Daily Inspiration Quote by Jock Sturges

Sturges is staking out a flattering exception for his species, and by extension for his own craft: aesthetics as the human tell, the proof-of-life that separates us from the rest of the animal file cabinet. The first sentence plays like a cautious scientific shrug ("no particular evidence"), but it’s also a quiet act of boundary-policing. By framing animals as indifferent to beauty, he clears a stage where human looking becomes not just a hobby but a defining drive.

The move matters because Sturges isn’t a philosopher; he’s a photographer whose work depends on the legitimacy of attention. In photography, the gaze is the instrument and the risk. Claiming that humans "always has and always will" care about aesthetics gives that gaze a kind of evolutionary alibi: we don’t merely consume images, we’re wired to make meaning out of surfaces, light, proportion, skin, landscape. It’s an argument for art as need rather than luxury, smuggling in a defense against the suspicion that aesthetic pursuit is superficial.

There’s subtext, too, in the insistence on permanence. "Always will" is less prediction than reassurance, a hedge against cultural panic: that screens, algorithms, and mass reproduction might cheapen taste or make beauty feel disposable. Sturges answers with a bold essentialism: even if styles change, the appetite for form won’t.

The irony is that plenty of animals perform, decorate, and choose mates with an eye for display. Sturges likely knows that. The line isn’t zoology; it’s a creed for makers: the human compulsion to arrange the world into something worth looking at is stubborn, maybe irrational, and not going away.