James Hillman Quotes

Matters of taste are not, it turns out, moral issues.

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.

Aesthetics - rather than reason - shapes our thought processes. First comes aesthetics, then logic. 'Thinking in Numbers' is not about an attempt to impress the reader but to include the reader, draw the reader in, by explaining my experiences - the beauty I feel in a prime number, for example.

I try to figure out - intellectually, philosophically, psychologically - what the experience of beauty is.

I always loved aesthetics. Not particularly fashion, but an idea of beauty.

Never has there been a close study of how necessary to a man are the experiences which we clumsily call aesthetic

Kant described beauty as a feeling of ungraspability: this is why the beauty experience is beyond concept.

The good is always beautiful, the beautiful is good!

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

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is taste. Others have the same love in such success that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is art.

Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.

Rhetoric takes no real account of the art in literature and morality takes no account of the art in life.

If you look after truth and goodness, beauty looks after herself.

Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.

I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sensual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.

It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.

Art is to beauty what honor is to honesty.

Nothing keeps me in such awe as perfect beauty; now, there is something consoling and encouraging in ugliness.

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

We find things beautiful because we recognize them and contrariwise we find things beautiful because their novelty surprises us.

Beauty is assailed from two directions - by the cult of ugliness in the arts, and by the cult of utility in everyday life.

Ethics and aesthetics are one.