Aesthetic Discernment Quotes

Good taste has everything to do with being cultured and being refined, and if art has to do with anything, it has to do with being human.

A good taste is often unconscious; a just taste is always conscious.

When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't. There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.

Such a man as instinctively feeds on pure ambrosia and leaves alone the indigestible in things.

Good taste ruins certain true spiritual values: such as taste itself.

Taste is the fundamental quality which sums up all other qualities. It is the ne plus ultra of the intelligence.

Whatever the practical origins of aesthetic discernment may have been, it has been used to create great works of art. When the very loftiest human creations are seen to derive from humble origins and functions, what needs revision is not our esteem for these creations but our notion of nobility.

Men have got more of a discerning eye. They appreciate cut and details, things that aren't so obvious. They like things that have cachet and gentlemanliness.

To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being... what matters is not whether you love it or hate it, but only to be quite clear about your position regarding it.

When I see my movies on the editing table, I do think I could have done them a certain way. The satisfaction is never there even when I'm directing a film. You need to have the feeling that you could have done this better.

Taste consists in the power of judging; genius in the power of executing.

In our hurried world too little value is attached to the part of the connoisseur and dilettante.

Unless you are a born connoisseur of art, you will not be able to judge by yourself why certain art is superior to other art.

Errors of taste are very often the outward sign of a deep fault of sensibility.

Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone.

To be a mere verbal critic is what no man of genius would be if he could; but to be a critic of true taste and feeling is what no man without genius could be if he would.

An artist needs knowledge and the power of observation only so that he can tell from what he is abstaining, and to be sure that his abstention will not appear artificial or false.

I stop paying attention because as much as I love beauty, I hate stupidity, and seeing the two combined pisses me off.

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.

Those art lovers who pride themselves mostly on *taste* usually possess no other talent.

The ultimate politeness in art consists of speaking only to those who are able to uncover and measure its relationships. Anything else is symbolic, and symbolism is merely transcendental imagery.