Aesthetic Motivational Quotes

Ô, the wine of a woman from heaven is sent, more perfect than all that a man can invent.

Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

The pursuit of science has often been compared to the scaling of mountains, high and not so high. But who amongst us can hope, even in imagination, to scale the Everest and reach its summit when the sky is blue and the air is still, and in the stillness of the air survey the entire Himalayan range in the dazzling white of the snow stretching to infinity? None of us can hope for a comparable vision of nature and of the universe around us. But there is nothing mean or lowly in standing in the valley below and awaiting the sun to rise over Kinchinjunga.

It took twenty-five years from the prediction of the neutrino to its detection, almost fifty years to confirm the Higgs boson, a hundred years to directly detect gravitational waves. Now the time it takes to test a new fundamental law of nature can be longer than a scientist’s full career. This forces theorists to draw upon criteria other than empirical adequacy to decide which research avenues to pursue. Aesthetic appeal is one of them. In our search for new ideas, beauty plays many roles. It’s a guide, a reward, a motivation. It is also a systematic bias.

Thus discernment, artistic or otherwise, is a critical skill, and yet it can be something we take for granted, in part because we do it so effortlessly. Think about how rarely we’re impressed by truly unimpressive people. When it happens, we feel as though we’ve been taken in by a charlatan. It can even be embarrassing to demonstrate poor aesthetic judgment. We don’t want others to know that we’re inept at telling good art from bad, skilled artists from amateurs. This suggests that we evaluate each other not only for our first-order skills, but for our skills at evaluating the skills of others. Human social life is many layered indeed.

Well, there is a piece of famous advice, grand advice even if it is German, to forget what you can't bear. The strong can forget, can shut out history. Very good. Even if it is self-flattery to speak of strength--these aesthetic philosophers, they take a posture, but power sweeps postures away. Still, it's true you can't go on transposing one nightmare into another, Nietzsche was certainly right about that. The tender-minded must harden themselves. Is this world nothing but a barren lump of coke? No, no, but what sometimes seems a system of prevention, a denial of what every human being knows. I love my children, but I am the world to them, and bring them nightmares. I had this child by my enemy. And I love her. The sight of her, the odor of her hair, this minute, makes me tremble with love. Isn't it mysterious how I love the child of my enemy? But a man doesn't need happiness for himself. No, he can put up with any amount of torment--with recollections, with his own familiar evils, despair. And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do without gratification for himself provided there is something great, something into which his being, and all beings can go. He does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope. Because then it is self-evident; it is meaning.

The conventions of hedonism and of utility can, in fact, be extremely elaborate. Its motives, however, though perhaps wholly free of greed, remain strictly those of need. Goodness remains reducible to utility, rightness to prudence, beauty to aesthetic enjoyment. The point of reference is individual preference, not the generically human vision of a moral sense of life. What is missing is the recognition of intrinsic beauty, rightness, goodness.

Frequently, I have been asked if an experiment I have planned is pure or applied science; to me it is more important to know if the experiment will yield new and probably enduring knowledge about nature. If it is likely to yield such knowledge, it is, in my opinion, good fundamental research; and this is more important than whether the motivation is purely aesthetic satisfaction on the part of the experimenter on the one hand or the improvement of the stability of a high-power transistor on the other.

I love football. I love the aesthetics of football. I love the athleticism of football. I love the movement of the players, the antics of the coaches. I love the dynamism of the fans. I love their passion for their badge and the colour of their team and their country. I love the noise and the buzz and the electricity in the stadium. I love the songs. I love the way the ball moves and then it flows and the way a teams fortune rises and falls through a game and through a season. But what I love about football is that it brings people together across religious divides, geographic divides, political divides. I love the fact that for ninety minutes in a rectangular piece of grass, people can forget hopefully, whatever might be going on in their life, and rejoice in this communal celebration of humanity. The biggest diverse, invasive or pervasive culture that human kinds knows is football and I love the fact that at the altar of football human kind can come worship and celebrate.

Many real-world Northwestern endonyms have European origins, such as “Portland,” “Victoria,” “Bellingham,” and “Richland.” To address this phenomenon while also contributing a sense of the fantastic, I chose to utilize a forgotten nineteenth century European artificial language as a source. Volapük is clumsy and awkward, but shares a relationship with English vocabulary (upon which it is based) that I was able to exploit. In my fictional universe, that relationship is swapped, and English (or rather, “Vendelabodish”) words derive from Volapük (“Valütapük”). This turns Volapük into an ancient Latin-like speech, offering texture to a fictional history of the colonizers of my fictional planets. Does one have to understand ancient Rome and medieval Europe and America’s Thirteen Colonies to understand the modern Pacific Northwest? Nah. But exploring the character and motivations of a migrating, imperial culture certainly sets the stage for explaining a modernist backlash against the atrocities that inevitably come with colonization.             The vocabulary of Volapük has also given flavor that is appropriate, I feel, to the quasi-North American setting. While high fantasy worlds seem to be built with pillars of European fairy tales, the universe of Geoduck Street is intentionally built with logs of North American tall tales. Tolkien could wax poetic about the aesthetic beauty of his Elvish words all he wanted, since aesthetic beauty fits the mold of fairies and shimmering palaces, but Geoduck Street needed a “whopper-spinning” approach to artificial language that would make a flapjack-eating Paul Bunyan proud. A prominent case in point: in this fictional universe, the word “yagalöp” forms the etymological root of “jackalope.” “Yag,” in the original nineteenth century iteration of Volapük, means “hunting,” while “löp” means “summit.” Combining them together makes them “the summit of hunting.” How could a jackalope not be a point of pride among hunting trophies?

The main signpost that helps political realism to find its way through the landscape of international politics is the concept of interest defined in terms of power. This concept provides the link between reason trying to understand international politics and the facts to be understood. It sets politics as an autonomous sphere of action and understanding apart from other spheres, such as economics (understood in terms of interest defined as wealth), ethics, aesthetics, or religion. Without such a concept a theory of politics, international or domestic, would be altogether impossible, for without it we could not distinguish between political and nonpolitical facts, nor could we bring at least a measure of systematic order to the political sphere. We assume that statesmen think and act in terms of interest defined as power, and the evidence of history bears that assumption out. That assumption allows us to retrace and anticipate, as it were, the steps a statesman - past, present, or future - has taken or will take on the political scene. We look over his shoulder when he writes his dispatches; we listen in on his conversation with other statesmen; we read and anticipate his very thoughts. Thinking in terms of interest defined as power, we think as he does, and as disinterested observers we understand his thoughts and actions perhaps better than he, the actor on the political scene, does himself. The concept of interest defined as power imposes intellectual discipline upon the observer, infuses rational order into the subject matter of politics, and thus makes the theoretical understanding of politics possible. On the side of the actor, it provides for rational discipline in action and creates that astounding continuity in foreign policy which makes American, British, or Russian foreign policy appear as an intelligible, rational continuum, by and large consistent within itself, regardless of the different motives, preferences, and intellectual and moral qualities of successive statesmen.

Television’s greatest appeal is that it is engaging without being at all demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving. It’s the same in all low art that has as goal continued attention and patronage: it’s appealing precisely because it’s at once fun and easy. And the entrenchment of a culture built on Appeal helps explain a dark and curious thing: at a time when there are more decent and good and very good serious fiction writers at work in America than ever before, an American public enjoying unprecedented literacy and disposable income spends the vast bulk of its reading time and book dollar on fiction that is, by any fair standard, trash. Trash fiction is, by design and appeal, most like televised narrative: engaging without being demanding. But trash, in terms of both quality and popularity, is a much more sinister phenomenon. For while television has from its beginnings been openly motivated by — has been about—considerations of mass appeal and L.C.D. and profit, our own history is chock-full of evidence that readers and societies may properly expect important, lasting contributions from a narrative art that understands itself as being about considerations more important than popularity and balance sheets. Entertainers can divert and engage and maybe even console; only artists can transfigure. Today’s trash writers are entertainers working artists’ turf. This in itself is nothing new. But television aesthetics, and television-like economics, have clearly made their unprecedented popularity and reward possible. And there seems to me to be a real danger that not only the forms but the norms of televised art will begin to supplant the standards of all narrative art. This would be a disaster. [...] Even the snottiest young artiste, of course, probably isn’t going to bear personal ill will toward writers of trash; just as, while everybody agrees that prostitution is a bad thing for everyone involved, few are apt to blame prostitutes themselves, or wish them harm. If this seems like a non sequitur, I’m going to claim the analogy is all too apt. A prostitute is someone who, in exchange for money, affords someone else the form and sensation of sexual intimacy without any of the complex emotions or responsibilities that make intimacy between two people a valuable or meaningful human enterprise. The prostitute “gives,” but — demanding nothing of comparable value in return — perverts the giving, helps render what is supposed to be a revelation a transaction. The writer of trash fiction, often with admirable craft, affords his customer a narrative structure and movement, and content that engages the reader — titillates, repulses, excites, transports him — without demanding of him any of the intellectual or spiritual or artistic responses that render verbal intercourse between writer and reader an important or even real activity." - from "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young

Motif Petrify in fairy tales, as multiple aesthetical, has complex origins and development. Forgotten Transformed ritual foundation motive is revealed in the ritual killing of old people. The cyclical myth dismissal of growth and decline is attributed to old people stopping power of life. In order to preserve the life force Penina points out that it took to destroy the creatures that personified their weakening. Mythological justification for the ritual murder of the demonized old lady is a representative of an old man’s death. In doing so, there is no risk of punishment or retaliation for the killing done, because in the moral and mythological plane victim turns into a bully who needs to catch up with retribution. Deeply rooted in the mythical magical notion of the sacred, ritual killing old people is not completely lost in the genres of oral tradition, but is largely hidden in fairy tales. Another basis Petrify in fairy tales is tied for proofing hero. In this type of Petrify emphasized the dependence of suffering from violations of the ban. Offense prohibiting turning into a demonic time and space, or prohibiting speech that is not necessarily related to the hazards arising from the proximity of the demons in lyrical songs, ballads, and some traditions and psychologically conditioned, but the tales he has not shown in the light of personal motives, since the clash of two sacred place in the framework of fulfilling the task of the hero. The power of the heroes in the face of a hostile beings Petrifying people in fairy tales to finalize a victory over the demon, a demon or a subsequent grace which frees the victim of the killed hero of his unfortunate fate, eventually expires Penina Mezei.

There was a product which seemed attractive, expensive, portable, beautiful and simple. Everybody talked about its beauty but they bought it for it's simplicity.

All intending students of Buddhism would do well to remember, however, that the heart of the Dharma, the spiritual essence that underlies and interpenetrates all doctrinal formulations, metaphysical disciplines, and aesthetic expressions, will be revealed, not in proportion to the bulk of our scholastic equipment, but only to the extent to which we have cultivated right motive.

a syllabus is established over time. . . . it represents cultural, social, pedagogic choices which aim at more or less stable consensus. . . . the syllabus is instinct not only with aesthetic but also with political and political-economic motives and valuations. There is a politics in the marketing of the 'classical' as there is a counter-politics in the bartering of the subversive and the anarchic. A canon, on the contrary, is a profoundly personal construct. . . . A canon is the guarded catalogue of that in speech, music and art which houses inside us, which is irrevocably familiar to our homecomings.

It is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion, but not necessarily an Orwellian one. It is nice, not brutal. Nannying, not bullying. But it is definitely totalitarian--or "holistic", if you prefer--in that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and outer appearance, all have political salience for liberal fascists. Liberals place their faith in priestly experts who know better, who plan, exhort, badger, and scold. They try to use science to discredit traditional notions of religion and faith, but they speak the language of pluralism and spirituality to defend "nontraditional" beliefs. Just as with classical fascism, liberal fascists speak of a "Third Way" between right and left where all good things go together and all hard choices are "false choices". The idea that there are no hard choices--that is, choices between competing goods--is religious and totalitarian because it assumes that all good things are fundamentally compatible. The conservatives or classical liberal vision understands that life is unfair, that man is flawed, and that the only perfect society, the only real utopia, waits for us in the next life. Liberal fascism differs from classical fascism in many ways. I don't deny this. Indeed, it is central to my point. Fascisms differ from each other because they grow out of different soil. What unites them are their emotional or instinctual impulses, such as the quest for community, the urge to "get beyond" politics, a faith in the perfectibility of man and the authority of experts, and an obsession with the aesthetics of youth, the cult of action, and the need for an all powerful state to coordinate society at the national or global level. Most of all, they share the belief--what I call the totalitarian temptation--that with the right amount of tinkering we can realize the utopian dream of "creating a better world".

If you’ve ever suffered the accusations of people who objectified you as an emblem of darkness, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been haunted by the opinions of your friends, it wasn’t your fault. If they’ve ever assumed the worst of you, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been judged by your own parents, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been treated as an outcast, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever made a decision based on an opinion, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been labeled, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been stuck in the middle of a love triangle, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever been heartbroken, it wasn’t your fault. If you’ve ever cried yourself to sleep, it wasn’t your fault. As you suffered and grew up, your soul got stained, your heart got shattered and your body paralyzed, which drove you into a deep state of slow sleep. As you opened your eyes, the atrocities of your past were glistening over your eyes and you knew, you had lost yourself in a place of utter darkness, but there was learning to be done in the cold dark. Like seeds of plants shaded by dirt, you twitched with the want to rise. As you grew tired of the shadows, you climbed into a world that was finally making room for light. Room for you and for all your truth. You ignited not in the light but in the distant shadows of the dark. In your chaos, you found clarity. In your suffering, you found purpose. You didn’t ignore the pain. You gave it reason. You used it. You reveled in it. As you began your journey to redefine yourself in misery and pain, your heart grew fonder but you didn’t give up. As stones of suffering came to dance, your feet took flight, the sun tried to burn you down, but God threw a shadow over the horizon and you saw a ray of hope and chased your way over the mightiest slopes. For a long time, you thought being different was a negative thing; but as you grew older, you started to realize that you were born to stand out, not blend in. Now, when people put a label on you, you find comfort in your true self because, in the end, you are proud to be who you’re. You’re a survivor. You and I come from completely different places, our world is a parallel space and we speak different languages, but one thing I’m sure of is that my heart beats the same as yours. At end of the day, we’re all meant to be who we are; Our True Selves.

I hope you don't get stuck in the atrocities of your past. For others, it may just be a story but for people like us, it's the epitome of scars and a mountain of insurmountable obstacles.

I wonder what brought us here? The analogy of our situation or the void we want to fill? Perhaps, our previous journey was a complete sham; both stuck in the atrocities of the past; impotent to move on from our former grievances and after all this time, we meet again. Maybe, this time it will be different; maybe this time we won't repeat the same mistakes we made; maybe this time we'll do better; maybe this time we'll be better. But what if we didn't? What if this contemporary start of our new era destroyed us now more than ever? The question begs itself and the rest is silence!

Logic requires knowledge.

You are on the edge of the escarpment, confused whether to dive into a new chapter of life or immerse in the story of your past.

According to Croce, therefore, the burden of artistic meaning lies not with representation but with expression. And expression is the vehicle of aesthetic value. Works of art express things, and even abstract art, like instrumental music or abstract painting, can be an effective milieu for expression. So how do we understand expression, and why is it a value? One suggestion is that works of art express emotion, and that this is of value to us because it acquaints us with the human condition, and arouses our sympathies for experiences that we do not otherwise undergo. But clearly works of art don’t express emotion in the way that you express your anger by shouting at your son, or your love by speaking to him affectionately. Most works of art are not created in a sudden heat of passion; nor do we have the knowledge that will enable us to say what passion (if any) motivated the artist. Even when artists refer to the emotion that is allegedly conveyed by their work, we may not believe that their description is the correct one. Beethoven prefaced the slow movement of Op. 132 with the description ‘Hymn of thanksgiving from the convalescent to the Godhead in the Lydian mode’. Suppose you respond by saying ‘To me it is just a serene expression of contentment, and convalescence has nothing to do with it’. Does that show that you have not understood the movement? Why is Beethoven any better placed than you, to put words to the feeling conveyed by his music? Maybe you, as critic, are better able to describe the emotional content of a piece of music than the composer. There are plenty of artists who are awoken by criticism to the meaning of their own works: such, for example, was T. S. Eliot’s response to Helen Gardner’s book about his poetry—namely, at last I know what it means.

I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose: 1. Sheer egoism [...] It is humbug to pretend that this is not a motive, a strong one. [...] But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. 2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. 3. Historical impulse 4. Political purpose

The conflict of perspectives and competing wills that is the true reality is obscured and flattened out by the social imposition of a common standpoint, in language, thought, morality, and politics, which presents itself as simply or cosmically true by concealing its true sources. The inquiry into the geneology of these ruling ideas is therefore a vital part of their unmasking. The proposed geneology of Christian morality, as the expression not of universal love but of the slave revolt of the base against the noble, motivated by fear, hatred, and envy, is Nietzsche’s most famous thesis, expounded in Beyond Good and Evil and On the Geneology of Morals. . . . He regarded modern morality, which speaks with the voice of the community or even of humanity as a whole, as particularly dangerous, because it requires suppression of the cruelty and recklessness that distinguishes the strong individual. The height of self-realization cannot be reached by someone who is too concerned with the reactions of others, or his effects on them. There is a fundamental conflict between the pursuit of individual creativity and perfection and the claims of the general welfare. For this reason, Nietzsche was not a democrat. Already at the time of writing The Birth of Tragedy, he defended slavery as a condition of the possibility of great cultural achievement by the few, as in ancient Athens. And he defended its modern counterpart, the economic oppression of the masses, for the same reason. He opposed shortening the workday from twelve hours to eleven when it was proposed in Basel, he approved of child labor, and he opposed the educational groups for workers. When in 1871 he heard the false rumor that the Paris communards had pillaged the Louvre, he called it ‘the worst day of my life.’ Equality meant nothing to him; he believed it would inevitably push everything down to the lowest common denominator, that of the ‘democratic herd animal.’ Life, he insisted, is tragic; it is necessary to choose between justice and aesthetic perfection. And in his latest writings he expressed fantasies of annihilation, with ‘degenerates’ being got rid of to make room for the highest type of man.

Poets were believed to have access to the muses, the daughters of memory who possessed historical knowledge and insight into the gods’ motives.

No one taught me how to analyse a book, how to read from a safe distance, how not to lose sight of context, how to grasp the things left unsaid. No one taught me about schools of thought or even the ideologies meant to give depth to a mundane story. No one taught me aesthetics, language... All these, I discovered in high school while studying the classics, and broadened this knowledge at the Higher Teachers' Training College in Yaounde, from which I graduated as a French teacher. But I had already developed a habit. All my life, I would read the same way l had started off—intensely, passionately, instinctively—and sentence fragments would stick with me […] Books soothed my soul, made me angry, made me strong. They made me laugh and cry. They pushed me to examine existence with my own mind, to trust my intuition, to stretch my mind to perceive—against the backdrop of characters, nature, and plot—the intricate symphony of time that beams our being to the world. As a child, reading made me feel less lonely, less insignificant, less vulnerable. As an adult, I developed enough discernment to understand that, while reading had not made me a better person, it had made me more levelheaded towards my own motivations, and freer.

Why I write . . . science fiction or fantasy . . . is a question which I am in a better position to answer. First, this is an area of fiction where the writer has considerably more freedom than in other types of fiction. I enjoy descriptive writing, and it pleases me to be able to describe landscapes and meteorological phenomena which could not exist on Earth, but which might be possible elsewhere; similarly, with characters and their motivations. For an example, I indulged my fancy in all of these things in my novelette ‘The Keys To December,’ which contained unmanlike humans engaged in an unusual project on a strange world. This provided an aesthetic pleasure of a sort that would not have obtained had I written a more down-to-Earth story.

Although it is the sensory-motor-emotive level that motivates the poet, whose cognitive processes of creativity work upward from the roots through the trunk to the leaves of the cognitive metaphor tree, the respondents to a poem work downwards from the linguistic leaves through the conceptual trunk to its sensory-motor-emotive roots.

Virtues sketch the values, not aesthetics.

If you compare the written prayers from the psalms, the Lord's Prayer, or those we find in the prayer books of the church, one thing will immediately strike any reader: The prayers from those sources are theologically rich and aesthetically appropriate. I cannot always say this of the spontaneous prayers of many Christians—and I am not impugning their motives or questioning their hearts.