China Mieville Quotes

Every living person and thing responds to beauty. We all thirst for it. We receive strength and renewal by seeing stirring and satisfying sites.

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.

Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part.

Find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and dark which that thing provides.

The beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself.

Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness.

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.

The career of an esthete was nothing I ever intended.

I think, ultimately, I am a sensualist and an aesthete.

I want to show beautiful things and share them with everyone.

Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.

Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail.

The noble grotesque involves the true appreciation of beauty.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood.

There is a saying in Bali: "We have no art. We do everything as beautifully as possible." This reflects my philosophy of practice. I try to remember daily what a gift it is to have the privilege of living in this wondrous world.

There is so much in the world for us all if we only have the eyes to see it, and the heart to love it, and the hand to gather it to ourselves--so much in men and women, so much in art and literature, so much everywhere in which to delight, and for which to be thankful.

The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that.

Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world.

If you have been afraid that your love of beautiful flowers and the flickering flame of the candle is somehow less spiritual than living in starkness and ugliness, remember that He who created you to be creative gave you the things with which to make beauty and the sensitivity to appreciate and respond to His creation.

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

The hunger of the eye is not to be despised; and they are to be pitied who have starvation of the eye.