Aesthetic Purpose Quotes

I never start anything with a really overt, political, or even exactly artistic mission statement.

The principal rule of art is to please and to move. All the other rules were created to achieve this first one.

The purpose of art is to re-present nature, not represent it.

Life is very nice, but it has no shape. The object of art is actually to give it some and to do it by every artifice possible-truer than the truth.

The most useful thing about art is it's uselessness.

Painting for me is like a fabric, all of a piece and uniform, with one set of threads as the representational, esthetic element, and the cross-threads as the technical, architectural, or abstract element. These threads are interdependent and complementary, and if one set is lacking the fabric does not exist. A picture with no representational purpose is to my mind always an incomplete technical exercise, for the only purpose of any picture is to achieve representation.

Lucidity is the first purpose of color in music.

A story is an end in itself. It is not written to teach, sell, explain or destroy anything. It is not written even to entertain. It is written as a man is born - an organic whole, dictated only by its own laws and its own necessity - an end in itself, not a means to an end.

It is always understood as an expression of condemnation when anything in Literature or Art is said to be done for effect; and yet to produce an effect is the aim and end of both.

Tis the privilege of Art Thus to play its cheerful part, Man on earth to acclimate And bend the exile to his fate.

Art is to be free. Design is to fix.

Beauty doesn't have to be about anything. What's a vase about? What's a sunset or a flower about? What, for that matter, is Mozart's Twenty-third Piano Concerto about?

It seems to me that before the photograph can exist as art it must, by its very nature choose whether it is to be a record or a testimony.

Poetry contains nothing haphazard.

If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.

I do care about style. I do care, but I only care about style that serves the subject.

Nothing is arbitrary, nothing is insulated in beauty. It depends forever on the necessary and the useful. The plumage of the bird, the mimic plumage of the insect, has a reason for its rich colors in the constitution of the animal. Fitness is so inseparable an accompaniment of beauty, that it, has been taken for it.

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.

I do not oppose form, but only form as a goal.

There is a danger when every building has to look spectacular; to look like it is changing the world. I don't care how a building looks if it means something, not to architects, but to the people who use it.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Beauty always had a purpose: to be of service to life.

Some are created for beauty, and some for use; and there are some which one can do without altogether.

Beauty depends on purpose. It is in the elements best suited to their purpose or aim that beauty shines forth most strongly.