A Quote by George Santayana

Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.

George Santayana

Quote Topics

Aesthetic Criticism Delight Few Hang Intuition Moments Real

Quote Author

George Santayana
Spanish - Novelist
December 16, 1863 - September 26, 1952

I must confess that I and a few others are burdened with heavy responsibilities regarding the future of criticism. I am certainly, if not the inventor, then at least one of the first systematizers of an absurd critical practice that, as soon as it had peeked its beak out of the nest, flapping its new wet wings, took flight in the minds of the young, becoming a wild ox and sowing avant-garde literature with the mighty tomes of what might as well be called the abstract bear.

Louis Aragon

Few things are more agreeable than the spectacle of a man who loses his temper; we should be grateful to such people for providing us with moments of often unsullied delight.

Harold Nicolson

Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history. The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity. The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection.

Alain Badiou

Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.

John Masefield

Even spiritually advanced people are often confused. They feel an inner ecstasy which comes from the vital world, and they think this is the real delight. But it is not so. Real delight comes from the highest world to the soul, and from the soul it saturates the whole being.

Sri Chinmoy

Common sense is merely unaided intuition, and unaided intuition is reasoning performed in the absense of instruments and the tested knowledge of science. Common sense tells us that massive satellites cannot hang suspended 36,000 kilometers above the one point on the earth's surface, but they do.

E. O. Wilson

There are moments that I`ve had some real brilliance, you know. But I think they are moments. And sometimes, in a career, moments are enough.

Dennis Hopper

Aesthetics has become too important to be left to the aesthetes. To succeed, hard-nosed engineers, real estate developers, and MBAs must take aesthetic communication, and aesthetic pleasure, seriously. We, their customers, demand it.

Virginia Postrel

A piece of advice I would give to young actors - hang on to your family, and hang on to your reality - and hang on to your "real". Because you're going into the land of make believe.

Lorna Luft

This duality has been reflected in classical as well as modern literature as reason versus passion, or mind versus intuition. The split between the conscious mind and the unconscious. There are moments in each of our lives when our verbal-intellect suggests one course, and our hearts, or intuition, another.

Robert E. Ornstein

I'm one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline.

Steve Jobs

What I've really liked doing is combining what you might call art criticism or music criticism with something that is happening in real life.

Geoff Dyer

Criticism is above all a gift, an intuition, a matter of tact and flair; it cannot be taught or demonstrated--it is an art.

Henri Frederic Amiel

What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism .