Azra Imsirovic > Azra's Quotes

“Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious.”
― Rumi

“The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi, The Illuminated Rumi

“In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.”
― Rumi

“Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“I want to be where your bare foot walks, because maybe before you step, you'll look at the ground. I want that blessing”
― Rumi

“I am so close, I may look distant.
So completely mixed with you, I may look separate.
So out in the open, I appear hidden.
So silent, because I am constantly talking with you.”
― Rumi

“The Water said to the dirty one, “Come here.”

The dirty one said, “I am too ashamed.”

The water replied, “How will your shame be washed away without me?”
― Rumi

“Every story is us”
― Jalâl ad-Dîn Rûmî, The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“With passion pray.

With passion make love.

With passion eat and drink and dance and play.

Why look like a dead fish

in this ocean of God?”
― Rumi

“Look carefully around you and recognize
the luminosity of souls.
Sit beside those who draw you to that.”
― Rumi

“The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.”
― Rumi

“There is little one can say about love. It has to be lived, and it's always in motion.”
― Rumi, The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.”
― Baruch de Spinoza, Spinoza in der europäischen Geistesgeschichte

“Rules of taste enforce structures of power.”
― Susan Sontag

“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“I want to say something about bad writing. I'm proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. I am proud of Philip Guston's bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire's mamma's boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which's something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b.”
― Ariana Reines

“Aesthetics have substantial political consequences. How one views oneself as beautiful or not beautiful or desirable or not desirable has deep consequences in terms of one’s feelings of self-worth and one’s capacity to be a political agent.”
― Cornel West, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life

“Think of cocaine. In its natural form, as coca leaves, it's appealing, but not to an extent that it usually becomes a problem. But refine it, purify it, and you get a compound that hits your pleasure receptors with an unnatural intensity. That's when it becomes addictive.

Beauty has undergone a similar process, thanks to advertisers. Evolution gave us a circuit that responds to good looks - call it the pleasure receptor for our visual cortex - and in our natural environment, it was useful to have. But take a person with one-in-a-million skin and bone structure, add professional makeup and retouching, and you're no longer looking at beauty in its natural form. You've got pharmaceutical-grade beauty, the cocaine of good looks.

Biologists call this "supernormal stimulus" [...] Our beauty receptors receive more stimulation than they were evolved to handle; we're seeing more beauty in one day than our ancestors did in a lifetime. And the result is that beauty is slowly ruining our lives.

How? The way any drug becomes a problem: by interfering with our relationships with other people. We become dissatisfied with the way ordinary people look because they can't compare to supermodels.”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“I think that's what art is: art is communication made in the hope that interesting miscommunications will arise.”
― Misha Glouberman

“Desire for beauty will endure and undermine the desire for truth.”
― Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—And Us

“God's pleasure--the beauty creation possesses in his regard--underlies the distinct being of creation, and so beauty is the first and truest word concerning all that appears within being; beauty is the showing of what is; God looked upon what he had wrought and saw that it was good.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

“He had never believed that spirituality had to be anemic or aesthetic.
”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo

“At last everything was satisfactorily arranged, and I could not help admiring the setting: these mingled touches betrayed on a small scale the inspiration of a poet, the research of a scientist, the good taste of an artist, the gourmet’s fondness for good food, and the love of flowers, which concealed in their delicate shadows a hint of the love of women”
― August Strindberg, Madman's Defence

“Aestheticism is the garbage of intuitive feeling.”
― Kazimir Severinovich Malevich

“In the life of the individual, an aesthetic sensibility is both more authentic and more commendable than a political or religious one.”
― Tom Robbins

“Let a thing be but a sort of punctual surprise, like the first cache of violets in March, let it be delicate, painted and gratuitous, hinting that the Creator is solely occupied with aesthetic considerations, and combines disparate objects simply because they look so well together, and that thing will admirably fill the role of a flower.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“AESTHETICS OF THE AESTHETICIAN

What is the aesthetician
But a mule hitched to the times?”
― Kenneth Koch, The Collected Poems

“They walked on rather aimlessly. He hoped she wouldn't notice he was touched, because he wouldn't have known how to explain why. Here lay the great discrepancy between aesthetic truth and sleazy reality.”
― Patrick White, The Vivisector

“The aesthetic can have its revenge upon ideology by revealing a power to complicate that is also a power to undermine.”
― Murray Krieger