Thorstein Veblen Quotes

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

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.

To me, an intellectual is a person who is primarily interested in ideas. What I am is an aesthete, a person who is primarily interested in beauty. That's why I write about art.

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

Art is always in the eyes of the beholder. Only posterity has the right to point out our mistakes.

I am an enthusiast on the subject of the arts.

I don't go to enough exhibitions, purely because it intimidates me.

There is no such thing as ugly.

There's nothing more superficial to do than to paint a beautiful woman. The most beautiful portraits in art were of ugly women. If you paint Brigitte Bardot, it's a disaster. Sunsets, you have to stay away from sunsets. You paint a sunset, you are in great danger.

I'm a formalist. I'm interested in the history of painting.

I'm just a fan of art and culture.

Moderation sees itself as beautiful; it is unaware that in the eye of the immoderate it appears black and sober and consequently ugly-looking.

The art establishment has turned away from the old curriculum which puts beauty and craft at the top of the agenda.

The word 'beauty' is as easy to use as the word 'degenerate.' Both come in handy when one does or does not agree with you

Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.

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

Wit has as few true judges as painting.

Why should beauty be suspect?

Ruskin's much-derided moral theory of art was part of an attempt to show that this human activity, which we value so highly, engaged the whole of human personality. His insistence on the sanctity of nature was part of an attempt to develop Goethe's intuition that form cannot be put together in the mind by an additive process, but is to be deduced from the laws of growth in living organisms, and their resistance to the elements.

Is beauty beautiful, or is it only our eyes that make it so?

There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes consider abominable.

Why Alexia that is quite beautiful. It does ot reflect your customary taste at all approved Miss Hisselpenny with glee. Trust Ivy to like the hideous thing for it's looks.

If you speak of beauty, you are at once suspected of...kitsch.