Quotes & Sayings About Poor Taste

It was our belief that the love of possessions is a weakness to be overcome ... Children must early learn the beauty of generosity. They are taught to give what they prize most, that they may taste the happiness of giving ... The Indians in their simplicity literally give away all that they have - to relatives, to guests of other tribes or clans, but above all to the poor and the aged, from whom they can hope for no return. — Charles Alexander Eastman

I know some of my parents' friends think 'Little Britain' is in incredibly poor taste. But swimming the Channel? You can't really say anything negative about that, can you? There's nothing better than making your parents happy. The glee on my father's face that day was amazing. — David Walliams

You have horrible taste in sensible footwear. Prefer high-pressure sexual advances to gentlemanly overtures. Can order a poor man into bankruptcy. Have questionable judgment when it comes to choosing travel companions." I — Alessandra Torre

By almost any assessment, the giant was a terrible artist. But he was lucky enough to settle in Jangleheim, a nation whose people had notoriously poor taste. Which just goes to show: There's a place for everybody. — Christopher Healy

My dick is not moving from where it's lodged, pressed up against the zipper of my jeans. I think her holier-than-thou attitude might have even made it harder.
Clearly, my dick has poor taste in women. — Sabrina Paige

Look. Folks. It's simple. If you have poor taste in decorating, don't go nuts in the entryway. Wait until your guests are inside before you spring something unusual on them. — James Lileks

The tea ritual: such a precise repetition of the same gestures and the same tastes; accession to simple, authentic and refined sensations, a license given to all, at little cost, to become aristocrats of taste, because tea is the beverage of the wealthy and the poor; the tea ritual, therefore, has the extraordinary virtue of introducing into the absurdity of our lives an aperture of serene harmony. Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And, with each swallow, time is sublimed. — Muriel Barbery

They wander on earth and live in heaven, and although they are weak, they protect the world; they taste of peace in the midst of turmoil; they are poor, and yet they have all they want. They stand in suffering and remain in joy, they appear dead to all outward sense and lead a life of faith within. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In water so fine, a few minutes of bad memory all but disappear downstream, washed away by ten thousand belly busters, a million cannonballs. Paradise was never heaven-high when I was a boy but waist-deep, an oasis of cutoff blue jeans and raggedy Converse sneakers, sweating bottles of Nehi Grape and Orange Crush, and this stream. I remember the antidote of icy water against my blistered skin, and the taste of mushy tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches, unwrapped from twice-used aluminum foil. I saw my first water moccasin here, and my first real girl, and being a child of the foot washers I have sometimes wondered if this was my Eden, and my serpent. If it was, I didn't hold out any longer than that first poor fool did. — Rick Bragg

How is the birdhouse coming along, Charlie Brown?"
"Well, I'm a lousy carpenter, I can't nail straight, I can't saw straight and I always split the wood ... I'm nervous, I lack confidence, I'm stupid, I have poor taste and absolutely no sense of design ... So, all things considered, it's coming along okay! — Charles M. Schulz

Islamic ethics is based on 'limits and proportions,' which means that the answer to an offensive cartoon is a cartoon, not the burning of embassies or the kidnapping of people designated as the enemy. Islam rejects guilt by association. Just as Muslims should not blame all Westerners for the poor taste of a cartoonist who wanted to be offensive, those horrified by the spectacle of rent-a-mob sackings of embassies in the name of Islam should not blame all Muslims for what is an outburst of fascist energy. — Amir Taheri

Art, we are told, is a criterion of one's taste. How humiliating, should our taste turn out to be bad. Rather as though we were caught stark naked with a poor figure. — Ilka Chase

We therefore work, not
for the work's sake, but for money - and money is supposed to get us
what we really want in our hours of leisure and play. In the United
States even poor people have lots of money compared with the wretched
and skinny millions of India, Africa, and China, while our middle andupper classes (or should we say "income groups") are as prosperous as
princes. Yet, by and large, they have but slight taste for pleasure. Money
alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For enjoyment is an art
and a skill for which we have little talent or energy. — Alan W. Watts

What happened to her?" he asked. "Poor taste in boyfriends, — Neil Gaiman

Reading private correspondence is in poor taste, Lord Ackerly."
"Unless it is terribly interesting," Eleanor says, "which Jessamin's letters are not. Mine, however, are lurid tales of my near-death experience and subsequent sequestering against my will in the home of the mysterious and brooding Lord Ackerly. I fear I may have given you a tragic past and a deadly secret or two."
"Are we staying in a decaying Gothic abbey?" I ask.
"Naturally. When I'm finished, there won't be a person in all the city who isn't writhing with jealousy over the heart-pounding drama of my life." She pauses, tapping her pen thoughtfully against her chin. "I don't suppose you have a cousin? I could very much use a romantic foil."
Finn shakes his head. "Sorry to disappoint."
"Alas. As long as I'm not the friend who meets a tragic end that brings you two together forever through shared grief." Her line meets dead silence, and a sly grin splits her face. "Oh wait, I nearly was. — Kiersten White

The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I'm alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling, and they're only a few steps behind you, finding the flaw, the poor weld, the place where we weren't stitched up quite right, the place they could almost slip right into through if the skin wasn't trying to keep them out, to keep them here, on the other side of the theater where the curtain keeps rising. I crawled out the window and ran into the woods. I had to make up all the words myself. The way they taste, the way they sound in the air. I passed through the narrow gate, stumbled in, stumbled around for a while, and stumbled back out. I made this place for you. A place for to love me. If this isn't a kingdom then I don't know what is. — Richard Siken

He's like a hero come back from the
war, a poor maimed bastard living out the reality of his dreams.
Wherever he sits himself the chair collapses; whatever door he
enters the room is empty: whatever he puts in his mouth leaves a
bad taste. Everything is just the same as it was before; the
elements are unchanged, the dream is no different than the reality.
Only, between the time he went to sleep and the time he woke up,
his body was stolen. — Henry Miller

Consider the black widow spider. It's a timid little beastie, useful and, for my taste, the prettiest of the arachnids, with its shiny, patent-leather finish and its red hourglass trademark. But the poor thing has the fatal misfortune of possessing enormously too much power for its size. So everybody kills it on sight. — Robert A. Heinlein

Platitudes are poor substitutes for emotions, this negative space hollowed out and without words. I know the shape of you and it has no name. I know the sound of you and the smell of you and the touch and sight and taste of you. But language departed the same day you did, leaving my mouth empty. — Tania De Rozario

The subjective viewpoint is the only one to use regarding a library. Your true library is a collection of the books you want.You may have deplorably poor taste or bad judgment. Never mind. Correct those traits before you exchange your books. — Carolyn Wells

They've always made a bigger deal about the side effects of drinking pregnant in America than they have in France. But then, the Americans make a bigger deal of everything. It's a bad sign, this trial. It shows very poor taste. It shows that French people are eager to place the blame elsewhere for their own choices. Between that and the arrival of Starbucks, you'll see. — Courtney Maum

Some women like to treat a man like a piece of bubble gum. The poor sap thinks everything's fine. And it is - until the taste runs out. Then she'll just spit him out the car window of her life and never look back. — Robert Burton Robinson

Jo, they have a baby grand piano, but no one in the family plays. They have shelves of books they've never read, and the tension between the couples was so thick it nearly choked us."
"Let me tell you something 'bout those rich Uptown folk," said Cokie. "They got everything that money can buy, their bank accounts are fat, but they ain't happy. They ain't ever gone be happy. You know why? They soul broke. And money can't fix that, no sir. My friend Bix was poor. Lord, he had to blow that trumpet ten hours a day just to put a little taste in the pot. Died poor, too. You saw him, Jo, with that plate on his chest. But that man wasn't soul broke. — Ruta Sepetys

For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution. — Chris Anderson

Charity is salt in the wound. It is painful. The state gives charity with the bitter hatred of a victim to his blackmailer. The receiver of free money is subjected to harassment, insult, and profound humiliation. Newspapers are enlisted to heap scorn on the arrogant bastards who choose to beg instead of starve or let their children starve. It is made clear that the poor seek charity as a great and sordid chicanery in which they delight. And there are some who do. As there are people who take delight in sticking hot needles deep into their abdomens, swallow pieces of broken bottles. A special taste. Speaking for humanity in general, the poor accept charity with a shame and loss of self-respect that is truly pitiful. — Mario Puzo

Ludmilla, now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds. Hearing also has its role, alert to your gasps and your trills. It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of raeding: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being. — Italo Calvino

Comedians second-guessing themselves is scary. Poor taste is not a crime and we can't forget that. — Jeff Ross

It is always a bad sign when the lower classes laugh: their taste in humour is both poor and sinister; — Robert Louis Stevenson

As for 'Dear Friend Hitler,' if it ever gets off the ground it will likely go down in history as little more than a symbol of Bollywood's limitless capacity for poor taste. — Sadanand Dhume

Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord,
That would reduce these bloody days again
And make poor England weep in streams of blood!
Let them not live to taste this land's increase
That would with treason wound this fair land's peace!
Now civil wounds are stopped, peace lives again:
That she may long live here, God say amen! — William Shakespeare

I don't remember ever being see-saw, when I'd made my mind up that a thing was wrong. It takes the taste out o' my mouth for things, when I know I should have a heavy conscience after 'em. I've seen pretty clear, ever since I could cast up a sum, as you can never do what's wrong without breeding sin and trouble more than you can ever see. It's like a bit o' bad workmanship
you never see th' end o' the mischief it'll do. And it's a poor look-out to come into the world to make your fellow creatures worse off instead o' better. — George Eliot

It started embarrassing me. I began to feel like such a nasty little egomaniac." She reflected. "I don't know. It seemed like such poor taste, sort of, to want to act in the first place. I mean all the ego. And I used to hate myself so, when I was in a play, to be backstage after the play was over. All those egos running around feeling terribly charitable and warm. Kissing everybody and wearing their makeup all over the place, and then trying to be horribly natural and friendly when your friends came backstage to see you. I just hated myself. — J.D. Salinger

My poor soul! Sigh, pray and strive to take upon you the blessed yoke of Christ, and you will live on earth in a heavenly manner. Lord, grant that I may carry the light and goodly yoke, and I shall be always at rest, peaceful, glad and joyous; and I shall taste on earth of crumbs which fall from the celestial feast, like a dog that feeds upon the crumbs which fall from the master's table. — Tikhon Of Zadonsk

Whoever you are, the land to which God has brought you is not like the land of Egypt from which you came out. You can no longer live here as you lived there. Your old life and your former ways are crucified now, and you must not seek to live any more for your own gratification, but give up your own judgement into the hands of a wise director, and sacrifice your pleasures and comforts for the love of God and give the money you no longer spend on those things, to the poor. Above all, eat your daily Bread without which you cannot live, and come to know Christ Whose Life feeds you in the Host, and He will give you a taste of joys and delights that transcend anything you have ever experienced before, and which will make the transition easy. — Thomas Merton

He quickly observed, that good sentences and excellent representations of the follies of mankind met with little regard or applause, whilst sounds, without sense, threw every body into raptures: - - but 'twas the fashion of the day to be musically mad, and those who were absurd enough to prefer a rational entertainment to a flimsy opera, were poor insipid beings, without taste or enthusiasm. — Eliza Parsons

It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die. But there is more than one sort of luck. To fall prey to a motor neuron disease is surely to have offended the Gods at some point, and there is nothing more to be said. But if you must suffer thus, better to have a well-stocked head ... — Tony Judt

So far you've spent your life striving to please others," she heard him say. "With a rather poor rate of success. Why don't you try pleasing yourself for a change? Why not live by your own rules? What has obeying the conventions ever gotten you?" Evie pondered the questions, and her breath hissed in pleasure as he found a particularly sore spot. "I like the conventions," she said after a moment. "There is nothing wrong with being an ordinary person, is there?" "No. But you're not ordinary - or you never would have come to me instead of marrying cousin Eustace." "I was desperate." "That wasn't the entire reason." His low voice sounded like a purr. "You also had a taste for the devil. — Lisa Kleypas

MOS: And besides, sir, You are not like a thresher that doth stand With a huge flail, watching a heap of corn, And, hungry, dares not taste the smallest grain, But feeds on mallows, and such bitter herbs; Nor like the merchant, who hath fill'd his vaults With Romagnia, and rich Candian wines, Yet drinks the lees of Lombard's vinegar: You will not lie in straw, whilst moths and worms Feed on your sumptuous hangings and soft beds; You know the use of riches, and dare give now From that bright heap, to me, your poor observer, Or to your dwarf, or your hermaphrodite, Your eunuch, or what other household-trifle Your pleasure allows maintenance. — Ben Jonson

For poor taste in husbands, her judgment rivaled Anne Boleyn's. — Meredith Duran

As the index tells us the contents of stories and directs to the particular chapter, even so does the outward habit and superficial order of garments (in man or woman) give us a taste of the spirit, and demonstratively point (as it were a manual note from the margin) all the internal quality of the soul; and there cannot be a more evident, palpable, gross manifestation of poor, degenerate, dunghilly blood and breeding than a rude, unpolished, disordered, and slovenly outside. — Philip Massinger

Stay out of this," she (Christy) snapped at me, wiping futilely at her cheeks. "This isn't your business."
"When you blamed Adam, whose only fault that I can see is that he has poor taste in wives, you made it my business," I told her.
Honey cleared her throat. "You do know you are one of his wives, right?"
I raised an eyebrow. "Happily, he doesn't know how bad off he is with me - and I intend that he never will. — Patricia Briggs

There's something weird about that guy, she whispers as she slips into the car, bringing an unexpected smile to my face.
Ah, Ariel. Some might say she has poor taste, but I cant help but be flattered.
Take that, knight in shining armor. This lady prefers the knave. — Stacey Jay

I'm not exactly in a position where I get to be super-picky about the roles I get. But I would also never want to be a part of something that I think is poor in taste or doesn't align with what I believe in. — Tavi Gevinson

If the work is poor, the public taste will soon do it justice. And the author, reaping neither glory nor fortune, will learn by hard experience how to correct his mistakes. — Jacques-Louis David

You might have good, moral efforts of working hard and earning money in order to help feed the poor or something along those lines - and then you get the money you've been seeking and you see and feel and taste how sweet it is and you only want more and more and more for ... yourself.
Money corrupts its own intentions. — Cole Ryan

Have ye no good points?" said Wee Mad Arthur desperately. Rob Anybody looked puzzled. "We kind of thought them is our good points, but if you want to get picky, we never steal from them as has nae money, we has hearts of gold, although maybe - okay, mostly - somebody else's gold, and we did invent the deep-fried stoat. That must count for something." "How is that a good point?" said Arthur. "Weel, it saves some other poor devil having tae do it. It's what ye might call a taste explosion; ye take a mouthful, taste it, and then there is an explosion." Despite himself, Wee Mad Arthur was grinning. "Have you boys got no shame?" Rob Anybody matched him grin for grin. "I couldna say," he replied, "but if we have, it probably belonged tae somebody else. — Terry Pratchett

Men whose only concern is other people's opinion of them are like actors who put on a poor performance to win the applause of people of poor taste; some of them would be capable of good acting in front of a good audience. A decent man plays his part to the best of his ability, regardless of the taste of the gallery. — Nicolas Chamfort

As Siri walked along that oh-so-noisy riverbank on his way to work, he saw a pelican gliding above the surface of the water. It was a marvelous bird, proud and resourceful, and he imagined how it would taste with a little chili paste and fresh yams. Hungry people made poor environmentalists. — Colin Cotterill

Your friends are at the house.'
I sit up, straight. 'Who'?
'I don't know. Weird people. The Sullivan girl, whose father got the Gosford police to pick you up.'
'Siobhan?'
'And another one who's making cups of tea for everyone, and keeping the boy who's telling Luca fart jokes away from the girl who says he's "the last bastion of patriarchal poor taste".'
'Justine, Thomas and Tara.'
And the drug fiend, Jimmy, is keeping Mia calm and the Trombal boy's rung about ten times. I don't like his manner on the phone.'
'You won't like any guy's manner on the phone. — Melina Marchetta

When people are poor, they find ways of making things taste like fish. — Ma Jian

The dawn, even when it is cold and melancholy, never fails to shoot through my limbs as with arrows of sparkling piercing ice. I pull aside the thick curtains, and search for the first glow in the sky which shows that life is breaking through. And with my cheek leant upon the window pane I like to fancy that I am pressing as closely as can be upon the massy wall of time, which is for ever lifting and pulling and letting fresh spaces of life in upon us. May it be mine to taste the moment before it has spread itself over the rest of the world! Let me taste the newest and the freshest. From my window I look down upon the Church yard, where so many of my ancestors are buried, and in my prayer I pity those poor dead men who toss perpetually on the old recurring waters; for I see them, circling and eddying forever upon a pale tide. Let us, then, who have the gift of the present, use it and enjoy it ... — Virginia Woolf

I've always had real good taste; no matter how poor I've been, I've had good taste in clothes. — Georgia Holt

Summer was made to give you a taste of what hell is like. Winter was made for landladies to charge high rents and keep cold radiators and make a fortune off of poor tenants. — Langston Hughes

Suppose there were groups of secularists at hospitals who went round the terminally ill and urged them to adopt atheism: 'Don't be a mug all your life. Make your last days the best ones. People might suppose this was in poor taste. — Christopher Hitchens

Once government got a taste of money, the appetite grew. — Robert T. Kiyosaki

He had his choice, and he liked the worst. — John Ciardi

The New Testament is an invaluable book, though I confess to having been slightly prejudiced against it in my very early days by the church and the Sabbath-school, so that it seemed, before I read it, to be the yellowest book in the catalogue. Yet I early escaped from their meshes. It is hard to get the commentaries out of one's head and taste its true flavor ... It would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the Life of Christ because the book has been edited by Christians. In fact, I love this book rarely, though it is a sort of castle in the air to me, which I am permitted to dream. — Henry David Thoreau

If you disagree with something, it's easier to say 'you suck' than to figure out and explain exactly what you disagree with. You're also safe that way from refutation. In this respect trolling is a lot like graffiti. Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally making a mark on the world. — Paul Graham

I have had it all tested for poison," he assured Harry. "Had a house-elf taste every bottle after what happened to your poor friend Rupert. — J.K. Rowling

There's a bed, a little fold-out table, and cabinets made of actual wood. These in combination with the photographs of family and friends give it a cozy, domestic flavor which is, however, completely ruined by the framed picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall. Waterhouse finds this to be shockingly poor taste until he remembers it's a German boat. — Neal Stephenson

Readers of history may decide that joking while two guys are driving around through a town that has recently been slaughtered by six-foot-tall praying mantis beasts with shark-tooth-studded arms is in poor taste.
It is.
But that is exactly what real boys have always done when confronted with the brutal aftermath of warfare. — Andrew Smith

Tell me: what's more obscene than fucking waste?
Death is in quite poor taste, if you ask me. — Eleanor Brown

I once dressed up, very badly timed as Steve Irwin's daughter. And I didn't realize he had passed because I hadn't been following the news. I love Bindi Irwin, just the timing was in poor taste. — Alysia Reiner

She had a taste for sugar, however, and this meant that a doughnut or a cake might follow the sandwich. She was a traditionally built lady, after all, and she did not have to worry about dress size, unlike those poor, neurotic people who were always looking in mirrors and thinking that they were too big. What was too big, anyway? Who was to tell another person what size they should be? It was a form of dictatorship, by the thin, and she was not having any of it. If these thin people became any more insistent, then the more generously sized people would just have to sit on them. Yes, that would teach them! Hah! — Alexander McCall Smith

Shadow looked down at the girl on the table. "What happened to her?" he asked. "Poor taste in boyfriends," said Jacquel. "It's not always fatal. — Neil Gaiman

Fuck you," said Czernobog. "Fuck you and fuck your mother and fuck the fucking horse you fucking rode in on. You will not even die in battle. No warrior will taste your blood. No one alive will take your life. You will die a soft, poor death. You will die with a kiss on your lips and a lie in your heart. — Neil Gaiman

What signifies, says some one, giving halfpence to beggars? they only lay it out in gin or tobacco. "And why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence (says Johnson)? it is surely very savage to refuse them every possible avenue to pleasure, reckoned too coarse for our own acceptance. Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer, and are not ashamed to shew even visible displeasure, if ever the bitter taste is taken from their mouths." — Hester Lynch Piozzi

Of course my jokes are in poor taste, inappropriate, and confused; they reveal my lack of security. But that is because I have no respect for myself. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It's what's available to the poor communities. They do buy healthy stuff, you know, but the lettuce is usually iceberg lettuce and to get any taste, they have to use all that ranch dressing. — Sandra Cisneros

And yet, because I am without a doubt mortal, I have the troubling desire to do good, to please, to communicate my warmth, to still be very beautiful sometimes to inspire a taste for beauty. I know that these times are not fertile in grace ... I am afraid tomorrow the grace of woman ... may be recognized as a public utility & be socialized to the point of becoming a banal article, a bazaar object like in '93 & that one will find types of tender or amusing women with millions of copies like the creations of the big ... fashion stores where it is always the same thing. I want to affirm the superiority of the god over that of the organizer of concerts for the poor. — Rachilde

A taste for kitsch among the well-to-do is a sign of spiritual impoverishment; but among the poor, it represents a striving for beauty, an aspiration without the likelihood of fulfilment. — Theodore Dalrymple

Yet, sluggard, wake, and gull thy soul no more With earth's false pleasures, and the world's delight, Whose fruit is fair and pleasing to the sight, But sour in taste, false as the putrid core: Thy flaring glass is gems at her half light; She makes thee seeming rich, but truly poor: She boasts a kernel, and bestows a shell; Performs an inch of her fair-promis'd ell: Her words protest a heav'n; her works produce a hell. — Francis Quarles

Look at the stars. They are not arranged; instead they seem to be scattered through the heavens like sea spray. Yet you could never criticize stars for displaying poor taste, any more than you could criticize mountain ranges for having awkward proportions. These designs are spontaneous, and yet they demonstrate the wiggly patterns of nature that are quite different from anything you would call a mess. We can't quite put our finger on what the difference is between the two, but we certainly can see the difference between a tide pool and an ashtray full of garbage. We may not be able to define the difference, but we know they are different. — Alan W. Watts