In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.

— Baruch Spinoza

In the past an artist produced things that were necessary socially; they were instruments, albeit of a special kind, that helped the dead reach eternity, spells to be cast, prayers to be liturgically fleshed. . . . The aesthetic component of those instruments enhanced their function but was never central, never an independent, nonutilitarian thing.

— Stanisław Lem

In the psychology of aesthetics, there is a name for the moment between the anxiety of confronting something new and the satisfying click of understanding it. It is called an 'aesthetic aha.

— Derek Thompson

In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.

— Clarice Lispector

Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it's beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

I think that's what art is: art is communication made in the hope that interesting miscommunications will arise.

— Misha Glouberman

It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.

— Walter Pater

....it seems to me that a pleasurable Contemplation of Beauty has certainly an immeasurably greater value than mere Consciousness of Pleasure.

— G.E. Moore

[I’t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,

— Ross Wetzsteon

It was one of God's jokes that such a dumb mind had been put in such an eloquent body.

— Charlaine Harris