Aesthetic Realism Quotes

Art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. Realism is striving for truth, and truth is always beautiful. Here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

We want people to represent us in politics - and in love and economics too. When people represent us fully, they are ourselves and are not ourselves. When an object is simultaneously the same as and different from the person concerned with it - or considering it - aesthetics is there. ~ Eli Siegel

The main reason why men and women make different aesthetic judgments is the fact that the latter, generally incapable of abstraction, only admire what meets their complete approval. ~ Franz Grillparzer

There is no point in being realistic about here and now, no use at all not any, and so it is not the nineteenth but the twentieth century, there is no realism now, life is not real it is not earnest, it is strange which is an entirely different matter. ~ Gertrude Stein

photos of everything befitting a mid- century table. This comforting, simple, homey-but-vibrant aesthetic became my ideal. It was ~ Meg Ray

I would hate to think I'm promoting sadness as an aesthetic. But I grew up in not just a family but a town and a culture where sadness is something you're taught to feel shame about. You end up chronically desiring what can be a very sentimental idea of love and connection. A lot of my work has been about trying to make a space for sadness. ~ Mike Mills

Aesthetic sense is the twin of one's instinct for self-preservation and is more reliable than ethics. ~ Joseph Brodsky

The ride to Alicante had been like something out of a dream, or a cheesy romance novel. The two of them astride white stallions, galloping across the countryside, charging across emerald meadows and through a forest the color of flames. Isabelle's hair streamed behind her like a river of ink, and Simon had even managed not to fall off his horse--never a foregone conclusion. ~ Cassandra Clare

The idealized market was supposed to deliver 'friction free' exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers' performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that 'More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority's services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services'. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as 'market Stalinism'. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.
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It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the 'true spirit' of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only ~ Mark Fisher

What liberates the imagination is the sense that work in its theory and practice holds aesthetic possibilities, that jobs can be elegantly conceived and gracefully done. This sense of beauty unlocks feelings of pleasure and love and breaks down the barrier between worker and work and commit to work not merely the "thinking" consciousness but the full resources of mind. ~ Robert Grudin

When everything is said and done, the only thing that really matters is the quality of the soul you build during the life you're given. ~ Kayt C. Peck

I don't call myself an 'industrial designer,' because I'm other things. Industrial designers want to make novel things. Novelty is a concept of commerce, not an aesthetic concept. ~ Eva Zeisel

This business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all. ~ George W. Bush

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today's technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments. ~ Walter Benjamin

Political realism is based upon a pluralistic conception of human nature. Real man is a composite of "economic man," "political man," "moral man," "religious man," etc. A man who was nothing but "political man" would be a beast, for he would be completely lacking in moral restraints. A man who was nothing but "moral man" would be a fool, for he would be completely lacking in prudence. A man who was nothing but "religious man" would be a saint, for he would be completely lacking in worldly desires.
Recognizing that these different facets of human nature exist, political realism also recognizes that in order to understand one of them one has to deal with it on its own terms. That is to say, if I want to understand "religious man," I must for the time being abstract from the other aspects of human nature and deal with its religious aspect as if it were the only one. Furthermore, I must apply to the religious sphere the standards of thought appropriate to it, always remaining aware of the existence of other standards and their actual influence upon the religious qualities of man. What is true of this facet of human nature is true of all the others. No modern economist, for instance, would conceive of his science and its relations to other sciences of man in any other way. It is exactly through such a process of emancipation from other standards of thought, and the development of one appropriate to its subject matter, that economics has developed as an autonomous theory of th ~ Hans J. Morgenthau

Most girls celebrate their birthdays with friends. I spent mine with a pack of wolves. ~ Ruth Emmie Lang

Contrasted to the Enlightenment ideal of a unified epistemology that discovers the foundational truths of physical and biological phenomena and unites them with an accurate understanding of humanity in its psychological, social, political, and aesthetic aspects, postmodern skepticism rejects the possibility of enduring universal knowledge in any area. It holds that all knowledge is local, or "situated," the product of interaction of a social class, rigidly circumscribed by its interests and prejudices, with the historical conditions of its existence. There is no knowledge, then; there are merely stories, "narratives," devised to satisfy the human need to make some sense of the world. ~ Paul R. Gross

Any number of holier-than-thou honorable realists walk around in the belief that they have accomplished something, simply because they tell you for the hundredth time that a field is green and a red-painted house is painted red. ~ Edvard Munch

I just happened to have my camera and be photographing my friends. It was totally innocent; there was no purpose to the photographs. There was a purity to them that wasn't planned; it was realism. ~ Larry Clark

Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women's bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them. ~ Germaine Greer

Described by Harold Bloom as "the beginning of the end of the traditional novel of social morality" (xii), George Eliot's Middlemarch is nonetheless replete with a kind of authorial intervention that modern readers might find tiresome. Readers today are accustomed to the contemporary fictional maxim of "show, don't tell" but Eliot had different aesthetic ideas, for she always tells us right away who we are dealing with. At the beginning of Middlemarch, the character of one of its protagonists, Dorothea Brooke, is laid out. Eliot writes, ~ George Eliot

Sometimes gaining and losing are more intimately related than we like to think. And some things cannot be moved or owned. Some light does not make it all the way through the atmosphere, but scatters ... The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel. If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not ... abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway ... Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant. ~ Rebecca Solnit

I do not think that any realism is beautiful. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

The good designer aims at a perfect fusion of the various considerations which enter into his design. He aims at an untortured unity-a direct whole. He arranges his levels consciously or subconsciously, adhearing to the requisites of the problem he is asked to solve or to his own inclination. Some designers see total act through a disc of aesthetic considerations-others, more practical minded, may put economic considerations at top level. ~ Leo Lionni

For these were the days when Time was still the horizon of beauty and had not yet begun its slow inexorable destructions. ~ J. Mulrooney

In life, idea and emotion come separately. Mind and passions revolve in different spheres of our humanity, rarely coordinated, usually at odds. In fact, in life, moments that blaze with a fusion of idea and emotion are so rare, when they happen you think you're having a religious experience. But whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion. ~ Robert McKee

The real reality is always just around the corner. ~ Mason Cooley

The Unexpected stalks a farm in big boots like a vagrant bent on havoc. Not every farmer is an inventor, but the good ones have the seeds of invention within them. Economy and efficiency move their relentless tinkering and yet the real motive often seems to be aesthetic. The mind that first designed a cutter bar is not far different from a mind that can take the intractable steel of an outsized sickle blade and make it hum in the end. The question is how to reduce the simplicity that constitutes a problem ("It's simple; it's broke.") to the greater simplicity that constitutes a solution. ~ Verlyn Klinkenborg

I want big ideas to have aesthetic relevance. I want to tickle people's intellectual sensibilities and instill a sense of wonder. ~ Jason Silva

Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards. ~ Susan Sontag

Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.
Alexander Supertramp, May 1992 ~ Christopher McCandless

Whether you're talking about political borders or aesthetic divisions (and clearly, the political ones have much more tragic consequences), it seems like once they are created, we want to patrol them, enforce them. ~ Matthea Harvey

The fact is that libertarianism is not and does not pretend to be a complete moral or aesthetic theory; it is only a political theory, that is, the important subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in social life.

Political theory deals with what is proper or improper for government to do, and government is distinguished from every other group in society as being the institution of organized violence. Libertarianism holds that the only proper role of violence is to defend person and property against violence, that any use of violence that goes beyond such just defense is itself aggressive, unjust, and criminal. Libertarianism, therefore, is a theory which states that everyone should be free of violent invasion, should be free to do as he sees fit, except invade the person or property of another. What a person does with his or her life is vital and important, but is simply irrelevant to libertarianism.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that there are libertarians who are indeed hedonists and devotees of alternative lifestyles, and that there are also libertarians who are firm adherents of "bourgeois" conventional or religious morality. There are libertarian libertines and there are libertarians who cleave firmly to the disciplines of natural or religious law. There are other libertarians who have no moral theory at all apart from the imperative of non-violation of rights. That is because libertarianism per se has no genera ~ Murray N. Rothbard

But the days are still ours, and we still have many fine moments ahead of us. ~ Jostein Gaarder

Organization. If you want big words to talk to intellectuals with, that's a fine big word, son, just as many syllables as imagination, and it has a lot more realism in it. ~ Robert Shea

The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, as water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it further with words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings? ~ Jorge Luis Borges

But just as my philosophy had ceased to interest me as soon as it was formulated into a set of principles so, when I saw myself being imitated, I realised at once what an incubus my aesthetic personality might become if I were to be trapped within it. Imitation changes, not the impersonator, but the impersonated. ~ Peter Ackroyd