#Taste Quotes

“Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.”

“It is in bad taste," is the most formidable word an Englishman can pronounce.”

“My tastes are simple. I like only the very best.”

“Taste is the common sense of genius.”

“I confess that my stomach does not take to this style of cooking. I cannot accept calves sweetbreads swimming in a salty sauce, nor can I eat mince consisting of turkey, hare, and rabbit, which they try to persuade me comes from a single animal... As for the cooks, I really cannot be expected to put up with this ham essence, nor the excessive quantity of morels and other mushrooms, pepper, and nutmeg with which they disguise perfectly good food.”

“I read only to please myself, and enjoy only what suits my taste.”

“Women are the best judges of anything we turn out. Their taste is very important. They are the theatergoers; they are the ones who drag the men in. If the women like it, to heck with the men.”

“All styles are good except the tiresome kind.”

“Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.”

“Men lose their tempers in defending their taste.”

“He does not care for flowers. Calls them rubbish, and cannot tell one from another, and thinks it is superior to feel like that.”

“Great art stretches the taste, it doesn't follow tastes.”

“I have no liking for novels or stories - none in the world; and so, whenever I read one - which is not oftener than once in two years, and even in these same cases I seldom read beyond the middle of the book - my distaste for the vehicle always taints my judgment of the literature itself, as a matter of course; and also of course makes my verdict valuless. Are you saying "You have written stories yourself." Quite true: but the fact that an Indian likes to scalp people is no evidence that he likes to be scalped.”

“Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you're doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

“Sandwich outdoors isn’t a sandwich anymore. Tastes different than indoors, notice? Got more spice. Tastes like mint and pinesap. Does wonders for the appetite.”

“I have a simple taste, only the best.”

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

“The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity.”

“Fruitcake is like semen, there's a lot of it about but no one wants to swallow it”

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

“Good taste is the enemy of creativity.”

“In art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them.”

“The catfish is Plenty good enough fish for anyone”

“There may be something petty in a refined taste; it easily degenerates into effeminacy. It does not consider the broadest use. It is not content with simple good and bad, and so is fastidious and curious or nice only.”

“No one can tell me what is a good cigar - for me. I am the only judge. People who claim to know say that I smoke the worst cigars in the world. They bring their own cigars when they come to my house.”

“Foreigners cannot enjoy our food, I suppose, any more than we can enjoy theirs. It is not strange; for tastes are made, not born. I might glorify my bill of fare until I was tired; but after all, the Scotchman would shake his head and say, 'Where's your haggis?' and the Fijan would sigh and say, 'Where's your missionary?'”

“Taste is only to be educated by contemplation, not of the tolerably good but of the truly excellent.”

“Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.”

“Taste and style is beyond clothes. It's in food; it's in quality. Working out, healthy bodies, organic food-they're all part of the same thing.”

“I don't even listen to rap. My apartment is too nice to listen to rap in.”

“I don't use blue. I don't like it. It bugs me out. I hate it.”

“All of life is a dispute over taste and tasting.”

“One cannot develop taste from what is of average quality but only from the very best.”

“This is every cook's opinion -no savory dish without an onion,but lest your kissing should be spoiledyour onions must be fully boiled.”

“I love white Portugal wine better than claret, champagne, or burgundy. I have a sad vulgar appetite.”

“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”

“Before the end of December, generally, they experience their first thawing. Those which a month ago were sour, crabbed, and quite unpalatable to the civilized taste, such at least as were frozen while sound, let a warmer sun come to thaw them, for they are extremely sensitive to its rays, are found to be filled with a rich, sweet cider, better than any bottled cider that I know of, and with which I am better acquainted than with wine. All apples are good in this state, and your jaws are the cider-press.”

“From my experience with wild apples, I can understand that there may be reason for a savage's preferring many kinds of food which the civilized man rejects. The former has the palate of an outdoor man. It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.”

“Personal size and mental sorrow have certainly no necessary proportions. A large bulky figure has a good a right to be in deep affliction, as the most graceful set of limbs in the world. But, fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason will pa tronize in vain,--which taste cannot tolerate,--which ridicule will seize.”

“It is not to everyone's taste that truth should be pronounced pleasant. But at least let no one believe that error becomes truth when it is pronounced unpleasant.”

“There is nothing more fearful than imagination without taste.[Ger., Es ist nichts furchterlicher als Einbildungskraft ohne Geschmack.]”

“Everybody has their taste in noises as well as in other matters.”

“But are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid? [Referring to Gothic novels, fashionable in England at the beginning of the 19th century, but frowned upon in polite society.]”

“I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt.”

“But where only a free play of our presentational powers is to be sustained, as in the case of pleasure gardens, room decoration, all sorts of useful utensils, and so on, any regularity that has an air of constraint is [to be] avoided as much as possible. That is why the English taste in gardens, or the baroque taste in furniture, carries the imagination's freedom very far, even to the verge of the grotesque, because it is precisely this divorce from any constraint of a rule that the case is posited where taste can show its greatest perfection in designs made by the imagination.”

“Even the song of birds, which we can bring under no musical rule, seems to have more freedom, and therefore more for taste, than a song of a human being which is produced in accordance with all the rules of music; for we very much sooner weary of the latter, if it is repeated often and at length. Here, however, we probably confuse our participation in the mirth of a little creature that we love, with the beauty of its song; for if this were exactly imitated by man (as sometimes the notes of the nightingale are) it would seem to our ear quite devoid of taste.”

“If more than 10% of the people like a painting, you can be sure it's bad.”

“Good taste comes more from the judgment than from the mind.”

“If you take cranberries and stew them like apple sauce, it tastes much more like prunes than rhubarb does.”

“I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain.”