Any dispute in matters of taste usually results in a standoff.
Interpretation
Disputes about personal preferences often lead to impasse, as tastes are subjective.
Joseph Brodsky's quote highlights the futility of arguing over subjective matters such as taste, suggesting that when individual preferences clash, there is often no resolution or agreement. It underscores the idea that taste is deeply personal and unique to each individual, making it challenging to find common ground during disagreements in this realm.
In practice
During a debate about art, someone can quote this to illustrate how opinions can be so divergent that consensus is unlikely.
Basically, it's hard for me to assess myself, a hardship not only prompted by the immodesty of the enterprise, but because one is not capable of assessing himself, let alone his work. However, if I were to summarize, my main interest is the nature of time. That's what interests me most of all. What time can do to a man.
One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.
On the whole, infinity is a fairly palpable aspect of this business of publishing, if only because it extends a dead author's existence beyond the limits he envisioned, or provides a living author with a future he cannot measure. In other words, this business deals with the future which we all prefer to regard as unending.
The invention of ethical and political doctrines, which blossomed into our own social sciences, is a product of times when things appeared manageable. The same goes for the criticism of those doctrines, though as a voice from the past, this criticism proved prophetic.
Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those - in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed.
To put it in plain language, Russia is that country where the name of a writer appears not on the cover of his book, but on the door of his prison cell.
When you've understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can't understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom.
We know that there is an infinite, and we know not its nature. As we know it to be false that numbers are finite, it is therefore true that there is a numerical infinity. But we know not of what kind; it is untrue that it is even, untrue that it is odd; for the addition of a unit does not change its nature; yet it is a number, and every number is odd or even (this certainly holds of every finite number). Thus we may quite well know that there is a God without knowing what He is.
The world is God's language to us.
I am not responsible for what other people think. I am responsible only for what I myself think, and I know what that is. No idea I've ever come up with has ever struck me as a divine revelation. Nothing I have ever observed leads me to think there is a God watching over me.
Nobody likes to be found out, not even one who has made ruthless confession a part of his profession. Any autobiographer, therefore, at least between the lines, spars with his reader and potential judge.
A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.