Quotes About Good Taste

“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.”

— John Updike

“I was born into a world full of 'specialists'. I'm not sure whether it's the result of our education system or just natural entropy, but it's very uncommon to know a poet with even a mediocre knowledge about art, or an artist with a good taste in poetry, and so on and on. What this really is: lack of general education in a structural sense: god knows how many people I've met that are actually PROUD about proclaiming their ignorance about another field: it is as if it signifies their 'devotion to one path' while in reality they really only look like a buffoon if you ask me. New is that I am encountering 'Literary Critics' that proudly proclaim to 'never have read any foreign poetry' as if a 'movie critic' that only has watched Dutch films would be somehow capable of criticizing them in any true sense of the word.”

— Martijn Benders

“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.”

— Terry Castle

“Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege.”

— Dave Hickey

“Things that seem too common: too many furnishings where one is sitting; too many brushes around an inkstone; too many Buddhas in a home chapel; too many stones and trees and bushes in a garden courtyard; too many children and grandchildren in a house; too many words used when talking to people; too much praise for oneself in a written petition.
Things that don't offend good taste even if numerous: books ...”

— Yoshida Kenkō

“A good espresso to me is a little bit salty; you just become used to a good taste. Anytime I go into a new place and they don't clean their machine properly or the water temperature isn't right, it tastes awful.”

— Andrew Bird

“Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest has failed.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“Genuine good taste consists in saying much in few words, in choosing among our thoughts, in having order and arrangement in what we say, and in speaking with composure.”

— Francois Fenelon

“It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.”

— Salvador Dali

“I've always had real good taste; no matter how poor I've been, I've had good taste in clothes.”

— Georgia Holt

“He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.”

— Thomas Mann

“Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.”

— Charles Bukowski

“My hands look terrible but I can do anything I want to do, so, you know, I just think I'm playing all around with more good taste and not dashing up and down the piano.”

— Marian McPartland

“The sweet quality is set opposite to the bitter, and is a gracious, amiable, blessed and pleasant quality, a refreshing of the life, an allaying of the fierceness. It maketh all pleasant and friendly in every creature; it maketh the vegetables of the earth fragrant and of good taste, affording fair, yellow, white and ruddy colours.”

— Jakob Bohme

“I suppose that I was a kind of consultant for taste. Is it good taste? Or bad taste? I had an attention to detail, to what would tell best the story. Because many people get excited about the work and drift off from the story.”

— John Hench

“Beauty is produced by the pleasing appearance and good taste of the whole, and by the dimensions of all the parts being duly proportioned to each other.”

— Vitruvius

“Italian style is a natural attitude. It is about a life of good taste. It doesn't have to be expensive. Simple but with good taste. Luxury is possible to buy. Good taste is not.”

— Diego Della Valle

“It struck me that perhaps a lot of the people you see walking about are dead. We say that a man's dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. After all, parts of your body don't stop working -hair goes on growing for years, for instance. Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea. Old Porteous is like that. Wonderfully learned, wonderfully good taste - but he's not capable of change. Just says the same things and thinks the same thoughts over and over again. There are a lot of people like that. Dead minds, stopped inside. Just keep moving backwards and forwards on the same little track, getting fainter all the time, like ghosts.”

— George Orwell

“My mum and my dad have really good taste in movies. My gran would tape them off the TV and write notes about them, rating them.”

— Domhnall Gleeson

“She looks like a librarian with some money and good taste in clothes, but underneath the Versace, she's Godzilla with tits.”

— Richard Kadrey

“High society here turns me off and I feel a bit of rage against all these rich guys here, since I have seen thousands of people in the most terrible misery without anything to eat and with no place to sleep, that is what has most impressed me here, it is terrifying to see the rich having parties day and night while thousands and thousands of people are dying of hunger ... Although I am very interested in all the industrial and mechanical development of the United States, I find that Americans completely lack sensibility and good taste. They live as if in an enormous chicken coop that is dirty and uncomfortable. The houses look like bread ovens and all the comfort that they talk about is a myth.”

— Frida Kahlo

“Applied good taste is a mark of good citizenship. Ugliness is a from of anarchy.. ugly cities, ugly advertising, ugly lives produce bad citizens.”

— Lester Beall

“Good taste is synonymous with success in all fields of life. It's not a question of money, but of a trained eye.”

— Letitia Baldrige

“'Smart growth' destroys the environment. 'Dumb growth' destroys the environment. The only difference is that 'smart growth' does it with good taste. It's like booking passage on the Titanic. Whether you go first-class or steerage, the result is the same.”

— Albert Allen Bartlett

“Ah, the truth, what a thing it is! I sacrifice so much for it, with people: I forego, for truth's sake, discretion, loyalty, diplomacy, tact, polite manners, elegance, grace, poise, balance, good taste, conformity, image-role, fashionableness, polish, confidences, promises, ambition, consistency, identity, clarity, comprehensibleness, good will, hypocrisy, and lots of other things
amass sacrifice, at truth's altar. God! is truth worth it? I hope it is. It better be, in fact.”

— Marvin L. Cohen

“Learn the rules and then break them in such a way as to exercise good taste.”

— George Shearing

“It's important not to overstate the benefits of ideas. Quite frankly, I know it's kind of a romantic notion that you're just going to have this one brilliant idea and then everything is going to be great. But the fact is that coming up with an idea is the least important part of creating something great. It has to be the right idea and have good taste, but the execution and delivery are what's key.”

— Sergey Brin

“Persons who would never think of announcing boldly to the world, 'I am a scholar,' 'I am a great artist,' 'I am a beautiful woman,' nevertheless seem to think it wholly within the bounds of good taste to announce that they are Christians!”

— Georgia Harkness

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

— Millicent Fenwick

“Good colour really means good taste; and 'powerful' colour means a reserve, to give a climax its full force, and not 'red, white, and blue all over.”

— John F. Carlson

“There are two dirty words in photography, one is art, the other is good taste”

— Helmut Newton

“In my vocabulary there are two bad words: art and good taste.”

— Helmut Newton

“In San Francisco, vulgarity, "bad taste," ostentation are regarded as a kind of alien blight, an invasion or encroachment from outside. In Los Angeles, there is so much money and power connected with ostentation that is no longer ludicrous: it commands a kind of respect. For if the mighty behave like this, then quiet good taste means that you can't afford the conspicuous expenditures, and you become a little ashamed of your modesty and propriety.”

— Pauline Kael

“I listed to Tchaikovsky. He is both kitsch and profound. I love that lack of "Good taste."”

— Cy Twombly

“Good taste is always bad.”

— Poul Henningsen

“H. L. Mencken once said that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. That is not true. I have come to believe that it pays to make all your layouts project a feeling of good taste, provided that you do it unobtrusively. An ugly layout suggests an ugly product. There are very few products which do not benefit from being given a first class ticket through life.”

— David Ogilvy

“I challenge youth to cooperate with parents who are concerned about your reading and your viewing. Be concerned yourself about what you take into your mind. Young people, you would never eat a meal of spoiled or contaminated food if you could help it, would you? Select your reading and viewing carefully and in good taste.”

— Marvin J. Ashton

“Good taste is the enemy of comedy.”

— Mel Brooks

“A good taste in art feels the presence or the absence of merit; a just taste discriminates the degree
the poco piu and the poco meno. A good taste rejects faults; a just taste selects excellences. A good taste is often unconscious; a just taste is always conscious. A good taste may be lowered or spoilt; a just taste can only go on refining more and more.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

“To show the relativity of what's good taste and what's not is something I like to play with.”

— Jean Paul Gaultier

“To seem sorrowful is not in good taste: You're supposed to seem bored.”

— Stendhal

“The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.”

— Susan Sontag

“Good taste rejects excessive nicety.”

— Francois Fenelon

“Good taste is not a substitute for knowledge”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

“What is the use of aesthetics if they can neither teach how to produce beauty nor how to appreciate it in good taste? It exists because it behooves rational human beings to provide reasons for their actions and assessments. Even if aesthetics are not the mathematics of beauty, they are the proof of the calculation.”

— Franz Grillparzer

“Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.”

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

“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

“Who is omnipotent or wise enough to decide each new standard of good taste? Or sensitivity?”

— Cary Grant

“The Secretary, working in the Dismal Swamp betimes next morning, was informed that a youth waited in the hall who gave the name of Sloppy. The footman who communicated this intelligence made a decent pause before uttering the name, to express that it was forced on his reluctance by the youth in question, and that if the youth had had the good sense and good taste to inherit some other name it would have spared the feelings of him the bearer.”

— Charles Dickens

“Friendship is an island that you retreat to and you all fall on the floor and laugh at all the other ninnies that don't have enough brains to have your good taste.”

— Ray Bradbury