"AEsthete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... senile letters to Hannah More about the French Revolution, we see him as a man almost hysterical in the intensity of his sensations, whether of joy or of horror. He lived for his sensations like an aesthete. He wrote of himself as "I, who am as constant at a fire as George Selwyn at an execution." If he cared for the crownings of kings and such occasions, it was because he took a childish delight in ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... And yet it is not really a bias against morality; it is a bias against other people's morality. It is generally founded on a very definite moral preference for a certain sort of life, pagan, plausible, humane. The modern aesthete, wishing us to believe that he values beauty more than conduct, reads Mallarme, and drinks absinthe in a tavern. But this is not only his favourite kind of beauty; it is also his favourite kind of conduct. ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... a criticism as this, a shining reflection, so to speak, of the work which it exalts; yet MacSilly, the seraphic aesthete of Edinburgh, has expressed in a still more moving and penetrating fashion the impression produced upon his mind by the sight of this primitive painting. "The Madonna of Margaritone," says the revered MacSilly, "attains the transcendent end of art. ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France |
