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Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuse himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
-Henry Adams
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It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.
-Renata Adler
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Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.
-Martin Amis
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What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.
-Charles Baudelaire
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Everyone has taste, yet it is more of a taboo subject than sex or money. The reason for this is simple: claims about your attitudes to or achievements in the carnal and financial arenas can be disputed only by your lover and your financial advisers, whereas by making statements about your taste you expose body and soul to terrible scrutiny. Taste is a merciless betrayer of social and cultural attitudes. Thus, while anybody will tell you as much (and perhaps more than) you want to know about their triumphs in bed and at the bank, it is taste that gets people's nerves tingling.
-Stephen Bayley
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Lovers of painting and lovers of music are people who openly display their preference like a delectable ailment that isolates them and makes them proud.
-Maurice Blanchot
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A man's palate can, in time, become accustomed to anything.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
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Bad taste is a species of bad morals.
-Christian Nevell Bovee
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Between good sense and good taste there lies the difference between a cause and its effect.
-Jean De La Bruyere
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People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.
-Samuel Butler
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The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.
-Raymond Chandler
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A style does not go out of style as long as it adapts itself to its period. When there is an incompatibility between the style and a certain state of mind, it is never the style that triumphs.
-Coco Chanel
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Fashion can be bought. Style one must possess.
-Edna W. Chase
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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
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Style is the dress of thoughts; and let them be ever so just, if your style is homely, coarse, and vulgar, they will appear to as much disadvantage, and be as ill received, as your person, though ever so well-proportioned, would if dressed in rags, dirt, and tatters.
-Lord Chesterfield
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The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.
-G. K. Chesterton
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Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
-Jean Cocteau
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What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist's presence makes itself felt above that of the model. With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul's style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.
-Jean Cocteau
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Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.
-Cyril Connolly
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No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.
-Cyril Connolly
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It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.
-Salvador Dali
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A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every orientation presupposes a disorientation.
-Hans Magnus Enzensberger
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Taste is the feminine of genius.
-Lord Edward Fitzgerald
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Style is the image of character.
-Edward Gibbon
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Books about Style
