Denis Dutton Quotes

I wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value?

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.

The more people explore the world, the more they realize in every country there's a different aesthetic. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.

Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.

When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.

Art is inspiring. Walking into a gallery, or when the lights go up on a stage; that thrill of getting something that has nothing to do with acquisition.

You can't expect someone born into a family with no music... to understand when I'm conducting the Schoenberg Variations.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

Culture opens the sense of beauty.

I knew it was beautiful, but knowing something is beautiful and caring about it are two very different things, and I didn't care.

To be full of joy when looking at an oeuvre is not a little thing.

Beauty is objectified pleasure.

If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there, it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which return me to life more violently.

Taste is, in general, considered as that faculty of the human mind by which we perceive and enjoy whatever is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature or art.

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.

Men are so inclined to content themselves with what is commonest; the spirit and the senses so easily grow dead to the impressions of the beautiful and perfect, that every one should study, by all methods, to nourish in his mind the faculty of feeling these things. ...For this reason, one ought every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

Beauty . . . cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.

When beauty is universal, it loses its power to move the heart, and only its absence can produce any emotional effect.

During a rehearsal of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony the members of the orchestra were so overwhelmingly moved by the conducting of Arturo Toscanini that they rose as one man and applauded him. When the spontaneous cheering has subsided, Toscanini turned to his men, tears glistening in his eyes. "Please . . . please! Don't do this! You see, gentlemen, it isn't me you should applaud. It's Beethoven!"

Beauty is lyrical. Ugliness is elegiac.

Beautiful works do not intoxicate, but they enchant.

It's been a growth process for each of us to understand why we find certain things beautiful. And if we do find something beautiful, we'll chase it, because you want to understand yourself and what your psyche is creating.

The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning.

In my opinion, an individual without any love of the arts cannot be considered completely civilized.

Thus art is not an object, it is an experience.