Quotes about taste

A collection of quotes on the topic of taste, likeness, doing, good.

Quotes about taste

Louis Tomlinson photo

“In my first video diary I explained my love for women who have a taste in carrots.”

Louis Tomlinson (1991) English pop singer

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/5834782.Louis_Tomlinson

Robert Downey Jr. photo

“It's like I've got a shotgun in my mouth with my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal.”

Robert Downey Jr. (1965) American actor

Source: explaining his drug addiction in 1999 to a judge

Harriet Tubman photo
William Shakespeare photo

“A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.”

Variant: Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
Source: Julius Caesar

Egon Schiele photo
Eleanor Roosevelt photo

“The purpose of life…is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

Foreword (January 1960)
You Learn by Living (1960)

Diana Vreeland photo

“Too much good taste can be boring”

Diana Vreeland (1903–1989) American magazine editor
Stephen Hawking photo

“Simplicity is a matter of taste”

Source: The Grand Design

Joseph Haydn photo

“Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name: He has taste, and, furthermore, the most profound knowledge of composition.”

Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) Austrian composer

Ich sage ihnen vor Gott, als ein ehrlicher Mann, ihr Sohn ist der größte Componist, den ich von Person und den Nahmen nach kenne: er hat geschmack, und über das die größte Compositionswissenschaft.
Quoted in a letter from Leopold Mozart to Maria Anna Mozart (1785-02-16)

George Orwell photo
Pablo Picasso photo

“Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer
Dolly Parton photo
Leonardo Da Vinci photo

“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

This quotation was first used in print (and misattributed to Leonardo da Vinci) in a science fiction story published in 1975, The Storms of Windhaven. One of the authors, Lisa Tuttle, remembers that the quote was suggested by science fiction writer Ben Bova, who says he believes he got the quote from a TV documentary narrated by Fredric March, presumably I, Leonardo da Vinci, written by John H. Secondari for the series Saga of Western Man, which aired on 23 February 1965. Bova incorrectly assumed that he was quoting da Vinci. The probable author is John Hermes Secondari (1919-1975), American author and television producer.
Misattributed
Variant: For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.

Mwanandeke Kindembo photo
Alexander Pope photo
Marcel Duchamp photo

“I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own tastes.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

Quote by Harriet & Sidney Janis in 'Marchel Duchamp: Anti-Artist' in View magazine 3/21/45; reprinted in Robert Motherwell, Dada Painters and Poets (1951)
1921 - 1950
Variant: I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart photo

“Stay with me to-night; you must see me die. I have long had the taste of death on my tongue, I smell death, and who will stand by my Constanze, if you do not stay?”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) Austrian Romantic composer

Spoken on his deathbed to his sister-in-law, Sophie Weber (5 December 1791), from Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words by Friedrich Kerst, trans. Henry Edward Krehbiel (1906)
Variant: The taste of death is on my tongue, I feel something that is not from this world (Der Geschmack des Todes ist auf meiner Zunge, ich fühle etwas, das nicht von dieser Welt ist).

Frederick Buechner photo
Anaïs Nin photo

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

February 1954 The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5 as quoted in Woman as Writer (1978) by Jeannette L. Webber and Joan Grumman, p. 38
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Context: We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it.
Context: The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materialization, an incarnation of his inner world. Then he hopes to attract others into it. He hopes to impose his particular vision and share it with others. And when the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.
We also write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely. We write as the birds sing, as the primitives dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it. When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.

William Shakespeare photo

“Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.”

Caesar, Act II, scene ii.
Source: Julius Caesar (1599)

Gaston Leroux photo
Christine de Pizan photo
Stephen Fry photo
Anne Bradstreet photo

“If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.”

Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) Anglo-American poet

14.
Meditations Divine and Moral (1664)
Source: The Works of Anne Bradstreet

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn photo

“A genius doesn't adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant's taste”

Source: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)

Joseph Louis Lagrange photo
Robin Williams photo
Dante Alighieri photo

“Thou shalt prove how salt is the taste of another man's bread and how hard is the way up and down another man's stairs.”

Canto XVII, lines 58–60 (tr. Sinclair).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Paradiso

Laozi photo

“I am not at all interested in immortality, only in the taste of tea.”

Laozi (-604) semi-legendary Chinese figure, attributed to the 6th century, regarded as the author of the Tao Te Ching and fou…

From Lu Tong (also spelled as Lu Tung)
Misattributed

Hedy Lamarr photo

“To be a star is~to own the world and all the people in it. After a taste of stardom, everything else is poverty.”

Hedy Lamarr (1914–2000) Austrian-American actress and co-inventor of an early technique for spread spectrum communications and freq…

Popcorn in Paradise (1980)

Bon Scott photo

“It's nothing to do with us at all, our success is due to the taste of the public.”

Bon Scott (1946–1980) Rock musician

Countdown interview, Mascot Airport, Sydney, April 1976.

Robert Southey photo

“And then she went to the porridge of the Little, Small, Wee Bear, and tasted that; and that was neither too hot nor too cold, but just right.”

"The Story of the Three Bears", The Doctor http://www.edsanders.com/stories/3bears/3bears.htm (1837).

François-René de Chateaubriand photo

“Perfect works are rare, because they must be produced at the happy moment when taste and genius unite; and this rare conjuncture, like that of certain planets, appears to occur only after the revolution of several cycles, and only lasts for an instant.”

François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) French writer, politician, diplomat and historian

As quoted in Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources (1893) selected and compiled by James Wood.

Jeremy Bentham photo

“Judges of elegance and taste consider themselves as benefactors to the human race, whilst they are really only the interrupters of their pleasure”

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) British philosopher, jurist, and social reformer

Théorie des peines et des récompenses (1811); translation by Richard Smith, The Rationale of Reward, J. & H. L. Hunt, London, 1825, Bk. 3, Ch. 1
Context: Judges of elegance and taste consider themselves as benefactors to the human race, whilst they are really only the interrupters of their pleasure … There is no taste which deserves the epithet good, unless it be the taste for such employments which, to the pleasure actually produced by them, conjoin some contingent or future utility: there is no taste which deserves to be characterized as bad, unless it be a taste for some occupation which has mischievous tendency.

Gemma Galgani photo
Benjamin Disraeli photo
Barry Lyga photo

“I’m a complicated man, with complicated taste buds.”

Barry Lyga (1971) American writer

Source: I Hunt Killers

Virginia Woolf photo
Bertolt Brecht photo
Oscar Wilde photo

“I'm a man of simple tastes. I'm always satisfied with the best.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Variant: I have simple tastes. I am always satisfied with the best

Anaïs Nin photo
Leonardo Da Vinci photo
Cornelia Funke photo
Paulo Coelho photo
Bertrand Russell photo
Sadhguru photo
Charles Alexander Eastman photo
Zig Ziglar photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Sue Monk Kidd photo

“We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment and in retrospection.”

Sue Monk Kidd (1948) Novelist

Source: Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story

Lionel Shriver photo
Fernando Pessoa photo

“I’m losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless.”

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher
Terry Pratchett photo

“Heaven has no taste."
"Now-"
"And not one single sushi restaurant."
A look of pain crossed the angel's suddenly very serious face.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Source: Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

Ian McEwan photo
Bill Maher photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Louis Sachar photo
George Bernard Shaw photo

“Do not do unto others as you would expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

#1
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Cassandra Clare photo
Leonardo Da Vinci photo

“once you have tasted the taste of sky, you will forever look up”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Source: Leonardo on Painting: An Anthology of Writings by Leonardo Da Vinci with a Selection of Documents Relating to His Career

William Shakespeare photo
Steven Pinker photo
Sylvia Plath photo
Oscar Wilde photo

“I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

As quoted in Oscar Wilde : An Idler's Impression (1917) http://books.google.com/books?id=ddAVAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=edgar+saltus+wilde&cd=3#v=snippet&q=satisfied&f=false by Edgar Saltus, p. 20

John Mayer photo
Emil M. Cioran photo
Leonardo Da Vinci photo

“Many are they who have a taste and love for drawing, but no talent; and this will be discernible in boys who are not diligent and never finish their drawings with shading.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), IX The Practice of Painting

Claude Monet photo
Barack Obama photo
Johnny Depp photo

“I just don’t quite understand it [the press], really. I don’t understand the animal. It’s a strange, roundabout way of selling something; it leaves a foul taste… The thing that fascinates me is: who cares what an actor thinks?”

Johnny Depp (1963) American actor, film producer, and musician

Quoted in Steven Daly, "The Maverick King," http://www.deppimpact.com/mags/transcripts/vanityfair_nov04.html Vanity Fair (November 2004)

W.B. Yeats photo

“The official designs of the Government, especially its designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage, may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors of national taste.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Speech (3 March 1926), Seanad Éireann (Irish Free Senate), on the Coinage Bill. http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/S/0006/S.0006.192603030003.html

Michel Bréal photo
Eric Hobsbawm photo

“People may not like to meet bandits, especially on a dark night, but a taste for reading about them seems to be universal.”

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer

Preface to Pantheon Edition
Bandits (1969)

Daniel Handler photo

“If you have ever peeled an onion, then you know that the first thin, papery layer reveals another thin, papery layer, and that layer reveals another, and another, and before you know it you have hundreds of layers all over the kitchen table and thousands of tears in your eyes, sorry that you ever started peeling in the first place and wishing that you had left the onion alone to wither away on the shelf of the pantry while you went on with your life, even if that meant never again enjoying the complicated and overwhelming taste of this strange and bitter vegetable.

In this way, the story of the Baudelaire orphans is like an onion, and if you insist on reading each and every thin, papery layer in A Series of Unfortunate Events, your only reward will be 170 chapters of misery in your library and countless tears in your eyes. Even if you have read the first twelve volumes of the Baudelaires' story, it is not too late to stop peeling away the layers, and to put this book back on the shelf to wither away while you read something less complicated and overwhelming. The end of this unhappy chronicle is like its bad beginning, as each misfortune only reveals another, and another, and another, and only those with the stomach for this strange and bitter tale should venture any farther into the Baudelaire onion. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes.”

Source: The End (2006), Chapter 1

Fiona Apple photo
Aurelius Augustinus photo
Daniel Handler photo
Joseph Addison photo

“A man that has a taste of music, painting, or architecture, is like one that has another sense, when compared with such as have no relish of those arts.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 93 (16 June 1711).
The Spectator (1711–1714)

José Saramago photo

“In between these four whitewashed walls, on this tiled floor, notice the broken corners, how some tiles have been worn smooth, how many feet have passed this way, and look how interesting this trail of ants is, travelling along the joins as if they were valleys, while up above, projected against the white sky of the ceiling and the sun of the lamp, tall towers are moving, they are men, as the ants well know, having, for generations, experienced the weight of their feet and the long, hot spout of water that falls from a kind of pendulous external intestine, ants all over the world have been drowned or crushed by these, but it seems they will escape this fate now, for the men are occupied with other things. […]
Let's take this ant, or, rather, let's not, because that would involve picking it up, let us merely consider it, because it is one of the larger ones and because it raises its head like a dog, it's walking along very close to the wall, together with its fellow ants it will have time to complete its long journey ten times over between the ants' nest and whatever it is that it finds so interesting, curious or perhaps merely nourishing in this secret room […]. One of the men has fallen to the ground, he's on the same level as the ants now, we don't know if he can see them, but they see him, and he will fall so often that, in the end, they will know by heart his face, the color of his hair and eyes, the shape of his ear, the dark arc of his eyebrow, the faint shadow at the corner of his mouth, and later, back in the ants' nest, they will weave long stories for the enlightenment of future generations, because it is useful for the young to know what happens out there in the world. The man fell and the others dragged him to his feet again, shouting at him, asking two different questions at the same time, how could he possibly answer them even if he wanted to, which is not the case, because the man who fell and was dragged to his feet will die without saying a word. Only moans will issue from his mouth, and in the silence of his soul only deep sighs, and even when his teeth are broken and he has to spit them out, which will prompt the other two men to hit him again for soiling state property, even then the sound will be of spitting and nothing more, that unconscious reflex of the lips, and then the dribble of saliva thickened with blood that falls to the floor, thus stimulating the taste buds of the ants, who telegraph from one to the other news of this singularly red manna fallen from such a white heaven.
The man fell again. It's the same one, said the ants, the same ear shape, the same arc of eyebrow, the same shadow at the corner of the mouth, there's no mistaking him, why is it that it is always the same man who falls, why doesn't he defend himself, fight back. […] The ants are surprised, but only fleetingly. After all, they have their own duties, their own timetables to keep, it is quite enough that they raise their heads like dogs and fix their feeble vision on the fallen man to check that he is the same one and not some new variant in the story. The larger ant walked along the remaining stretch of wall, slipped under the door, and some time will pass before it reappears to find everything changed, well, that's just a manner of speaking, there are still three men there, but the two who do not fall never stop moving, it must be some kind of game, there's no other explanation […]. [T]hey grab him by the shoulders and propel him willy-nilly in the direction of the wall, so that sometimes he hits his back, sometimes his head, or else his poor bruised face smashes into the whitewash and leaves on it a trace of blood, not a lot, just whatever spurts forth from his mouth and right eyebrow. And if they leave him there, he, not his blood, slides down the wall and he ends up kneeling on the ground, beside the little trail of ants, who are startled by the sudden fall from on high of that great mass, which doesn't, in the end, even graze them. And when he stays there for some time, one ant attaches itself to his clothing, wanting to take a closer look, the fool, it will be the first ant to die, because the next blow falls on precisely that spot, the ant doesn't feel the second blow, but the man does.”

Source: Raised from the Ground (1980), pp. 172–174

Ray Comfort photo
Fiona Apple photo
Stendhal photo

“The taste for freedom, the fashion and cult of happiness of the majority that the nineteenth century is infatuated with, was only a heresy in his eyes that would pass like others.”

Le goût de la liberté, la mode et le culte du bonheur du plus grand nombre, dont le XIXe siècle s'est entiché, n'étaient à ses yeux qu'une hérésie qui passera comme les autres.
Source: La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1839), Ch. 7

Oscar Wilde photo
Leonardo Da Vinci photo
Sarah Vaughan photo

“There's a category for me. I like to be referred to as a good singer of good songs in good taste.”

Sarah Vaughan (1924–1990) American jazz singer

Interview, The Hollywood Reporter, 1974

Marcel Proust photo

“When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.And once again I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy), immediately the old gray house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater.”

Mais, quand d’un passé ancien rien ne subsiste, après la mort des êtres, après la destruction des choses, seules, plus frêles mais plus vivaces, plus immatérielles, plus persistantes, plus fidèles, l’odeur et la saveur restent encore longtemps, comme des âmes, à se rappeler, à attendre, à espérer, sur la ruine de tout le reste, à porter sans fléchir, sur leur gouttelette presque impalpable, l’édifice immense du souvenir.<p>Et dès que j’eus reconnu le goût du morceau de madeleine trempé dans le tilleul que me donnait ma tante (quoique je ne susse pas encore et dusse remettre à bien plus tard de découvrir pourquoi ce souvenir me rendait si heureux), aussitôt la vieille maison grise sur la rue, où était sa chambre, vint comme un décor de théâtre.
"Overture"
In Search of Lost Time, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol I: Swann's Way (1913)

Harriet Tubman photo

“Children, if you are tired, keep going; if you are hungry, keep going; if you want to taste freedom, keep going.”

Harriet Tubman (1820–1913) African-American abolitionist and humanitarian

"Harriet Tubman never said this — it comes from one of the scores of juvenile Harriet Tubman fictionalized biographies." — Kate Larson, Harriet Tubman biographer.
Disputed

Friedrich Nietzsche photo
H.P. Lovecraft photo

“I endorse all that you say of the superior intelligence of the felidae. Never have I been able to associate the docile servility and satellitism of the canidae with mental power. Zoölogists seem to consider the cerebration of cats and dogs about 50-50—but my respect always goes to the cool, sure, impersonal, delicately poised feline who minds his business and never slobbers—the aristocratic, epicurean philosopher who knows what he wants and tells interlopers to go to hell. There is no credit in having a dog attached to one—for a dog can be conditioned to become anybody's slave and property. But a cat is nobody's slave. You do not own a cat. If one lives in your home, it is because he regards your way of life favourably, and accepts you as a friend, as one gentleman accepts another. He takes no kicks or insolence from anyone. If you are not worthy to associate with him, he will depart to seek an environment more suited to a gentleman's taste. Therefore he who retains the respect and companionship of a feline has proven himself to be essentially a superior citizen. For a human being, membership in the Kappa Alpha Tau forms a badge of distinction. Many are the eminent names on that member ship list—Mahomet himself, Richelieu, Poe, Baudelaire... one could catalogue them endlessly. Certainly, I ask no greater honour than to be accounted a citizen of Ulthar beyond the River Skai!”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to E. Hoffmann Price (29 July 1936), published in Selected Letters Vol. V, p. 290
Non-Fiction, Letters, to E. Hoffmann Price

H.P. Lovecraft photo
Abraham Lincoln photo
Voltaire photo
Catherine of Genoa photo
Isaac of Nineveh photo
Humphrey Lyttelton photo