Taste Quotes - Page 27

• The power of admiring whatever is deserving of admiration, the nice and quick perception of the beautiful and the true, is one of the highest and noblest of our faculties, born of taste, and knowledge, and wisdom, or rather it is taste, and wisdom, and knowledge, in one rare and great combination.

  Mary Russell Mitford

  Beautiful, Appreciation, Nice

  MARY RUSSELL MITFORD (1870). “OUR VILLAGE”, p.406

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• Prejudices of taste, likings and dislikings, are not always vanquishable by reason.

  Mary Russell Mitford

  Prejudice, Reason

  Mary Russell Mitford (1870). “Our Village: Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery”, p.32

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• Every generation tailors history to its taste.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  History, Generations, Tailors

  Ada Louise Huxtable (1986). “The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered: The Search for a Skyscraper Style”, Pantheon

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• In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style. The style of Parisian architecture has been proved and refined by at least three centuries of academic dictates and highly developed taste. There are few violations of this taste, and there is exemplary architectural consistency. Paris has defined the aesthetics of a sophisticated urban culture.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Paris, Consistency, Style

  Ada Louise Huxtable (1986). “ARCHITECTURE, ANYONE?”, Random House

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• The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Sex, Two, Fiction

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• It is almost impossible for the poetess, once laurelled, to take off the crown for good or to reject values and taste of those who tender it.

  Louise Bogan

  Crowns, Impossible, Rejects

  Louise Bogan (1970). “A Poet's Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation”, New York : McGraw-Hill

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• Music or the color of the sea are easier to describe than the taste of one of these Armoricaines.

  Eleanor Clark

  Color, Oysters, Sea

  Eleanor Clark (2014). “The Oysters of Locmariaquer”, p.6, Harper Collins

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• The essence of good taste is a sense of values, and a sense of values is the pivotal point of good living.

  Millicent Fenwick

  Essence, Good Living, Pivotal

  Millicent Fenwick (1948). “Vogue's book of etiquette: a complete guide to traditional forms and modern usage”

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• One of the keys to our present definition of good taste is that it is better to be kind than to be 'correct.' There is no situation in which it is smart to be nasty.

  Millicent Fenwick

  Smart, Keys, Definitions

  Millicent Fenwick (1948). “Vogue's book of etiquette: a complete guide to traditional forms and modern usage”

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• And there is no living creature, though the whims of eons had put its eyes on boggling stalks and clamped it in a carapace, diminished it to a pinpoint and given it a taste for mud and stuck it down a well or hid it under a stone, but that creature will live on if it can.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Life, Eye, Stones

  Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Housekeeping: A Novel”, p.178, Macmillan

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• There is a wide difference between general acquaintance and companionship. You may salute a man and exchange compliments with him daily, yet know nothing of his character, his inmost tastes arid feelings.

  William Matthews

  Character, Men, Differences

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• I have no sympathy whatever with those who would grudge our workmen and our common people the very highest acquisitions which their taste or their time or their inclination would lead them to realize.

  Thomas Chalmers

  Education, People, Acquisition

  William Hanna, Thomas Chalmers (1852). “Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Thomas Chalmers, D.D. LL.D.”, p.206

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• You, that have toiled during youth, to set your son upon higher ground, and to enable him to begin where you left off, do not expect that son to be what you were, - diligent, modest, active, simple in his tastes, fertile in resources. You have put him under quite a different master. Poverty educated you; wealth will educate him. You cannot suppose the result will be the same.

  Anna Letitia Barbauld

  Son, Simple, Higher Ground

  Anna Letitia Barbauld (2001). “Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose”, p.384, Broadview Press

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• This noble word [women], spirit-stirring as it passes over English ears, is in America banished, and 'ladies' and 'females' substituted: the one to English taste mawkish and vulgar; the other indistinctive and gross.

  Harriet Martineau

  America, Female, Noble

  Harriet Martineau (1837). “Society in America”, p.145

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• I will never eat fish eyeballs, and I do not want to taste anything commonly kept as a house pet, but otherwise I am a cinch to feed.

  Laurie Colwin

  Food, House, Pet

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• If the mind loves solitude, it has thereby acquired a loftier character, and it becomes still more noble when the taste is indulged in.

  Wilhelm von Humboldt

  Character, Mind Love, Solitude

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• An animal is not cruel; it lives wholly in the instant leap on its prey, in the present taste of marrow or blood. Cruelty begins with the memory, and the pleasures of the memory are impure; they draw their strength along levels where no sun has reached.

  Storm Jameson

  Memories, Animal, Blood

  Storm Jameson (2011). “The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell”, p.50, A&C Black

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• The future is always fairyland to the young. Life is like a beautiful and winding lane, on either side bright flowers, and beautiful butterflies and tempting fruits, which we scarcely pause to admire and to taste, so eager are we to hasten to an opening which we imagine will be more beautiful still. But by degrees, as we advance, the trees grow bleak; the flowers and butterflies fail, the fruits disappear, and we find we have arrived--to reach a desert waste.

  George Augustus Henry Sala

  Beautiful, Flower, Future

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• my mother ... took the fact that my taste differed from hers as a personal insult.

  Merrill Markoe

  Mother, Facts, Insult

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• An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Travel, Stupid, Ugly Things

  Jamaica Kincaid (2000). “A Small Place”, p.17, Macmillan

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• money is an acquired taste that grows as it is fed.

  Helen McCloy

  Money, Feds, Grows

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• Money is an acquired taste. But, once acquired, it becomes an addiction.

  Helen McCloy

  Money, Addiction, Acquired Taste

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• it is usually in better taste to praise an isolated action or a production of genius, than a man's character as a whole.

  Elizabeth Wordsworth

  Character, Men, Genius

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• All analyses end badly. Each 'termination' leaves the participants with the taste of ashes in their mouths; each is absurd; each is a small, pointless death. Psychoanalysis cannot tolerate happy endings; it casts them off the way the body's immunological system casts off transplanted organs.

  Janet Malcolm

  Ashes, Analysis, Mouths

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• Since I have known God in a saving manner, painting, poetry, and music have had charms unknown to me before. I have received what I suppose is a taste for them, or religion has refined my mind and made it susceptible of impressions from the sublime and beautiful. O, how religion secures the heightened enjoyment of those pleasures which keep so many from God, by their becoming a source of pride!

  Henry Martyn

  Beautiful, Art, Pride

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