
59. “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
60. “It is just as important to set apart time for the development of our aesthetic faculties as for cultivating the money-getting instinct. A man cannot live by bread alone. His higher life demands an impalpable food.” – Orison Swett Marden
61. “If the universal is the essential, then it is the basis of all life and art. Recognizing and uniting with the universal therefore gives us the greatest aesthetic satisfaction, the greatest emotion of beauty.” – Piet Mondrian
62. “The fact that the colors in the flower have evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting. That means insects can see the colors. That adds a question, does this aesthetic sense we have also exist in lower forms of life?” – Richard Feynman
63. “I always loved fashion and clothes. Not because I think that’s a woman’s place, but because I care about aesthetics. I like art. I like going to art museums, and to me, these things are just manifestations of one’s aesthetic sense.” – Leila Janah
64. “The forms of art are inexhaustible, but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.” – Clive Bell
65. “Paper is a uniquely beautiful format, more so than the web, I think you need to invest in the aesthetics.” – Dave Eggers
Also read: Encouraging Quotes
Insightful Aesthetic Quotes for Artists
66. “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
67. “If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson.” – Oscar Wilde
68. “The aesthetic of architecture has to be rooted in a broader idea about human activities like walking, relaxing, and communicating. Architecture thinks about how these activities can be given added value.” – Thom Mayne
69. “There is an aesthetic excitement about painting which is one of the most beautiful experiences that can be. Put things down while you feel that joy.” – Charles Webster Hawthorne
70. “It is through its very incompleteness that art becomes complete in beauty, and so addresses itself, not to the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty of reason, but to the aesthetic sense alone.” – Frank Harris
71. “The companionship of the aesthetic brought with it the need to defend the literary as a mode of discourse whose workings persuade us to distinguish it from other modes.” – Michael L. Clark
72. “In the past, an artist produced things that were necessary socially. They were instruments, albeit of a special kind, that helped the dead reach eternity, spells to be cast, prayers to be liturgically fleshed. The aesthetic component of those instruments enhanced their function but was never central, never an independent, non-utilitarian thing.” – Stanisław Lem
73. “The machine aesthetic brought something familiar to modern experience, but remote from architecture, to bear on modern architecture.” – Robin Evans
74. “Leonardo Da Vinci combined art and science and aesthetics and engineering, that kind of unity is needed once again.” – Ben Shneiderman
75. “If you add something to a painting, never let it be for aesthetic reasons. Only let it be for reasons of expression.” – Asger Jorn
76. “My particular aesthetic of light and color and design wouldn’t change as a result of working with computer graphics rather than with slit-scan or miniatures.” – Douglas Trumbull
77. “Painting is the aesthetic side of the object but it has never been original, has never been its own goal.” – Kazimir Malevich
78. “What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles. It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.” – Hans Hofmann
Aesthetic Quotes That Will Open Your Mind
79. “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
80. “After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in aesthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are artists as well.” – Albert Einstein
81. “If we consider the philosophical aspect, we can say that ‘aesthetic’ is concerned with notions like beautiful and ugly.” – Anonymous
82. “I’ve handled color as a man should behave. You may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one.” – Josef Albers
83. “I think death is the aesthetic part of chess, seeing your opponent’s army fall. Producing a sacrifice in order to mate is the aesthetic part of it. It’s a beautiful, bloodless war.” – Daniel Naroditsky
84. “Form follows profit is the aesthetic principle of our times.” – Richard Rogers
85. “Design is a way of life, a point of view. It involves the whole complex of visual communications: talent, creative ability, manual skill, and technical knowledge. Aesthetics and economics, technology and psychology are intrinsically related to the process.” – Paul Rand
86. “Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.” – Richard Dawkins
87. “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
88. “I could not help admiring the setting: these mingled touches betrayed on a small scale the inspiration of a poet, the research of a scientist, the good taste of an artist, the gourmet’s fondness for good food, and the love of flowers, which concealed in their delicate shadows a hint of the love of women.” – August Strindberg
89. “But those who seek only reassurance from life will never be more than tourists—seeing everything and trying to possess what can only be felt. Beauty is the shadow of imperfection.” – Simon Van Booy
90. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” – Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
More Aesthetic Quotes to Make You Think
91. “Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know.” – Daniel Tammet
92. “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
93. “Aesthetic sense is the twin of one’s instinct for self-preservation and is more reliable than ethics.” – Dana Amir
94. “I wanted to get to that aesthetic proposition that comes out of learning the human elements of a world so that those notes and rhythms mean something to you besides just the academic way in which they fall in place.” – Stanley Crouch
95. “Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion. Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away, and there is no longer art.” – Remy de Gourmont
96. “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
97. “We all appreciated a certain aesthetic, and with that appreciation came a certain stylized presence.” – Amber Heard
98. “If you get it out into the urban field, it’s going to be used or misused, but it’ll also probably provide a way of people acknowledging what the aesthetic is about because people have to confront it every day.” – Richard Serra
99. “Aesthetic detachment will not stop the suffering of desire nor will the agonies of the boudoir cure the desire of suffering.” – David Hosford
100. “What is extraordinary about contemporary art is the energy. It has our energy. New energy. Pieces hundreds of years old are beautiful from an aesthetic point of view, but without our modern energy.” – Victor Pinchuk
Did These Quotes Make You Appreciate Aesthetics?
Seeing the beauty around us makes us feel happy, content, and hopeful. And, admiring even the littlest things shows why we should be grateful for existing in this life. Unfortunately, not everyone pays attention to the things that matter most.
We get so busy with work or school that we become so focused on just one task. But, if we just pay attention, even the twinkling stars in the sky or the green grass and the colorful flowers in the park can help us be more calm and optimistic about life. In other words, aesthetics are what make us feel good and happy.
Indeed, beauty inspires us to live fully and make every day count. Our appreciation of everything around us pushes us to keep going in our path. So, the next time you feel tired and unmotivated, make sure you pause and look at the beauty of the world!
Which aesthetic quote is your favorite? Did you learn a lot about aesthetics? Share your thoughts with us by leaving a comment below.
