Quotes about taste
page 5

William Fitzsimmons photo

“Just another taste of pleasure.”

William Fitzsimmons (1978) American musician

Until When We Are Ghosts (2006), Shattered

Connie Willis photo

““How dare you contradict their opinions! You are only a common servant.”
“Yes, miss,” he said wearily.
“You should be dismissed for being insolent to your betters.”
There was a long pause, and then Baine said, “All the diary entries and dismissals in the world cannot change the truth. Galileo recanted under threat of torture, but that did not make the sun revolve round the earth. If you dismiss me, the vase will still be vulgar, I will still be right, and your taste will still be plebeian, no matter what you write in your diary.”
“Plebeian?” Tossie said, bright pink. “How dare you speak like that to your mistress? You are dismissed.” She pointed imperiously at the house. “Pack your things immediately.”
“Yes, miss,” Baine said. “E pur si muove.”
“What?” Tossie said, bright red with rage. “What did you say?”
“I said, now that finally have dismissed me, I am no longer a member of the servant class and am therefore in a position to speak freely,” he said calmly.
“You are not in a position to speak to me at all,” Tossie said, raising her diary like a weapon. “Leave at once.”
“I dared to speak the truth to you because I felt you were deserving of it,” Baine said seriously. “I had only your best interests at heart, as I have always had. You have been blessed with great riches; not only with the riches of wealth, position, and beauty, but with a bright mind and a keen sensibility, as well as with a fine spirit. And yet you squander those riches on croquet and organdies and trumpery works of art. You have at your disposal a library of the great minds of the past, and yet you read the foolish novels of Charlotte Yonge and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Given the opportunity to study science, you converse with conjurors wearing cheesecloth and phosphorescent paint. Confronted by the glories of Gothic architecture, you admire instead a cheap imitation of it, and confronted by the truth, you stamp your foot like a spoilt child and demand to be told fairy stories.””

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998), Chapter 22 (p. 374)

David Lee Roth photo
Joel Fuhrman photo
Rebecca West photo
Denise Levertov photo

“The world is
not with us enough.
O taste and see.”

Denise Levertov (1923–1997) Poet

This a response to William Wordsworth's famous statement: "The world is too much with us late and soon."
O Taste and See : New Poems (1964)

Yoshida Kenkō photo
Ernest Gellner photo
F. Scott Fitzgerald photo
Algis Budrys photo
Alfred Hitchcock photo
James K. Morrow photo

“Being God, I must choose My words carefully. People, I’ve noticed, tend to hang on to My every remark. It gets annoying, this servile and sycophantic streak in Homo sapiens sapiens. There’s a difference, after all, between tasteful adulation and arrant toadyism, but they just don’t get it.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

"Bible Stories for Adults, No. 20: The Tower" p. 61 (originally published in Author’s Choice Monthly #8: Swatting at the Cosmos)
Short fiction, Bible Stories for Adults (1996)

Calvin Coolidge photo
Camille Pissarro photo
Mickey Spillane photo
Ben Jonson photo
Bill Hicks photo

“[takes a drag of his cigarette] Mmmm mmmm, tastes like steak and potatoes doesn't it? Mmmm.”

Bill Hicks (1961–1994) American comedian

Sane Man (1989)

“Libraries are brothels for the mind. Which means that librarians are the madames, greeting the punters, understanding their strange tastes and needs and then pimping their books.”

Guy Browning (1964) British comedian

How to... use a Library, Never Push When It Says Pull: Small Rules for Little Problems (2005).

“On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away.”

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic

"Rider Haggard: Still Riding", p. 29
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)

Hilary Duff photo

“It's more like giving people a taste of what the tour will be like. It's getting people to hear the music to a different sound … We remixed some of the songs so they sound totally different. It's really energetic.”

Hilary Duff (1987) American actress and singer

Pencek, David. "Duff does double-duty" http://www.norwichbulletin.com/news/stories/20050721/go/2182692.html. Norwich Bulletin. July 21 2005. Retrieved October 25 2006.
On the compilation album Most Wanted (2005), her fourth album.

Marcel Duchamp photo

“Now, if you [his sister, Suzanne Duchamp ] have been up to my place, you will have seen, in the studio, [his former studio in France, probably in Paris] a 'Bicycle Wheel' and a 'Bottle Rack'. [both art-works became later famous ready-mades of Duchamp] – I bought this as a ready-made sculpture [sculpture tout faite]. And I h have a plan concerning this so-called bottle rack. Listen to this. Here in N. Y., I have bought various objects in the same taste and I treat them as 'ready-mades'. You know enough English to understand the meaning of 'ready-made' [tour fait] that I give these objects. – I sign them and think of an inscription for them in English. I'll give you a few examples. I have, for example, a large snow shovel on which I have inscribed at the bottom: In advance of the broken arm, French translation: 'En avance dus bras cassé' – (Don't tear your hair out) trying to understand this in the Romantic or impressionist or Cubist sense – it has nothing to do with all that. Another 'readymade' is called: Emergency in favour of twice possible French translation: Danger \Crise \en favour de 2 fois. This long preamble just to say: Take this bottle rack for yourself. I'm making it a 'readymade' remotely. You are to inscribe it at the bottom and on the inside of the bottom circle, in small letters painted with a brush in oil, silver white colour, with an inscription which I will give you herewith, and then sign it, in the same handwriting, as follows: [after] Marcel Duchamp.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

long quote from Duchamp's letter to his sister Suzanne Duchamp, New York, c. 15 Jan. 1916; as quoted in The Duchamp Book, ed. Gavin Parkinson, Tate Publishing, London 2008 pp. 157-158
1915 - 1925

W. H. Auden photo

“The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.”

"Reading", p. 6
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

Hugh Macmillan, Baron Macmillan photo
Ben Hecht photo
Malachy McCourt photo
Arthur Schopenhauer photo
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey photo
Hans Arp photo

“By the time I was 16, the everlasting copying of stuffed birds and withered flowers at the Strasbourg School of Applied Art not only poisoned drawing for me but destroyed my taste for all artistic activity. I took refuge in poetry.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

Looking, Arp, Jean; as quoted by Soby, James Thrall. Arp: The Museum of Modern Art. Doubleday, New York, 1958, Print. p. 12
1960s

George Bird Evans photo
Colette photo

“But just as delicate fare does not stop you from craving for saveloys, so tried and exquisite friendship does not take away your taste for something new and dubious.”

Colette (1873–1954) 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi

Chambre d’Hôtel, "The Rainy Moon" (1940)

Henry James photo

“There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

"Anthony Trollope," Century Magazine (July 1883); reprinted in Partial Portraits (1888).

Henri-Frédéric Amiel photo

“There is but one thing needful — to possess God. All our senses, all our powers of mind and soul, all our external resources, are so many ways of approaching the divinity, so many modes of tasting and of adoring God. We must learn to detach ourselves from all that is capable of being lost, to bind ourselves absolutely only to what is absolute and eternal, and to enjoy the rest as a loan, as a usufruct…. To worship, to comprehend, to receive, to feel, to give, to act: this our law, our duty, our happiness, our heaven.”

Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881) Swiss philosopher and poet

16 July 1848
Only one thing is necessary: to possess God — All the senses, all the forces of the soul and of the spirit, all the exterior resources are so many open outlets to the Divinity; so many ways of tasting and of adoring God. We should be able to detach ourselves from all that is perishable and cling absolutely to the eternal and the absolute and enjoy the all else as a loan, as a usufruct…. To worship, to comprehend, to receive, to feel, to give, to act: this our law, our duty, our happiness, our heaven.
As translated in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries

Philo photo
Donald A. Norman photo
Steve Jobs photo

“Nobody has tried to swallow us since I've been here. I think they are afraid how we would taste.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

At the annual Apple shareholder meeting (22 April 1998)
1990s

Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo

“You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.”

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 27

Nisargadatta Maharaj photo
John Green photo
Clive Staples Lewis photo
Abu Musab Zarqawi photo

“The mujahideen will give America a taste of the degradation you have inflicted on the Iraqi people.”

Abu Musab Zarqawi (1966–2006) Jordanian jihadist

On the beheading of Eugene Armstrong. Statement accompanying a video of the beheading of US hostage Eugene Armstrong https://www.irishtimes.com/news/abu-musab-al-zarqawi-in-quotes-1.786124 The Irish Times (September 2004)

Jonathan Franzen photo
Theo van Doesburg photo

“.. the modern artist can conclude that impulsive and speculative production has come to an end. THE ERA OF DECORATIVE TASTE HAS VANISHED, the artist of today has finished completely with the past. Scientific and technical developments oblige him to draw conclusions.... to revise his means, to establish laws creating a system, that is to say, to master his elementary means of expression in a conscious manner.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote from Van Doesburg's article: 'Towards elementary plastic expression', in 'Material zur elementaren Gestaltung', G-1, July 1923; as quoted in 'Theo van Doesburg', Joost Baljeu, Studio Vista, London 1974, p. 141
1920 – 1926

Devendra Banhart photo

“Cook me in your breakfast,
and put me on your plate,
'cause you know i taste great.”

Devendra Banhart (1981) American folk singer

-At the Hop
From Niño Rojo
Variant: Put me in your dry dreams
or put me in your wet
If you haven't yet.

Jacopone da Todi photo
William John Macquorn Rankine photo
Bernard Berenson photo

“Taste begins when appetite is satisfied.”

Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) American art critic

Quoted by Stephen Bayley in The Observer http://www.theguardian.com/society/2007/jul/29/communities.architecture (28 July 2007)

Agatha Christie photo
George Steiner photo
Iain Banks photo

“We can, in fact, relive the history of taste in our own lives, the way embryos are supposed to go through the history of the evolution of a species.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 1 : The Frontiers of Nonsense

Henry Adams photo
Ernest Hemingway photo

“Here is the piece. If you can't say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say co-habit? If not that would have to say consummate I suppose. Use your own good taste and judgment.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Letter to Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich (11 April 1935); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

Oliver Goldsmith photo
Manuel Castells photo

“Let me start a different/ analysis by recalling an idea from Max Weber. He characterized cultural modernity as the separation of the substantive reason expressed in religion and metaphysics into three autonomous spheres. They are science, morality and art. These came to be differentiated because the unified world-views of religion and metaphysics fell apart. Since the 18th century, the problems inherited from these older world-views could be arranged so as to fall under specific aspects of validity: truth, normative rightness, authenticity and beauty. They could then be handled as questions of knowledge, or of justice and morality, or of taste. Scientific discourse, theories of morality, Jurisprudence, and the production and criticism of art could in turn be institutionalized. Each domain of culture could be made to correspond to cultural professions in which problems could be dealt with as the concern of special experts. This professionalized treatment of the cultural tradition brings to the fore the intrinsic structures of each of the three dimensions of culture. There appear the structures of cognitive-instrumental, of moral-practical and of aesthetic-expressive rationality, each of these under the control of specialists who seem more adept at being logical in these particular ways than other people are. As a result, the distance grows between the culture of the experts and that of the larger public. What accrues to culture through specialized treatment and reflection does not immediately and necessarily become the property of everyday praxis. With cultural rationalization of this sort, the threat increases that the life-world, whose traditional substance has already been devalued, will become more and more impoverished.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: Modernity — An Incomplete Project, 1983, p. 8-9

Bob Hope photo

“I know I'm in England because this morning, my stomach got up two hours before I did and had a cup of tea! I've had so much tea, I slosh when I walk! You have to drink tea - I've tasted the coffee!”

Bob Hope (1903–2003) American comedian, actor, singer and dancer

During a radio broadcast recorded in the UK. (During a broadcast in the Soviet Union, Bob re-used the first section, replacing 'England' with 'Russia' and 'cup of tea' with 'Bowl of Borscht')
Audio recording of radio broadcast.

Valentino Braitenberg photo
Charles Rollin photo
Kerli photo
Thomas Jefferson photo
Susan Cooper photo

“Strong as a young lion, pliant as a loving woman, and bitter to the taste, as all enchantment in the end must be.”

Susan Cooper (1935) English fantasy writer

Source: The Dark Is Rising (1965-1977), Silver on the Tree (1977), Chapter 14 “Caer Wydyr” (p. 190)

Jack LaLanne photo

“It tasted terrible, so I mixed it with prune juice and fruits. Nobody thought about it until then. We made the guy a millionaire.”

Jack LaLanne (1914–2011) American exercise instructor

On Yami Yoghurt which he sponsored quoted in "Jack LaLanne, Founder of Modern Fitness Movement, Dies at 96, New York Times."

Elie Wiesel photo
Bill Engvall photo
Nicholas Ferrar photo
Octavio Paz photo
Fiona Apple photo
Joanna Newsom photo

“I killed my dinner
with karate
kicked him in the face, taste the body, shallow work is the work that I do.”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

The Book of Right-On
The Milk-Eyed Mender (2004)

Charles Babbage photo

“There are in the Exhibition some beautiful examples of such lace amongst the productions of other countries as well as of our own. They are made by the united labour of many women. The cost of a piece of lace will consist of:
# The remuneration to the artist who designs the pattern.
# The cost of the raw material.
# The cost of the labour of a large number of women working on it for many months.
Let us compare this with the cost of a piece of statuary, which is undoubtedly of a much higher class of art; it will consist of:
# The remuneration to the artist who makes the model.
# The cost of the raw material.
# The cost of labour, by assistants in cutting the block to the pattern of the model.
# Finishing the statue by the artist himself.
In lace making the skill of the artist is required only for the production of the first example. Every succeeding copy is made by mere labour: each copy may be considered as an individual, and will cost the same amount of time.
In sculpture the three first processes are quite analogous to those in lace-making. But the fourth process requires the taste and judgment of the artist. It is this which causes it to retain its rank amongst the fine arts, whilst lacemaking must still be classed amongst the industrial.”

Charles Babbage (1791–1871) mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable c…

Source: The Exposition of 1851: Views Of The Industry, The Science, and the Government Of England, 1851, p. 49-50

Alexis De Tocqueville photo
Joshua Reynolds photo

“Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.”

Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) English painter, specialising in portraits

Discourse no. 3; vol. 1, p. 57.
Discourses on Art

Benjamin Spock photo
Edwin Abbott Abbott photo

“On the whole we get on pretty smoothly in our domestic relations, except in the lower strata of the Military Classes. There the want of tact and discretion on the part of the husbands produces at times indescribable disasters. Relying too much on the offensive weapons of their acute angles instead of the defensive organs of good sense and seasonable simulation, these reckless creatures too often neglect the prescribed construction of the women's apartments, or irritate their wives by ill-advised expressions out of doors, which they refuse immediately to retract. Moreover a blunt and stolid regard for literal truth indisposes them to make those lavish promises by which the more judicious Circle can in a moment pacify his consort. The result is massacre; not, however, without its advantages, as it eliminates the more brutal and troublesome of the Isosceles; and by many of our Circles the destructiveness of the Thinner Sex is regarded as one among many providential arrangements for suppressing redundant population, and nipping Revolution in the bud.

Yet even in our best regulated and most approximately Circular families I cannot say that the ideal of family life is so high as with you in Spaceland. There is peace, in so far as the absence of slaughter may be called by that name, but there is necessarily little harmony of tastes or pursuits; and the cautious wisdom of the Circles has ensured safety at the cost of domestic comfort.”

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART I: THIS WORLD, Chapter 4. Concerning the Women

Samuel Rutherford photo

“There is nothing that will make you a Christian indeed, but a taste of the sweetness of Christ.”

Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661) Scottish Reformed theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 105.

Clive Barker photo
Bellamy Young photo
Amit Chaudhuri photo
Marcel Duchamp photo

“.. the thing was to choose one [a ready-made object] that you were not attracted by.... and that was difficult because anything becomes beautiful if you look at it long enough... [My intention was to] completely eliminate the existence of taste, bad or good or indifferent.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

Quote from The New York school – the painters & sculptors of the fifties, Irving Sandler, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1978, p. 164
posthumous

Jean-François Millet photo

“He [Alfred de Musset] puts you into a fever, it is true; but he can do nothing more for you. He has undoubted charms, but his taste is capricious and poisoned. All he can do is to disenchant and corrupt you, and at the end leave you in despair. The fever passes, and you are left without strength - like a convalescent who is in need of fresh air, of the sunshine, and of the stars.”

Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) French painter

a remark to his friend Louis Marolle in Paris c. 1839; as quoted by Julia Cartwright in Jean Francois Millet, his Life and Letters https://archive.org/stream/jeanfrancoismill00cart#page/n5/mode/2up, Swan Sonnenschein en Co, Lim. London / The Macmillian Company, New York; second edition, September 1902, p. 60
Millet had little sympathy with the French poet Alfred de Musset and criticized the tendencies of his poetry severely.
1835 - 1850

Smokey Robinson photo
Eugène Fromentin photo

“A central problem in teaching mathematics is to communicate a reasonable sense of taste—meaning often when to, or not to, generalize, abstract, or extend something you have just done.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Gideon Mantell photo
Nicholas of Cusa photo
Jack Johnson (musician) photo
Ray Bradbury photo
Chinmayananda Saraswati photo

“Live morality before you talk of it. Practise meditation before you preach it. Taste goodness before you recommend it. Gain bliss before you offer it to others.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

In Conscious Living http://books.google.co.in/books?id=cUPoxT6C-DYC&pg=PA85, p. 85
Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago
Variant: Live morality before you talk to him. Practicing meditation before you preach. Goodness taste before you recommend. Gain bliss before you offer to others.

Fred Astaire photo

“It's unmatched perfection. It's a taste, understanding of his strength, and weaknesses in a way. He was not a sexual animal, but he made his partners look so extraordinarily related to him.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Mikhail Baryshnikov in an interview http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0205/05/lklw.00.html on Larry King Live, CNN. 5 May 2002.

Carl Friedrich Gauss photo
Eugène Delacroix photo
Pete Doherty photo
Edmund White photo

“It seemed strange to me that someone who painted big, scary abstractions should have been so commonsensical in her literary tastes, though later I would discover that twelve-tone composers read Keats just as experimental poets listened to Glenn Miller — few people are avant-garde outside their own domain.I suppose that as Midwesterners, the children of chemical engineers and homemakers, we experienced the arts as so foreign, even so preposterously unreasonable, that once we’d decided to embrace them we did so with lots of conviction and little discrimination. Surely it was no accident that T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the two great poetic synthesists of our day, the very men who had ransacked all of world culture and could refer in the same poem to the Buddha and to Sophocles or to Confucius and to Jefferson — it was no accident that they were both from the heartland. Public-library intellectuals, magpies of knowledge, like most autodidacts we were incapable of evaluating our sources. As a teen-ager, I tried to write verse like Milton’s; later, I wanted to write novels like Nabokov’s. In a novel I wrote in college, I imitated Evelyn Waugh. If someone had said to me, "But do you, the graceless son of a Cincinnati broker of chemical equipment, do you seriously imagine that you can just write a Renaissance Christian epic or something in the style of a Cambridge-educated Russian aristocrat or of the spokesman of the Bright Young Things of London circa 1925?"”

Edmund White (1940) American novelist and LGBT essayist

if someone had spoken like this to me, I wouldn’t even have understood his point.
My Women.The New Yorker https://archive.is/20121204150452/www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050613fa_fact 6 June 2005
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