Is your taste yours?

You did not choose most of what you love. It arrived — a parent's shelf, a friend's playlist, a decade of feeds learning exactly how long you linger. Taste has a supply chain, and you are its last stop. That is not an accusation. Every palate is trained by someone; Hume thought the training was the point. But there is a difference between a taste that was formed and a taste that is merely worn — between the thing you love because you have spent time inside it and the thing you display because it says something useful about you. The test is privacy. Strip the audience out. No one will ever know what you chose, praised, replayed, reread. What survives that silence is yours. What does not was rented. So: name something you genuinely love. Then tell the truth about where it came from — and whether it would survive the dark.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others.

Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.