Gray Aesthetic Quotes

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit

He criticized Christianity, but his objections were not so much intellectual as moral and aesthetic: he attacked the Christian religion because of its impact on the quality of life. Devaluing the natural world for the sake of a spiritual realm, Christianity could not be other than hostile to happiness: ‘man’, Leopardi wrote, ‘was happier before Christianity than after it.

Es una triste verdad, pero hemos perdido la capacidad de dar nombres bonitos a las cosas. Los nombres lo son todo.

Quizá te imagines que estás a salvo y te crees fuerte. Pero un matiz casual de color en una habitación o en el cielo de la mañana, o un perfume particular que una vez te gustó y que te trae sutiles recuerdos, un verso de un poema olvidado con el que de nuevo tropiezas, una cadencia de una obra musical que hayas dejado de tocar..., te digo, que es de cosas como esas de las que dependen nuestras vidas.

Es la incertidumbre la que nos encanta. La bruma vuelve maravillosas las cosas.

Autumn comes early to the foot of the Slovenian Alps. Even before September, the abundant harvests are followed by a sudden poignant rain that lasts for days and brings down leaves in the lanes of the village. Now, in my fifties, I find myself wandering that direction every few years, reliving my first glimpse of the Slovenian countryside. This is old country. Every autumn mellows it a little more, in aeternum, each beginning with the same three colors: a green landscape, two or three yellow leaves falling through a gray afternoon. I suppose the Romans - who left their walls here and their gargantuan arenas to the west, on the coast - saw the same autumn and gave the same shiver. When my father's car swung through the gates of the oldest of Julian cities, I hugged myself. For the first time, I had been struck by the excitement of the traveler who looks history in her subtle face.

I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily–against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better. This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

The result in all these cities, from Berlin to Stalingrad, was the classic Soviet-era housing solution: mile upon mile of identical gray or brown cement blocks; cheap, poorly-constructed, with no distinguishing architectural features and lacking any aesthetic indulgence (or public facilities).

And he says that everything, absolutely everything, is a question of aesthetics and color. That people aren’t really unhappy with you or your government. That the problem is the gray color of your uniforms, such a depressing color, so dull, and it doesn’t go with anything. Do you realize that the only color it goes with is red, it’s the only way to dress it up, make it look good? What a contradiction.

As they flew, Holden looked back up at the Knight: a blocky gray wedge with a drive cone stuck on the wider end. Like everything else humans built for space travel, it was designed to be efficient, not pretty. That always made Holden a little sad. There should be room for aesthetics, even out here.

To be allowed even one color plate in these rather stiff formal articles consisting largely of long scientific names, tables of measurements, fin counts, descriptions of viscera, ect., gives me a feeling of aesthetic release that perhaps the conservative businessman feels when he tops off a dull gray suit and plain white shirt with a red tie.

In principle, I had no objection to snakes. They ate rats, which was laudable of them, some were ornamental, and most of them were wise enough to keep out of my way. Live and let live was my basic attitude. On the other hand, that was theory. In practice, I had any number of objections to the huge snake curled up on the seat of the privy. Beyond the fact that he was gravely discommoding me at present, he wasn’t usefully eating rats and he wasn’t aesthetically pleasing, either, being a sort of drab gray with darker splotches. My major objection to him, though, was the fact that he was a rattlesnake. I supposed that in a way it was fortunate that he was; it was only the heartstopping buzz of his rattles that had prevented me sitting on him in the dawn’s early light.

As Oscar Wilde once observed in a letter to a magazine in response to criticisms of The Picture of Dorian Gray, “If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.” Our trembling little human lives and emotions are exactly this—works of art that are “rich and vital and complete”—they're neither good nor bad, but deeply amazing to those of us willing to appreciate great and aching beauty.

Slate reached the thorn tree and leaped into the branches, climbing nimbly to the very top. The moonlight turned her thick, gray pelt to silver and her eyes shone like two tiny moons. The branch swayed beneath her and she balanced there without a trace of fear.

I slid into one of my black suits (why other colors existed was beyond me. Black was suitable for every occasion. The only exception I made was with gray sweatpants, because those were practically considered lingerie for men) and wandered out of the master bedroom. I descended down the three marble steps to the living room. Black, sleek chandeliers dripped from the ceiling, and upholstered black leather couches and recliners filled the room. The three walls that weren’t floor-to-ceiling windows were bare, raw concrete. Everything about my place was dark, indulgent, and dangerous. An apartment carefully designed in the aesthetic of a modern douchebag.

The moralistic critic thinks that the most important thing about literature is its moral or political message or impact. The aesthetist thinks that the moral or political content of a work of literature or of art has little or nothing to do with either the value of the work or the pleasure to be derived from it. The aesthetist's slogan is Wilde's dictum, in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, that 'there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all'. In other words, immersion in literature doesn't make us better citizens or better people... conversely, a work of literature is not maimed or even marred by expressing odious moral views, and by the same token a mediocre work of literature is not redeemed by expressing moral views of which we approve.

The horror the Japanese have of the unexpected and the decisions is requires. The Japanese will become the most aesthetic people in the world. Six Buddhist sects have sprung from the interpretation of the scriptures and on ceremonial days, their priests wear tunics of raspberry, saffron, pistachio or violet, which create a lovely effect on the gray-brown-green of the Japanese landscape. The cemeteries are the fish ponds for the temples. These foreign visitors demand that before they leave Japan, someone should wrap up the "soul of Japan" for them. What do they want? Suddenly, through a simple mental process, their ignorance should be transformed into knowledge, clear-cut and precise, please, so that they can discuss it when they get home. I judge them, but I too, would sometimes like to find my meal set in front of me and fast. We come to this thin and frugal country with our greedy metabolisms: the whole West is that way. The golden dishes, the maharajahs, the rubies as big as the duck eggs, that is what struck our first explorers, not the frugality that is truly one of the marks of Asia. Have you ever drunk a good bottle of wine with a connaisseur? It is a form of torture. Because of the rhythm of Noh, travel is so slow that winter always overtakes travelers en route. They travel in tiny steps across a sort of mental Tibet. Japan: a self-sustaining island, rich in gold and in solver, excellent products, a disciplined and frugal population that carries cleanliness to the point of fanaticism, an always-appropriate alternation between honesty and hypocrisy, in short, the best governed state in the world. Walking does help to support the insupportable. When things turn bad, rather than expecting too much from people, one must sharpen one's relations with things. The tao ( the philosophy of Lao-tzu, sixth century B.C ) taught that our mind is a troublemaker that interferes between life and us, that we are victims of our categories. What exactly is Zen? For some it is a religion, for others a form of therapy, a means of liberation, a guide to character, a reaction of the Chinese spirit against the Indian spirit. True saints are not always on hand for writers who are passing through, people who don't need what one knows. In the Orient, knowledge is given spoonful by spoonful to the people who are truly hungry and the word "secret" means nothing here. In old Chinese Zen it was traditional to choose the gardener who knew nothing to succeed the master rather than one who knew too much. In this style of decor, as in the food, there is an immateriality repeated again and again: make yourself small, don't hurt the air, don't would our eyes with your terrible colored shirts, don't be so restless and don't offend this slightly bloodless perfection that we have been tending for eight hundred years. A crane preening his feathers, this elegant bird, so inexpressibly white, posed in the middle of the reeds, like a Ming vase.

But when we expect winter wonder, our attention and behavior reorient accordingly. The cold becomes a reminder that it’s time to make soup, our commutes become chances to observe the rain fall, and gray mornings become aesthetic backdrops for coffee drinking. When