No. 583
Aphorisms on Man (c. 1788)
Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 86
Le génie enfante, le goût conserve. Le goût est le bon sens du génie; sans le goût, le génie n'est qu'une sublime folie.
François-René de Chateaubriand, in "Essai sur la littérature anglaise (1836): Modèles classiques http://visualiseur.bnf.fr/CadresFenetre?O=NUMM-101390&M=tdm.
Misattributed
Grierson, in "A Garden of Deeds: Ramacharitmanas, a Message of Human Ethics", p. 35
On Tulsidas’s epic Ramacharritamanas
“Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.”
Discourse no. 3; vol. 1, p. 57.
Discourses on Art
2000s, 2004, 2004 Video Broadcast on Al-Jazeera October 29
“Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life. ”
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), II : The Starting-Point
Context: Knowledge is employed in the service of the necessity of life and primarily in the service of the instinct of personal preservation. The necessity and this instinct have created in man the organs of knowledge and given them such capacity as they possess. Man sees, hears, touches, tastes and smells that which it is necessary for him to see, hear, touch, taste and smell in order to preserve his life. The decay or loss of any of these senses increases the risks with which his life is environed, and if it increases them less in the state of society in which we are actually living, the reason is that some see, hear, touch, taste and smell for others. A blind man, by himself and without a guide, could not live long. Society is an additional sense; it is the true common sense.
