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.
We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say.
How Americans restore trust may be an existential question for their country, then, but it's ultimately a practical one: What U.S. society needs to answer it in the coming years aren't lamentations but practical measures, especially among the emerging generations that will define America's future.
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power of unleashing man's ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling.
One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.
Nothing could be more reckless than to base one's moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science.
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