Great Throughts Treasury

"Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change." - Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills

"There would be no history as we know it, no religion, no metaphysics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any “social contract” or covenant with the postulate of the divine. This instauration of trust, this entrance of man into the city of man, is that between word and world" - George Steiner, fully Francis George Steiner

"There would be no history as we know it, no religion, no metaphysics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any “social contract” or covenant with the postulate of the divine. This instauration of trust, this entrance of man into the city of man, is that between word and world." - George Steiner, fully Francis George Steiner

"Let architects sing of aesthetics that bring rich clients in hordes to their knees; Just give me a home, in a great circle dome where stresses and strains are at ease." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

"Conformism, imitativeness, submission to rules and to teachings is the writer's capital crime. The work of a writer must be not only the reflection, but the larger reflection of his personality. The only excuse that a man has for his writing is to write about himself, to reveal to others the sort of world that is mirrored in his own glass; his only excuse is to be original; he must speak of things not yet spoken of in a form not yet formulated. He must create his own aesthetics " - Remy de Gourmont

"Down below the broad, roaring waves of the sea break against the deep foundation of the rock. But high above the mountain, the sea, and the peaks of rock the eternal ornamentation blooms silently from the dark depths of the universe." - Rudolf Otto

"The artist fills space with an attitude. The attitude never comes from himself alone." - Willem de Kooning