This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"A saintly colored woman who was greatly loved in her community was asked how she made and kept so many friends. She replied, "I stop and taste my words before I let them pass my teeth."" - Claude A. Ries
"Almost all men are over-anxious. No sooner do they enter the world than they lose that taste fore natural and simple pleasures so remarkable in early life. Every hour do they ask themselves what progress they have made in the pursuit of wealth or honor; and on they go as their fathers went before them, till, weary and sick at heart, they look back with a sigh of regret to the golden time of their childhood." - Samuel Rogers
"Taste is, so to speak, the microscope of the judgment." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"We do not know either unalloyed happiness or unmitigated misfortune. Everything in this world is a tangled yarn; we taste nothing in its purity; we do not remain two moments in the same state. Our affections as well as bodies, are in a perpetual flux." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"The works of a person that builds begin immediately to decay, while those of him who plants begin directly to improve. In this, planting promises a more lasting pleasure than building; which, were it to remain in equal perfection, would at best begin to moulder and want repairs in imagination. Now trees have a circumstance that suits our taste and that is annual variety." - William Shenstone
"Cities have their indispensable purposes, and their charms, not the least of which is that you can be alone in a crowd. But that kind of living alone is an acquired taste, and not for the weak or unfortunate. they are apt to learn that no city’s institutions can provide protective supports like those of an extended family or real community." - George Frederick Will
"Taste is not stationary. It grows every day, and is improved by cultivation, as a good temper is refined by religion. In its most advanced state it takes the title of judgment. Hume quotes Fontenelle's ingenious distinction between the common watch that tells the hours, and the delicately constructed one that marks the seconds and smallest differences of time." - Robert Aris Willmott
"The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction." - Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
"In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste, but in its effects." - J. W. Fulbright, fully James William Fulbright
"At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have. In the middle, people grant that money has something to do with it, but think education and the kind of work you do almost equally important. Nearer the top, people perceive that taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior are indispensable criteria of class, regardless of money or occupation or education." - Paul Fussell
"Flattery’s fire is hidden. Its sweet taste is apparent, but the smoke is bound to come out at last." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
"God has established prayer in the moral world in order “to communicate to His creatures the dignity of causality.” That is to say, to give us a touch and a taste of what it is to be a Creator." - Alexander Whyte
"In languages around the world, three-fourths of all the words describing sensory impressions refer to hearing and vision. The remaining minority of words are divided among the other senses, including smell, taste, and touch, as well as sensitivity to temperature, humidity, and electrical fields." -
"Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it, and find out the truth about who you are." -
"What we gain without effort does not satisfy like what comes through the sweat of our brow or the work of self-transformation. No berries taste as sweet as those we pick. No insight changes us as deeply as what we discover ourselves. Prayer might help, but walking the endless path of practice is the only way to a deep reward. Sometimes just the path is reward enough." - Franz Metcalf
"There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed." - Edward Wadie Saïd
"How could sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing." - Albert Camus
"Any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, has disappeared. Leisure (has become) entertainment." - Allan Bloom, fully Allan David Bloom
"Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while every mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself, thou fillest us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Exaggeration is a prodigality of the judgment which shows the narrowness of one's knowledge or one's taste." - Baltasar Gracián
"There are two forms of knowledge, one legitimate, one bastard. To the bastard belong all the following: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. The other is legitimate, and is separate from this." - Democritus NULL
"Good taste is the product of judgment rather than of intellect." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"He is not a reasonable man who by chance stumbles upon reason, but he who derives it from knowledge, from discernment, and from taste." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"It is as common for men to change their taste as it is uncommon for them to change their inclination." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Taste and elegance, though they are reckoned only among the small and secondary morals, yet are of no mean importance in the regulation of life. A moral taste is not of force to turn vice into virtue; but it recommends virtue with something like the blandishments of pleasure." - Edmund Burke
"It is for the most part in our skill in manners, and in the observation of time and place and of decency in general that what is called taste consists; and which is in reality no other that a more refined judgment. The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment." - Edmund Burke
"War suspends the rules of moral obligation, and what is long suspended is in danger of being totally abrogated. Civil wars strike deepest of all into the manners of the people. They vitiate their politics; they corrupt their morals; they pervert their natural taste and relish of equity and justice. By teaching us to consider our fellow-citizens in a hostile light, the whole body of our nation becomes gradually less dear to us. The very nature of affection and kindred, which were the bond of charity, whilst we agreed, become new incentives to hatred and rage, when the communion of our country is dissolved." - Edmund Burke
"Without a sense of proportion there can be neither good taste nor genuine intelligence, nor perhaps moral integrity." - Eric Hoffer
"The study of art is a taste at once engrossing and unselfish, which may be indulged without effort, and yet has the power of exciting the deepest emotions - a taste able to exercise and to gratify both the nobler and softer parts of our nature." - François Guizot, fully François Pierre Guillaume Guizot
"Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a love about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion." - George Santayana
"To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be." - George Santayana
"The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce[s] them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim." - Gustave Le Bon
"Live each season as it passes; breath the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"The first pressure of sorrow crushes out from our hearts the best wine; afterwards the constant weight of it brings forth bitterness - the taste and strain from the lees of the vat." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"If we judge objects merely according to concepts, then all representation of beauty is lost. Thus there can be no rule according to which anyone is to be forced to recognizes anything as beautiful... The beautiful is that which pleases universally without a concept... There can be no objective rule of taste which shall determine by means of concept what is beautiful." - Immanuel Kant
"Taste is the faculty of judging an object or a method of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The object of such satisfaction is called beautiful." - Immanuel Kant
"High original genius is always ridiculed on its first appearance; most of all by those who have won themselves the highest reputation in working on the established lines. Genius only commands recognition when it has created the taste which is to appreciate it." - James Froude, fully James Anthony Froude
"The full use of taste is an act of genius." - John LaFarge
"Taste is not only a part and an index of morality - it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, “What do you like?” Tell me what you like, an I’ll tell you what you are." - John Ruskin
"Customs are made for customary circumstances and customary characters... The mind itself is bowed to the yoke; even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they live in crowds: they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have not nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own." - John Stuart Mill
"If it were only that people have diversities of taste, that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them all after one model. But different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development, and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the varieties of plants can in the same physical atmosphere and climate." - John Stuart Mill
"Customs are made for customary circumstances; even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they live in crowds: they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have not nature to follow. Whatever crushes individuality is despotism. [And] I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized." - John Stuart Mill