“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

“Change in fashion is simply the expression of an awakened intellect, groping in small things as in great for something better than it has known; and the use for a manual of fashion, such as we offer is, not to dictate to women any rule which they must blindly follow, but to afford such knowledge of varying costumes, and the manner of making them, that each may clothe herself appropriately, according to her appearance of age, or even mood.
Why should not a woman's purity of mind, her quick eye for color, her aesthetic sense of fitness, be disclosed in her attire as well as in the pictures on her walls or her garden? Very few of us will ever carve a great statue, or paint a great picture but we all have clothes to wear; and it is a duty we owe to ourselves and those around us, to so drape the bodies that God has given us, as to make no discord in this beautiful, pleasant world.
All of us have friends, or, it may be, children, with whom we would have a fair and tender memory. Carelessness and bad taste in dress, so far from being indicative of strength of mind, argues a certain vulgarity of feeling, just as vanity and foppery, on the other hand, prove a weak brain.
Wise men or women make their dress so thoroughly in accordance with their person and character, that nobody notices it any more than the frame of a picture; but to be clothed shabbily, in the hopes that our inner perfections will overshadow our dress, is but the extreme of vanity.
Peterson's Magazine, June 1873”
― Peterson's Magazine

“Is Ronchamp reminiscent of the Ark left stranded on Ararat, or like ‘bits of broken china thrown on top of the hill’? Is the roof like a bird’s wing, or does the whole edifice look like a decoy? Is it an alighting dove or a sitting duck? Good taste bids us to suppress the latter in favour of the former, although the latter is as easy to see.”
― Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries

“I couldn't quite say 'If you loved me' - we had always avoided the word. A mark of good taste on both our parts.”
― Larry McMurtry, Somebody's Darling

“All cultural artifacts can be parsed out into three categories: uncommon things, common things, and mediocre things. Mediocre things do not last very long, common things last a lifetime, and uncommon things last indefinitely.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“There has never been a midnight premier for a movie wherein Anthony Hopkins wears a top hat. Likewise, restaurants which stay open all night are not selling a lot of buttered peas and green salads after midnight. The creators of gleefully ephemeral things have no respect for time, thus mediocre things are not meant to be enjoyed at a proper time of day. There is no right or wrong time to consume a thing which was made to be obsolete in twelve months.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“Against the reliability of common sense, the laws of science, the ravages of sin, the tendencies of mankind, and the metaphysics which govern created things, some things are not destroyed by time. The ability to last is so exceedingly rare, when a man finds something which has bested time, he has found something for which there is only fitting adjective: divine.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“It is natural to care for those who have cared for us, but at the point a man has been dead a hundred years, no one alive who yet cares for him has any natural reason for doing so. In the several decades following a man’s death, those who knew him might carry a torch for his memory, describe the love they received from him, and champion the spirit they have inherited from him. However, if people are still willing to listen to a man one hundred years after his death, he speaks from the grave. After natural affection passes, if any affection remains, it is supernatural.”
― Joshua Gibbs

“Despite such verve and passion for Truth, the Christian brand is now rightly denigrated everywhere as trite and trivial. To put the word “Christian” before any kind of service, institution, or work of art is to consign the thing in question to the garbage pile of cut-rate design and cheap sentimentality.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“The man who only ever exposes himself to good messages issued from shallow spirits is more likely to adopt that shallowness of spirit than the goodness of the message.”
― 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

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

“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