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Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.
--
Le génie enfante, le go?t conserve. Le go?t est le bon sens du génie; sans le go?t, le génie n'est qu'une sublime folie.
--
François-René de Chateaubriand, in "Essai sur la littérature anglaise (1836): Mod?les classiques.

 

Alexander Pope

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Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.

 

Joshua Reynolds

 

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

 

Neatness begets order; but from order to taste there is the same difference as from taste to genius, or from love to friendship.

 

Johann Kaspar Lavater

 

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.

 

Jeremy Bentham

 

Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathematics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal genius. ... The theory of special genius, according to which for instance, it is supposed that a musical genius should be a fool at other subjects, confuses genius with talent. ... There are many kinds of talent, but only one kind of genius, and that is able to choose any kind of talent and master it.

 

Otto Weininger