Quotations on beauty

Give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirits of heaviness.
Bible, Isaiah 61: 3

Beauty ... in things ... exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.
David Hume (1757)

Truth is disputable, not human taste.
David Hume

Kant thought that judgments of taste had to be universal to be valued.
Arthur Danto (1999)

Since every age and every people have had their own form of beauty, we inevitably have ours.
Charles Baudelaire (1845)

So-called "good taste" takes fright at all the deeper affects of art.
Friedrich Hegel

One evening I sat Beauty on my knee and I found her bitter, and I injured her.
Arthur Rimbaud (1871)

Art is not the application of a cannon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon.
Pablo Picasso (1935)

The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty.
Barnett Newman (1948)

I threw the bottle rack and the urinal in their faces as a challenge, and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.
Marcel Duchamp (1962)

With my whole body, I taste these peaches.
Wallace Stevens

Beauty is the mystery of life.
Agnes Martin, (1989)

All artwork is about beauty: all positive work represents it and celebrates it. All negative art protests the lack of beauty in our lives.
Agnes Martin (1989)

It is as though beauty were a catalyst, transforming raw grief into tranquil sadness.
Arthur Danto (1990)

Truth and beauty live most happily amid complexity and paradox.
Jane Hirshfield: Nine Gates, page 102

The vernacular of beauty ... remains a potent instrument for change in this civilization.
David Hickey (1993)

Beauty creates shame.
Vanessa Beecroft (1998)

There is something crazy in a culture in which the value of beauty becomes controversial.
Peter Schjeldahl (1994)

With an electric brightness shared by almost no other uninvited freely-arriving perceptual event, beauty gives us a the live-in conviction of truth, as well as the perception of error.
Elaine Scarry, On Beauty (1999)

Beauty incites the desire for truth, This is its legacy, without itself fulfilling the search for enduring certitude, beauty spurs on this search.
Elaine Scarry, On Beauty (1999)