Refined Sensibility Quotes

Taste. You cannot buy such a rare and wonderful thing. You can't send away for it in a catalogue. And I'm afraid it's becoming obsolete.

There are connoisseurs of blue just as there are connoisseurs of wine.

No man receives the full culture of a man in whom the sensibility to the beautiful is not cherished; and there is no condition of life from which it should be excluded. Of all luxuries this is the cheapest, and the most at hand, and most important to those conditions where coarse labor tends to give grossness to the mind.

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

We know the degree of refinement in people by the matter they laugh at and the ring of the laugh.

My mom was always a fan of just really elegant, sophisticated pieces. I mean we grew up in Maine, so we didn't have a lot of call for black tie or anything, but I think I definitely got that sensibility from her.

Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.

You can cultivate taste, as you can the intellect. Full understanding whets the appetite and desire, and, later, sharpens the enjoyment of possession.

There is one thing that matters, to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.

Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people, because they have a power of looking at such persons as objects of amusement of another race altogether.

A gentleman's first characteristic is that fineness of structure in the body which renders it capable of the most delicate sensation; and of structure in the mind which renders it capable of the most delicate sympathies; one may say simply "fineness of nature.

Judges of elegance and taste consider themselves as benefactors to the human race, whilst they are really only the interrupters of their pleasure ... There is no taste which deserves the epithet good, unless it be the taste for such employments which, to the pleasure actually produced by them, conjoin some contingent or future utility: there is no taste which deserves to be characterized as bad, unless it be a taste for some occupation which has mischievous tendency.

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

Taste and elegance, though they are reckoned only among the smaller and secondary morals, yet are of no mean importance in the regulations 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, and it infinitely abates the evils of vice.

Though men of delicate taste be rare, they are easily to be distinguished in society by the soundness of their understanding, and the superiority of their faculties above the rest of mankind.

The essence of good taste is a sense of values, and a sense of values is the pivotal point of good living.

To understand bad taste one must have very good taste.

When you're a connoiseur you look for interesting rather than good.

Good taste is the modesty of the mind; that is why it cannot be either imitated or acquired.

I may be old-fashioned. But I believe there is such a thing as a search for beauty - a delight in the nice things in the world. And I don't think one should have to apologise for it.