A Quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Taste is only to be educated by contemplation, not of the tolerably good but of the truly excellent.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Quote Topics

Contemplation Educated Excellent Good Only Taste Truly

Quote Author

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
German - Novelist
August 28, 1749 - March 22, 1832

Taste is only to be educated by contemplation, not of the tolerably good but of the truly excellent. I therefore show you only the best works; and when you are grounded in these, you will have a standard for the rest, which you will know how to value, without overrating them.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A good taste in art feels the presence or the absence of merit; a just taste discriminates the degree--the poco piu and the poco meno. A good taste rejects faults; a just taste selects excellences. A good taste is often unconscious; a just taste is always conscious. A good taste may be lowered or spoilt; a just taste can only go on refining more and more.

Anna Brownell Jameson

Excellence is everything today, and most people aren't excellent. If you're not excellent - like truly excellent at what you do - you're toast.

Jason Calacanis

There is an ideal of excellence for any particular craft or occupation; similarly there must be an excellent that we can achieve as human beings. That is, we can live our lives as a whole in such a way that they can be judged not just as excellent in this respect or in that occupation, but as excellent, period. Only when we develop our truly human capacities sufficiently to achieve this human excellent will we have lives blessed with happiness.

Aristotle

[Good taste] is a nineteenth-century concept. And good taste has never really been defined. The effort of projecting 'good taste' is so studied that it offends me. No, I prefer to negate that. We have to put a period to so-called good taste.

Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.

Susan Sontag

Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.

Susan Sontag

If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.

Marcel Duchamp

An artist who brings to his work a mind tolerably furnished with the general principles of art, and a taste formed upon the works of good artists ? in short, who knows in what excellence consists - will, with the assistance of models... be an overmatch for the greatest painter that ever lived who should be debarred such advantages.

Joshua Reynolds

We may have an excellent ear for music, without being able to perform in any kind; we may judge well of poetry, without being poets, or possessing the least of a poetic vein; but we can have no tolerable notion of goodness without being tolerably good.

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury

People can only be free if they are truly educated.

Jose Marti

Italian style is a natural attitude. It is about a life of good taste. It doesn't have to be expensive. Simple but with good taste. Luxury is possible to buy. Good taste is not.

Diego Della Valle

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.

Susan Sontag

There's nothing better than an educated actor - not only educated in his craft but educated in the world.

Joe Morton

My wife is great at giving input for my projects. She's good at naming places, she has pretty good taste in music, and as a model, of course, she's excellent when it comes to lighting.