Edmund Burke

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

"BEAUTY is a thing much too affecting not to depend upon some positive qualities. And, since it is no creature of our reason, since it strikes us without any reference to use, and even where no use at all can be discerned, since the order and method of nature is generally very different from our measures and proportions, we must conclude that beauty is, for the greater part, some quality in bodies acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses. We ought therefore to consider attentively in what manner those sensible quality are disposed, in such things as by experience we find beautiful, or which excite in us the passion of love, or some correspondent affection.

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THE COMMON notion of the power of poetry and eloquence, as well as that of words in ordinary conversation, is that they affect the mind by raising in it ideas of those things for which custom has appointed them to stand."