Taste Quotes

• I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.

  Oscar Wilde

  Inspirational, Funny, Witty

  Oscar Wilde, Alvin Redman (1959). “The Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde”, p.249, Courier Corporation

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• I base most of my fashion taste on what doesn't itch.

  Gilda Radner

  Witty, Fashion, Funny Inspirational

  64 Copy quote

• Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.

  Charles Bukowski

  Millionaire, Good Taste, Bad Taste

  Charles Bukowski (2009). “Hollywood”, p.94, Canongate Books

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• A little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika.

  Dorothy Parker

  Fashion, Nice, Inspiration

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• Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.

  William Shakespeare

  Inspirational, Death, Running

  'Julius Caesar' (1599) act 2, sc. 2, l. 30

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• Taste cannot be controlled by law.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Law, Controlled

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoirs, 1: Correspondence and Private Papers”, p.138

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• Taste has never been corrupted by simplicity.

  Joseph Joubert

  Simplicity

  Joseph Joubert (1896). “Pensées of Joubert”

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• I love everything that's old, - old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Love, Friendship, Birthday

  1773 She Stoops to Conquer, act 1, sc.1.

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

  Pablo Picasso

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Creativity

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• Taste is something quite different from fashion, superior to fashion.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Fashion, Different, Superiors

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• Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

  Susan Sontag

  Intelligent, Ideas, Intelligence

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• Taste may be compared to that exquisite sense of the bee, which instantly discovers and extracts the quintessence of every flower, and disregards all the rest of it.

  Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

  Flower, May, Bees

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• The only enemy of art is taste.

  Thomas Hoving

  Art, Enemy, Art Is

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• An artist who brings to his work a mind tolerably furnished with the general principles of art, and a taste formed upon the works of good artists – in short, who knows in what excellence consists - will, with the assistance of models... be an overmatch for the greatest painter that ever lived who should be debarred such advantages.

  Joshua Reynolds

  Art, Mind, Excellence

  Sir Joshua Reynolds (1837). “Discourses on Painting and the Fine Arts, delivered at the Royal Academy. With a portrait”, p.244

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• Taste, if it mean anything but a paltry connoisseurship, must mean a general susceptibility to truth and nobleness, a sense to discern, and a heart to love and reverence all beauty, order, goodness, wheresoever, or in whatsoever forms and accompaniments they are to be seen. This surely implies, as its chief condition, not any given external rank or situation, but a finely-gifted mind, purified into harmony with itself, into keenness and justness of vision; above all, kindled into love and generous admiration.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Mean, Heart, Order

  Thomas Carlyle (1840). “Critical and miscellaneous essays, collected and republ”, p.50

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• The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment.

  Edmund Burke

  Causes, Judgment, Defects

  Edmund Burke (1824). “A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful”, p.19

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• A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

  Albert Camus

  Life, Truth, Passion

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• Taste may change, but inclination never.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  May, Inclination

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• Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.

  John Ruskin

  Ethics, Morality

  The Crown of Wild Olive Lecture 2 (1866)

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• The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.

  E. M. Forster

  Race, Curiosity, Mind

  E.M. Forster (1951). “Two Cheers for Democracy”

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• I need more sex, OK? Before I die I wanna taste everyone in the world.

  Angelina Jolie

  Love, Life, Sex

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• Next to occupation is the building up of good taste. That is difficult, slow work. Few achieve it. It means all the difference in the world in the end.

  Sherwood Anderson

  Mean, Building Up, Differences

  Sherwood Anderson (1953). “Letters: selected and edited with an introd. and notes by Howard Mumford Jones, in association with Walter B. Rideout”

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• Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Beauty, Ambition, Goal

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• Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said.

  Mel Brooks

  Inspiring, Funny Inspirational, Truth

  Quoted in John Robert Columbo, Popcorn in Paradise (1980)

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• People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.

  Samuel Butler

  Fashion, Clever, People

  Samuel Butler (1950). “The Essential Samuel Butler”

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