393 Quotes About Taste

I think “taste” is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else’s living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.

Thus, for an adequate interpretation of the differences found between the classes or within the same class as regards their relation to the various legitimate arts, painting, music, theatre, literature etc., one would have to analyse fully the social uses, legitimate or illegitimate, to which each of the arts, genres, works or institutions considered lends itself. For example, nothing more clearly affirms one's 'class', nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.

Mapenzi ni kiburudisho kisichojulikana ladha yake. Huwezi kuyazuia.

A grasp of the psychological mechanism behind taste will not necessarily change our sense of what we find beautiful, but it can prevent us from reacting to what we don’t like with simple disparagement

Mr. Lehrer's muse is not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste.

Su interés en la obra es simplemente moral o simplemente físico, y no es precisamente lo que debe ser: estético. Lectores tales gozan de una poesía sería y patética como de un sermón, y de una poesía humorística e ingenua, como de una bebida embriagadora, y carecen lo bastante de gusto para exigir edificación en una tragedia o epopeya.

Especially for upwardly mobile young females, declaring one's enthusiasm for Austen (whose heroines almost always move up in social and economic status as a result of the sterling marital alliances they form) has been a classic means of indicating one's purported good taste, good breeding, and good sense: I am an especially adorable member of the ruling class.

And if the reader has no taste for what he reads, all the time is wasted

...indeed it is very true that, just as the finest air in the world is vulgarized beyond all bearing once the public has taken to hum it and the street organs to play it, so the work of art that has appealed to the sham connoisseurs, that is admired by the uncritical, that is not content to rouse the enthusiasm of only a chosen few, becomes for this very reason, in the eyes of the elect, a thing polluted, commonplace, almost repulsive.