Quotes for your consideration

These biological commonplaces are something more than that; they reach to the roots of the esthetic in experience. The world is full of things that are indifferent and even hostile to life; the very processes by which life is maintained tend to throw it out of gear with its surroundings,. Nevertheless, if life continues and if in continuing it expands, there is an overcoming of factors of opposition and conflict; there is a transformation of them into differentiated aspects of a higher powered and more significant life. The marvel of organic, of vital, adaptation through expansion (instead of by contraction and passive accommodation)
actually takes place.

(Dewey, 1934) p. 14

In the good literary text, readers must find a place for themselves among that which has been presented by the author.

(Sumara, 1999) p. 292

Other examples provided by Ellen Handler Spitz (Spitz, 1982)


Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and the inward man be at one.

Socrates on the nature of love and beauty

“there is no inward standard different from the outward fact with which that outward fact may be compared. A unification of this kind is the goal of our intelligence and our affection, quite as much as of our aesthetic sense…. Beauty is the pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature”

Santayana

…the experiences that art intensifies and amplifies neither exist solely inside ourselves, nor do they consist of relations apart from matter. The moment when the creature is both most alive and most composed and concentrated are those of the fullest intercourse with the environment, in which sensuous material and relations are the most completely merged.

(Dewey, 1934) p. 103