Why a terrifying storm, viewed from safety, can feel beautiful

In 1756, Edmund Burke argued that beauty and 'the sublime' are opposite aesthetic experiences: beauty pleases through harmony and smallness, while the sublime moves us through vastness, darkness or power great enough to suggest real danger. Burke argued we can feel the sublime's thrill of near-terror, at a crashing ocean or towering cliff, only because we know, at a safe distance, it can't actually hurt us. The idea reshaped how Romantic painters approached wild landscapes a half-century later.

— Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful — 1756
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