“Beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty: so that "good" means that which simply pleases the appetite; while the "beautiful" is something pleasant to apprehend.”
I–II, q. 27, art. 1, 3
Summa Theologica (1265–1274)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Thomas Aquinas104
Italian Dominican scholastic philosopher of the Roman Catho… 1225–1274Related quotes
Ninon de L'Enclos (1620–1705) French author, courtesan, freethinker, and patron of the arts
Attributed in Lewis Copeland, Best Quotations for All Occasions (1965), p. 19
Attributed
Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French writer and philosopher
A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (1988)
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer
What is Art? (1897)
Context: The good is the everlasting, the pinnacle of our life. … life is striving towards the good, toward God. The good is the most basic idea … an idea not definable by reason … yet is the postulate from which all else follows. But the beautiful … is just that which is pleasing. The idea of beauty is not an alignment to the good, but is its opposite, because for most part, the good aids in our victory over our predilections, while beauty is the motive of our predilections. The more we succumb to beauty, the further we are displaced from the good.... the usual response is that there exists a moral and spiritual beauty … we mean simply the good. Spiritual beauty or the good, generally not only does not coincide with the typical meaning of beauty, it is its opposite.
“Love, let others read
The Socratic papers,
While in two beautiful eyes I will apprehend this art.”
Amor, leggan pur gli altri
Le Socratiche carte,
Ch'io in due begl'occhi apprenderò quest'arte.
Act II, Chorus.
Aminta (1573)
Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art
The Meaning of Art, London : Faber & Faber, 1931
Other Quotes
“Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”
Toni Morrison book The Bluest Eye
Source: The Bluest Eye