Style Quotes

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

Henry Adams

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

The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.

Susan Sontag

Taste has no system and no proofs.

Susan Sontag

She's beautiful,' he murmured.'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.

George Orwell

I think taste is a social concept and not an artistic one. I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.

John Updike

Looking good and dressing well is a necessity. Having a purpose in life is not.

Oscar Wilde

I love everything that's old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines; and, I believe, Dorothy, you'll own I have been pretty fond of an old wife.

Oliver Goldsmith

No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.

Cyril Connolly

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.

Cyril Connolly

I wish you all manner of prosperity, with a little more taste.

AlainRene Le Sage

'Tis beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just IT. Some women will stay in a man's memory if they once walked down a street.

Rudyard Kipling

He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

Walt Whitman

Without taste genius is only a sublime kind of folly. That sure touch which the lyre gives back the right note and nothing more, is even a rarer gift than the creative faculty itself.

Vicomte De Chateaubriand

Fashion can be bought. Style one must possess.

Edna W. Chase

I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies -- thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in style.

Leo Tolstoy

Style is what gives value and currency to thoughts.

Arthur Schopenhauer

A man's palate can, in time, become accustomed to anything.

Napoleon Bonaparte

And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. (How to Write with Style. Essay, 1985)

Kurt Vonnegut