Aesthetic Refinement Quotes

Doing something like 'Bushwick,' a lot of people need to agree that the piece is working with what's going on on the screen. So it's a lot of tweaks and re-works, just kinda moving pieces around and getting things to hit right.

Good taste ruins certain true spiritual values: such as taste itself.

Be aroused by poetry; structure yourself with propriety, refine yourself with music.

A sort of egotistical self-evaluation is unavoidable in those joys in which erudition and art mingle and in which aesthetic pleasure may become more acute, but not remain as pure.

Engineering, like poetry, is an attempt to approach perfection. And engineers, like poets, are seldom completely satisfied with their creations. They notice, even if no one else does, the world that is not quite le mot juste, or the hairline crack that blemishes the structure.

What woeful stuff this madrigal would be, In some starved hackney sonneteer, or me! But let a lord once own the happy lines, How the wit brightens! how the style refines!

Producing perfection from imperfection is, after all, the highest of art forms.

Taste is the fundamental quality which sums up all other qualities. It is the ne plus ultra of the intelligence.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Every great masterpiece is a purification of the world.

Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.

Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.

All art does but consist in the removal of surplusage.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

There is no excuse for doing anything which is not strikingly beautiful.

The most exquisite words and finest strokes of an author are those which very often appear the most doubtful and exceptionable to a man who wants a relish for polite learning; and they are those which a sour undistinguishing critic generally attacks with the greatest violence.

The natural progress of the works of men is from rudeness to convenience, from convenience to elegance, and from elegance to nicety.

I think that there is an air of experience and aesthetic sophistication that weaves in with the amateur aspects of the film [Dream of Life]; it gives the film a certain elegance.

I've heard that many fine artists have to turn their 'finished' paintings to face the wall - otherwise, every time they walk past, they are tempted to pick up a brush and make small adjustments here and there.

We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental.

Elegance is reduction, simplification, condensation. It is spare, stark, sleek. Elegance is cultivated abstraction. The source of Greek and Roman classicism - clarity, order, proportion, balance - is in Egypt.

Men of wit, learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays.

I feel like I'm a realized artist, but hey, the good news is I can get better, and I'm going to continue to aim for that.

Sadistic excess attempts to reach roughly and by harshness what art reaches by fineness.

Such is the strength of art, rough things to shape.