Susan Sontag Quotes

Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.

taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Loud dress becomes offensive to people of taste, as evincing an undue desire to reach and impress the untrained sensibilities of the vulgar.

Art, we are told, is a criterion of one's taste. How humiliating, should our taste turn out to be bad. Rather as though we were caught stark naked with a poor figure.

To understand bad taste one must have very good taste.

Taste is the power of relishing or rejecting whatever is offered for the entertainment of the imagination.

Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste.

Everybody has their taste in noises as well as in other matters.

I'm an aesthetic empiricist. If you like something, it doesn't matter who made it. There really is no objective standard other than your own taste. You develop your own tastes, you find things that do or do not fit your tastes, and therefore are or are not 'good.' Whether they have been labeled as produced by the right person is another matter.

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

Ultimately, taste is so niche and so personal.

I think one of the most boring things is a person's taste.

There will always be some films that the audience would like and some that they don't. But if I start becoming a slave to appreciation, I will be subjecting myself and my talent to one particular type of taste. I don't want to do that.

Everyone has their own taste, and you can argue about taste.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

I don't think you should criticize people's music because maybe it just isn't for you.

We all have the people we follow on Tumblr whose opinions or taste we respect. And I think because you see so much more variety of opinions and everything on the internet, it's less decided that something is good or bad. It's more like we all just sort of like what we like.

"Taste is not only a part and 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, I'll tell you what you are."

Don't confuse good taste with the absence of taste.

Fashion is like food! Some people like sushi, others think hamburgers are divine! People like different things!

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

When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.

Some people could say, "I'd like something that's super dramatic and miserable and made me cry and made me sad forever" but that's not my taste.

I once heard that Quentin Tarantino, who I obviously love and think is a genius, says that there's no such thing as guilty pleasure, there's only pleasures. And I do love that idea, because I do think that there's a pretentiousness when people make a list of their favorite things. I like to live a life where I don't think of my pleasures as guilty pleasures.

"We liked it" or "I didn't like it" people say. As if it were nothing higher than to please the people!