"The artistic critic, like the mystic, is an antinomian always.  To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy.  It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.  Aesthetics are higher than ethics.  They belong to a more spiritual sphere.  To discern the beauty of a thing is the finest point to which we can arrive. Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right and wrong.  Aesthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious civilisation, what, in the sphere of the external world, sexual is to natural selection. Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change"

--Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist: With Some Remarks Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing