John Cage Quotes

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

Beauty is that little something that fills the whole world, and is contained neither in a single straight nose, a long eyelash, nor a blue mountain. Some see it in a leg of mutton, others in a compound fracture; and to expect others to accept one's own definition of it is as absurd as to expect all humanity to use the same toilet-brush.

Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.

Beauty is altogether in the eye of the beholder.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.

Spin is 'something is beautiful because we say it's beautiful.'

I always loved aesthetics. Not particularly fashion, but an idea of beauty.

Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye.

Beauty is as relative as light and dark. Thus, there exists no beautiful woman, none at all, because you are never certain that a still far more beautiful woman will not appear and completely shame the supposed beauty of the first.

I'm not that obsessed with making representations of ugliness. Everything I've seen is beautiful.

I find beauty in the grotesque, like most artists.

You have to be careful when you use beauty as a guide. There are many theories people didn't think were beautiful at the time but did find beautiful later - and vice versa.

It's weird to me to see how different everyone's opinion of beauty is.

There is no such thing as ugly.

Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.

Is beauty beautiful, or is it only our eyes that make it so?

Venus de Milo. To a child she is ugly. When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness, even though, by physiologic standards, incomplete, she is beautiful.

No facts, however indubitably detected, no effort of reason, however magnificently maintained, can prove that Bach's music is beautiful.

What beauty is, I know not, though it adheres to many things.

Physical beauty is such a strange thing.

Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not.

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.