Good Taste Quotes

“To leave out beautiful sunsets is the secret of good taste.”
― Dejan Stojanovic

“As Carrie Fisher once said in a film, everyone thinks they have good taste and a sense of humour.”
― Jane Green, Mr. Maybe

“A man is only as free as his love of good things.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“evangelical Christians talk quite a bit about the salvation of souls but have very little else to say about souls themselves. Because most American Christians conceive of salvation primarily as a judicial decision in their favor, the question of what souls should do after they are saved is rather baffling.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“The point of mediocre art is to inflame desire and destroy contentment because content people buy less. Good art is bad for business.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“Pleasure takes place in the body, but satisfaction is of the soul, and so things which offer purely physical pleasure cannot help egging people on to consume more and more in search of a spiritual state the carnal thing is incapable of delivering. The economy of spiritual things is different because spirit is immaterial, intellectual, and unquantifiable. There is not “more Christ” in a small bite of the Eucharist than a large one, neither is the object blessed with a bucket of holy water more holy than an object blessed with a thimble full. Inasmuch as a thing appeals more to the spirit than the body, a man needs less of it, which is why many people have accidentally eaten an entire bag of Doritos in one sitting, but no one has ever accidentally read the entire gospel of St. John in one sitting.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“Very good things exhaust the senses through the mind, while mediocre things pummel the senses without ever reaching the mind.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“Twentieth century art unambiguously proclaims that the standards and conventions of beauty accepted by all Christian people in bygone eras have been wholeheartedly rejected— not edited and refined but degraded and discarded.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“The Enlightenment project was doomed from the start, though, for though human beings run out of money, time, resources, energy, and desire, they never run out of the past. A war on the past will necessarily be endless, for no sooner has a man conquered the past than the very act of conquering becomes the past, as well.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“In a society bent on progress, stability is treason.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“Any society at war with the past will necessarily produce an endless tidal wave of cultural artifacts that are short-lived, for the longer any film or book or song lasts, the more adverse it is to progress.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“The Enlightened spirit is not like some safe cracker whose ear is pressed to the metal while his fingers imperceptibly turn a dial. Rather, the Enlightened spirit always needs to be tearing something down—usually whatever it created last—and the same is true of mediocre art, which is fiercely competitive and aims at unseating whatever is already popular.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“Jackson Pollock and Hugh Hefner both rose to prominence in the 1950s, though Pollock’s appeal was that no one understood him, and Hefner’s appeal was that no one misunderstood him. When Modern men think of art, they tend to think of such highs and lows. In the midst of this daring game of extremes, art lost the common touch.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“We want to like old things. We want to like things of great beauty. When we imagine ourselves as the kind of people who love beautiful, old things, we enjoy the fantasy.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“Very beautiful things become harder to like the more we give ourselves over to the spectacular, sexy, shocking, ultra-sensual, fashionable art and ethics of Modernity. So far as acquiring good taste is concerned, balance is a myth. Every blockbuster film a man watches makes the task of reading Paradise Lost and Jane Eyre seem more dull and more pointless.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“Mediocre art not only hinders our ability to understand other people, it demands that we interpret our own lives through a laughably narrow range of emotions largely defined and curated by the unmarried, agnostic, pro-choice twentysomethings who now rule our culture.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Will Heaven Be Boring?: A Conversation About Beauty and Good Taste

“In "A Stolen Life," Dugard’s ability to think through questions of suffering, love, hope, and justice is indistinguishable from that of people her age who have lived "normally,” immersed in the world of blockbuster films, disposable fashion, popular music, easy virtue, virtue signaling, screen addiction, trendy political causes, and banal propaganda. The further I got into "A Stolen Life," the more I realized Dugard sounded just like the young women (and men) whose work I read in college writing workshops. My conclusion is both horrifying and offensive: for all the good our freedom is doing us we might as well have been locked up in a dungeon with demoniacs. The effects of living freely in the Modern world are not easily distinguishable from the effects of living in captivity with a psychopath.”
― Joshua Gibbs

“The Modern world is arranged such that a free man with a moderate salary could more or less purchase the life of an inmate for himself and even prefer such a life to a conventional life of freedom.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“We do not deserve a better culture than the one we have; every culture is perfectly suited to the music it produces, the churches it builds, and the poems it writes. We cannot lament our inability to build a fitting sequel to St. Peter’s Basilica without simultaneously lamenting our complete lack of a theology that might compel us to do so.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“A man is free to do good to the extent that he does good. If a man claims he could do good, but doesn’t do it, he either doesn’t know what goodness is or he doesn’t know what freedom means.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“Beauty is what lies beyond usefulness. Beauty inspires loyalty and gives meaning to mere usefulness. We need useful things, but we love beautiful things. A building which is merely functional will not last, for people will not love it. They will get bored with it. The average football stadium now costs a billion dollars to build and lasts just thirty years, after which it appears dated, silly, and unfashionable. The Chartres Cathedral, on the other hand, is more beautiful than any sports complex on earth and it has been functional for more than 800 years. Beautiful things last because when they begin to fall apart, we tend to them, revive and restore them; however, when purely functional things fall apart, we tire of them and replace them.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“St. Peter’s Basilica is the fruit of numerous theological dogmas that are now thought obsolete, uncouth, and pretentious.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“The average man sees an ugly avant-garde painting, learns it sold for a hundred million dollars, and cannot help responding, “But I could have painted that,” which is exactly the point. The progressive art critic might not claim the beauty of Pollock’s paintings was inherent in the paintings themselves, but in the ideas the painting communicates— although, it should be noted, every art critic has much to gain in championing art which cannot be understood without an interpreter.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“Americans have been slow to identify mediocrity because mediocre art simultaneously embraces virtues which both progressives and conservatives hold dear. In order to condemn mediocrity, one must believe that surviving the test of time is a very reliable sign of goodness, and very few persons on the political left would agree to this premise. However, condemning mediocrity also depends upon admitting that, regardless of other boons it might offer society, capitalism has not been good for art, and very few conservatives would admit this.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“While Spotify openly publishes user listening activity, the “Private Session” option allows users to listen to music they think stupid, immature, or embarrassing apart from their friends’ knowledge. The “Private Session” feature on Spotify subtly reveals how intensely we want our friends to think we have good taste, and yet we are unwilling to suffer any diminution of comfort or pleasure to achieve this distinction. We want to enjoy sensual trash, but we do not want to be held accountable for it.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“When progressives and Christians speak of “nature,” they are not referring to the same thing. Within the framework of Christian thought, nature can only be understood in its relationship with the supernatural... In cutting nature off from supernature, the Enlightenment inaugurated a long, slowly unfurling contempt for both nature and supernature which reaches new heights every year. ”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“Apart from a belief in the supernatural, it has become very hard to distinguish the natural from the unnatural. Without Heaven, what is the difference between Hell and Earth? Without God, how can the human and the demonic be told apart? More than two hundred years after the French Revolution, the only people who attack a position or practice as “unnatural” are those who believe in God, as well, because the concept of nature only makes sense as an intermediary between the supernatural and the unnatural.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“Because new special things empty old special things of their specialness, there is no tradition of special.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“Tradition implies obedience and predictability, but the specialness of special things is their refusal to obey.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“To say that Mark Rothko painted “colorful rectangles” really does sum up the man’s oeuvre. The thrill of Rothko’s work is entirely bound up in the massive size of his canvases. The same is true of Pollock and Newman. Had either been forced to use notebook sized canvases, all their power would be lost. On the other hand, the Mona Lisa is still interesting when reduced to the size of a postage stamp.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity