Ayn Rand Quotes

I don't know if it's art, but I know I like it.

Beautiful jewelry, a beautiful room - that's what museums are - a beautiful painting, a beautiful face, it makes you feel good to look at, and that's a beautiful thing.

I think beauty is a feeling that you get after you've had an experience. It's the way you feel about it that is beautiful.

I'm a romantic. The impressionists have always been my favorites. I like prettiness - beauty, or what I perceive as beauty.

Great music is in the ear of the beholder.

In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.

I'm not one who divides music, dance or art into various categories. Either something works, or it doesn't.

But if Shakespeare himself is maybe about meaning and truth, I don't know, then he is certainly about pleasure and interest, we start with pleasure and interest, but maybe eventually it gets to meaning and truth.

For me, life offers so many complexly appealing moments that two beautiful objects may be equally beautiful for different reasons and at different times. How can one choose?

Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.

The affairs of music ought, somehow, to terminate in the love of the beautiful.

I think music isn't just a genre or sound. If it sounds good and makes you feel good it's a beautiful thing.

To analyze the charms of flowers is like dissecting music; it is one of those things which it is far better to enjoy, than to attempt to fully understand.

I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.

Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead.

The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning.

What I say is that we're capable of a transcendent response, and I think it makes us happy. And I do think beauty produces a transcendent response.

...for the object of education is to teach us to love beauty.

Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.

I'm surprised when the work appears beautiful, and very pleased. And I think work can be very good and very successful without being able to call it beautiful, although I'm not clear about that. The work is good when it has a certain completeness; and when it's got a certain completeness, then it's beautiful.

Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.

It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. - Of Human Bondage

Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.

It is not that which is beautiful that pleases us, but that which pleases is is called beautiful.

No facts, however indubitably detected, no effort of reason, however magnificently maintained, can prove that Bach's music is beautiful.