Jonathan Miller Quotes

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

We are able to feel and learn very quickly through music, through art, through poetry some spiritual things that we would otherwise learn very slowly.

Taste is the common sense of genius.

No one's conception of art is going to be acceptable to everybody.

The more you go to a theatre and the more you hear stories you aren't necessarily familiar with, the more open you become.

You have to recognize as a creative person that not everyone's going to be into what you're doing.

We are governed by sympathy; and the extent of our sympathy is determined by that of our sensibility

I'm too much left brain. I very much have an emotional response to things; I love literature and films and storytelling. I need to nourish my right side, it doesn't get a lot of exercise.

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

In our democratic culture people often think it is threatening to judge another person's taste. Some are even offended by the suggestion that there is a difference between good and bad taste, or that it matters what you look at or read or listen to.

... naturalness is not always consonant with taste.

Why Alexia that is quite beautiful. It does ot reflect your customary taste at all approved Miss Hisselpenny with glee. Trust Ivy to like the hideous thing for it's looks.

Taste depends upon those finer emotions which make the organization of the soul.

Sensibility... is a direct and particular reaction to the separate and individual nature of things. It begins and ends with the sensuous apprehension of colour, texture and formal relations; and if we strive to organize these elements, it is not with the idea of increasing the knowledge of the mind, but rather in order to intensify the pleasure of the senses.

Being a musician makes you very - musicians in general tend to be quite sensitive, I think, to the environment around them, which helps when you are trying to interact with others on screen, to be aware, to be sensitive, and to try to understand what's going on in the scene.

And so was Luria, whose words now came back to me: ‘A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being ... It is here ... you may touch him, and see a profound change.’ Memory, mental activity, mind alone, could not hold him; but moral attention and action could hold him completely.

Music enhances the education of our children by helping them to make connections and broadening the depth with which they think and feel. If we are to hope for a society of culturally literate people, music must be a vital part of our children's education.

I divide all literary works into two categories: Those I like and those I don't like. No other criterion exists for me.

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.

A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art.

In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.

Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses?

Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.

There is a field where all wonderful perfections of microscope and telescope fail, all exquisite niceties of weights and measures, as well as that which is behind them, the keen and driving power of the mind. No facts however indubitably detected, no effort of reason however magnificently maintained, can prove that Bach's music is beautiful.

Fine taste is an aspect of genius itself, and is the faculty of delicate appreciation, which makes the best effects of art our own.