Because taste is grounded in the sense of distinction, it follows that not everyone can have good taste. It is a conceptual impossibility (just as not all students can have above-average grades)…. Thus “good taste” shifts towards more inaccessible, less familiar styles.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 125

Good taste confers a sense of almost unassailable superiority upon its possessor. This is the primary reason that, in our society, people from different social classes do not freely interact with one another. They cannot stand each other’s taste. More specifically, the people who are higher up in the social hierarchy are utterly contemptuous of everything that the people beneath them enjoy (movies, sports, television shows, music, etc.).

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 125

Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.

–George Orwell, Burmese Days (1934), p. 57

You cannot translate a poem into an explanation, any more than you can translate a poem into a painting or a painting into a piece of music or a piece of music into a walking stick. A work of art says what it says in the only way it can be said. Beauty, for example, cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 117

As soon as a mystery is scheduled for solution, it is no longer a mystery; it is a problem.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 36

[Thoreau] would see that today ten thousand engineers are busy making sure that the world shall be convenient even if it is destroyed in the process, and others are determined to increase its usefulness even though its beauty is lost somewhere along the way.

–E. B. White, “A Slight Sound at Evening” (1954) in Essays of E.B. White (1977), 241