This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"All luxury corrupts either the morals or the taste." - Joseph Joubert
"Taste has never been corrupted by simplicity." - Joseph Joubert
"There is in the soul a taste for the good, just as there is in the body an appetite for enjoyment." - Joseph Joubert
"Taste is the literary conscience of the soul." - Joseph Joubert
"No civilization professes openly to be unable to declare its destination. In an age like our own, however, there comes a time when individuals in increasing numbers unconsciously seek direction and taste despair." - Loren Eiseley
"Most of us believe that the freedom and power of adulthood is our due, but we have little taste for adult responsibility and self-discipline." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"Those wretches who never have experienced the sweets of wisdom and virtue, but spend all their time in revels and debauches, sink downward day after day, and make their whole life one continued series of errors. They taste no real or substantial pleasure; but, resembling so many brutes, with eyes always fixed on the earth, and intent upon their loaden tables, they pamper themselves in luxury and excess." - Plato NULL
"Men lose their tempers in defending their taste." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The microscope cannot find the animal-cule which is less perfect for being little. Eyes, ears, taste, smell, motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of reproduction that take hold on eternity – all find room to consist in the small creature. So do we put our life into every act. The true doctrine of omnipresence is that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Taste has no system and no proofs." - Susan Sontag
"It is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God’s heaven as a God-made man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations." - Thomas Carlyle
"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, 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
"Men, generally going with the stream, seldom judge for themselves, and purity of taste is almost as rare as talent." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"It is better to drink of deep griefs than to taste shallow pleasures." - William Hazlitt
"Wonder at the first sign of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste and knowledge." - William Hazlitt
"Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come. Julius Caesar (Caesar at II, ii)" - William Shakespeare
"Things sweet to taste prove in digestion sour." - William Shakespeare
"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." - Anne Lamott
"Let us examine more closely the significance of this vague word, reality. It may have several meanings, according to the different points of view which one takes. We may regard it as embodied in the physical world, the world of land and sea, of sky and trees, of sunshine and of storm. The real therefore will be to us that which we can touch and see, smell and taste, as one will say, "I know that is real for I can see it with my eyes." Seeing is believing, and the testimony of the senses is the superior court of appeal in controverted questions. But the world of reality may be regarded from quite a different point of view, as the world of consciousness, the mind of man, the experiences of the inner self, the Ego. Here is a world of phenomena interrelated and reciprocally dependent. It is a realm of ideas, of memory images, of fancy, of will, and of desire. The verities in this world cannot be seen, or measured, or weighed, and yet we do not hesitate to speak of them as realities; they are real as the love of friends is real, or the anger of a foe. The passion of a Romeo, the will of a Napoleon, the genius of a Goethe ... these are realities." - John Grier Hibben
"Good taste is the worst vice ever invented. " - Edith Sitwell, fully Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell
"All of life is a dispute over taste and tasting. " - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Two things must be distinguished in consciousness; first, the fact that I know; secondly, what I know. In self consciousness these are merged in one; for Spirit knows itself. It involves an appreciation of its own nature, as also an energy enabling it to realise itself; to make itself actually that which it is potentially. According to this abstract definition it may be said of Universal History, that it is the exhibition of Spirit in the process of working out the knowledge of that which it is potentially. And as the germ bears in itself the whole nature of the tree, and the taste and form of its fruits, so do the first traces of Spirit virtually contain the whole of that History." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections." - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
"Cultivate fine taste and discrimination in your choice of things. Get a right idea of values. Material possessions that you do not need and cannot use may be only an encumbrance. Let your guiding rule be not how much but how good. A thing you do not want is dear at any price. Avoid surplus age. Choose things that express your own individuality. You must possess your things or they will possess you. Look for quality rather than quantity. Unnecessary possessions bring unnecessary care and responsibility. Excess is waste. Have an occasional stocktaking and eliminate unsparingly." - Grenville Kleiser
"I who am blind can give one hint to those who see - one admonition to those who would make full use of the gift of sight: Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind. And the same method can be applied to the other senses. Hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra, as if you would be stricken deaf tomorrow. Touch each object you want to touch as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail. Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if tomorrow you could never smell and taste again. Make the most of every sense; glory in all facets of pleasure and beauty which the world reveals to you through the several means of contact which Nature provides. But of all the senses, sight must be the most delightful." - Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
"Live daringly, boldly, fearlessly. Taste the relish to be found in competition - in having put forth the best within you. " - Henry J. Kaiser
"It is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity when the excellent lies before us." - Isaac D'Israeli
"The greatest discovery in life, the most precious treasure, is of awareness. Without it you are bound to be in darkness, full of fears. And you will go on creating new fears -- there is no end to it. You will live in fear, you will die in fear, and you will never be able to taste something of freedom. And it was all the time your potential; any moment you could have claimed it, but you never claimed it." - Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
"There is no absolute peril except for him who abandons himself; There is no complete death except for him who aquires a taste of dying." - Jacques Rivière
"Far too often the choices reality proposes are such as to take away one's taste for choosing. " - Jean Rostand
"To be lonely is to feel unwanted and unloved, and therefor unloveable. Loneliness is a taste of death. No wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental illness or violence to forget the inner pain." - Jean Vanier
"The response to war is to live like brothers and sisters. The response to injustice is to share. The response to despair is a limitless trust and hope. The response to prejudice and hatred is forgiveness. To work for community is to work for humanity. To work for peace is to work for a true political solution; it is to work for the Kingdom of God. It is to work to enable every one to live and taste the secret joys of the human person united to the eternal." - Jean Vanier
"Generally speaking there is no irreducible taste or inclination. They all represent a certain appropriative choice of being. It is up to existential psychoanalysis to compare and classify them Ontology abandons us here; it has merely enabled us to determine the ultimate ends of human reality, its fundamental possibilities, and the value which haunts it." - Jean-Paul Sartre
"As far as sacred Scripture is concerned, however much forward men try to gnaw at it, nevertheless it clearly is crammed with thoughts that could not be humanly conceived. Let each of the prophets be looked into: none will be found who does not far exceed human measure. Consequently, those for whom prophetic doctrine is tasteless ought to be thought of as lacking taste buds." - John Calvin
"There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths, and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices, and set the example of more enlightened conduct, and better taste and sense in human life." - John Stuart Mill
"Errors of taste are very often the outward sign of a deep fault of sensibility. " - Jonathan Miller, fully Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller
"The care of children. . . is infinitely better left to the best-trained practitioners of both sexes who have chosen it as a vocation, rather than to harried and all too frequently unhappy persons with little time or taste for the work of educating minds." - Kate Millet, Katherine Murray Millett
"All of those for whom authentic transformation has deeply unseated their souls must, I believe, wrestle with the profound moral obligation to shout form the heart—perhaps quietly and gently, with tears of reluctance; perhaps with fierce fire and angry wisdom; perhaps with slow and careful analysis; perhaps by unshakable public example—but authentically always and absolutely carries a a demand and duty: you must speak out, to the best of your ability, and shake the spiritual tree, and shine your headlights into the eyes of the complacent. You must let that radical realization rumble through your veins and rattle those around you. Alas, if you fail to do so, you are betraying your own authenticity. You are hiding your true estate. You don’t want to upset others because you don’t want to upset your self. You are acting in bad faith, the taste of a bad infinity. " - Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II
"Weak men often from the very principle of their weakness derive a certain susceptibility; delicacy and taste which render them, in those particulars, much superior to men of stronger and more consistent minds, who laugh at them." - Lord Brooke, Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke, de jure 13th Baron Latimer and 5th Baron Willoughby de Brooke
" Genius is allied to a warm and inflammable constitution, delicacy of taste to calmness and sedateness. Hence it is common to find genius in one who is a prey to every passion; but seldom delicacy of taste. Upon a man possessed of this blessing, the moral duties, no less than the fine arts, make a deep impression, and counterbalance every irregular desire; at the same time, a temper calm and sedate is not easily moved, even by a strong temptation." -
"A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed." - Mary Shelley, née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
"Remember you will not always win. Some days, the most resourceful individual will taste defeat. But there is, in this case, always tomorrow - after you have done your best to achieve success today." - Maxwell Maltz
"Whoever possesses God in their being has Him in a divine manner, and He shines out to them in all things; for them all things taste of God and in all things it is God's image that they see." - Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim
"The soul has two eyes: an inner and an outer eye. The inner eye of the soul is the one which perceives being and receives its own being directly from God: This is the activity which is particular to itself. The outer eye of the soul is that which is directed towards all creatures and which perceives them in the manner of an image and the function of a faculty. But they who are turned within themselves so that they know God according to their own taste and in their own being, are freed from all created thingss and are secure in themselves in a very fortress of truth." - Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim
"To kill one man is to be guilty of a capital crime, to kill ten men is to increase the guilt ten-fold, to kill a hundred men is to increase it a hundred-fold. This the rulers of the earth all recognize and yet when it comes to the greatest crime—waging war on another state—they praise it! It is clear they do not know it is wrong, for they record such deeds to be handed down to posterity; if they knew they were wrong, why should they wish to record them and have them handed down to posterity? If a man on seeing a little black were to say it is black, but on seeing a lot of black were to say it were white, it would be clear that such a man could not distinguish between black and white. Or if he were to taste a few bitter things were to pronounce them sweet, clearly he would be incapable of distinguishing between sweetness and bitterness. So those who recognize a small crime as such, but do not recognize the wickedness of the greatest crime of all—the waging of war on another state–but actually praise it—cannot distinguish between right and wrong. So as to right or wrong, the rulers of the world are in confusion." - Mozi or Mo-tze, Mocius or Mo-tzu, original name Mo Di, aka Master Mo NULL
"My children, Allah's greetings of peace and supplications, His salams and salawats, resonate there in that water of divine knowledge. There you will find His representatives, His prophets, His olis, qutbs, auliya' and all those who know Him. Every second, every minute, they are praying and resonating with that beauty of Allah. Whoever falls into this water of divine knowledge will keep changing, until the taste of Allah is within him and he becomes the beauty of Allah." - Bawa Mahaiyadden, fully Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen