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Famous Joshua Gibbs Quotes

“While Spotify openly publishes user listening activity, the “Private Session” option allows users to listen to music they think stupid, immature, or embarrassing apart from their friends’ knowledge. The “Private Session” feature on Spotify subtly reveals how intensely we want our friends to think we have good taste, and yet we are unwilling to suffer any diminution of comfort or pleasure to achieve this distinction. We want to enjoy sensual trash, but we do not want to be held accountable for it.”

ArtBeautyGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“When progressives and Christians speak of “nature,” they are not referring to the same thing. Within the framework of Christian thought, nature can only be understood in its relationship with the supernatural... In cutting nature off from supernature, the Enlightenment inaugurated a long, slowly unfurling contempt for both nature and supernature which reaches new heights every year.”

ArtBeautyProgressGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Whether a man is concerned with kings, paupers, plants, pandas, minerals, models, math, production, propulsion, or prostitutes, when he learns what usually happens— what usually works, what usually hurts, what is usually said, what is usually felt— a man has discovered something about that thing’s nature. When a man learns that holding very hot things is usually painful, he learns something about his fleshly nature. When a boy learns that lying to his mother usually leads to fear and remorse, he learns something about his spiritual nature. When we observe that dogs usually become ill after eating chocolate, we learn something about canine nature. Tendency and propensity invariably teach us about nature.”

ArtNatureBeautySupernature
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Apart from a belief in the supernatural, it has become very hard to distinguish the natural from the unnatural. Without Heaven, what is the difference between Hell and Earth? Without God, how can the human and the demonic be told apart? More than two hundred years after the French Revolution, the only people who attack a position or practice as “unnatural” are those who believe in God, as well, because the concept of nature only makes sense as an intermediary between the supernatural and the unnatural.”

ArtBeautyGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Anyone looking to follow in the footsteps of Pollock, Rothko, or Mondrian is out of luck. Pollock was not interested in painting nature. He was not interested in the world or in reality itself. Rather, he painted himself, as all Modern artists must do. Imitation is a failure of self-expression. Imitation is treason, for every act of imitation looks to the past. Imitation also implies hierarchy, for a man must choose who to imitate. If he claims to imitate no one, though, he may claim success in all that he undertakes, for he has no standard outside himself by which his work can be judged.”

ArtBeautyJackson Pollock
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Long term exposure to fake things makes real things seem overly dull, demanding, expensive, messy, complicated, and pretentious. Those raised on watermelon candy will find actual watermelon not sweet enough. Anyone raised on comic book movies will not find Hamlet or Paradise Lost sufficiently exciting. Anyone raised on Big Macs will find French onion soup too pungent, or else not sweet enough, not fatty enough, or not salty enough.”

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Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Physical beauty is eminently more impressive, visceral, and humbling than artistic Beauty. Were a human being the likes of Nicole Kidman or Paul Newman to stand on display in the Metropolitan or the Louvre, and were patrons of the museum able to gaze with impunity—not covertly and from a distance, but from point blank range as though the living spectacles were mere portraits— many people would quickly leave behind the artistic beauty of Rembrandt and Titian.”

ArtBeautyConservatism
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Beauty is a liability. “Beauty will save the world,” but don’t tell the Trojans that. “Save the world? Beauty is tearing the world apart!” Any starry-eyed messiah quoting Dostoyevsky from the walls of Troy would have been pitched over. The beauty of Helen threw the cosmos out of whack. The beauty of Sarai jeopardized Abram’s trip into Egypt. So, too, a beautiful sunbather may upset the peace of a family trip to the beach and a beautiful priest might easily distract from mass or compromise confession.”

ArtBeautyTraditionConservatism
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“As soon as one generation undertakes a project which can be finished in a single lifetime, their children have incentive to scrap that project in favor of projects more suited to their own tastes and values. Any social or cultural project which will take fifty years to accomplish encounters profound existential threats halfway through, for everyone who started the project begins to age out of productivity and those have just entered the project have both incentive and ability to redirect time and funds to a more fashionable project which does not seem so old-fashioned.”

ArtBeautyTradition
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Any cultural project which only takes ten years to complete is easily undone. As an ideology, then, the problem with “Change the world” is that it is too easily accomplished. “Change” is doable over and over again, and new projects of “change” undermine and abolish the changes of a previous generation. Everyone who “changes the world” is undermining or abolishing the change some wide-eyed, well-meaning dreamer undertook just a few years ago. “Change the world” always involves crushing the dream of someone slightly older than yourself who wanted to do the same thing. Thus we reach a paradox: unless a society undertakes a project it cannot hope to accomplish, it will not accomplish anything lasting.”

ArtBeautyEducation Quotes
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“The Enlightenment project was doomed from the start, though, for though human beings run out of money, time, resources, energy, and desire, they never run out of the past. A war on the past will necessarily be endless, for no sooner has a man conquered the past than the very act of conquering becomes the past, as well.”

ArtBeautyConservatismGood TasteFrench Revolution
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“In a prior age, the human experience was understood as the temporal embodiment of desire, delight, fear, grief, faith, love, hope, hatred, horror, sympathy, gentleness, kindness, loyalty, fidelity, sublimity, desperation, chagrin, anger, fury, wrath, distress, discomposure, shame, dignity, indignity, glory, contempt, slight, heartbreak, fondness, tenderness, adoration, infatuation, compassion, goodwill, worship, sorrow, anguish, despair, woe, dejection, despondency, duty, angst, reverence, respect, esteem, exaltation, melancholy, disquiet, weariness, felicity, glee, bliss, ecstasy, rapture, euphoria, exhilaration, rhapsody, brotherhood, contemplation, mediation, surrender, fancy, impulse, yearning, thirst, hankering, pining, enthusiasm, need, obligation, fancy, mystery, helplessness, luck, recklessness, boldness, fearlessness, wildness, sorrow, regret, gloom, heavyheartedness, and dreaminess and ten thousand others. These are the sentiments which great art compels us to feel. But mediocre art truncates the human experience. It prunes and lops off all the diversity and richness of life and leaves us with little more than lust, amusement, self-fulfillment, and the resentment which comes from our endless search for the power that now attends victimhood.”

ArtBeautyTasteTraditionConservatismVictimhood
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Against the reliability of common sense, the laws of science, the ravages of sin, the tendencies of mankind, and the metaphysics which govern created things, some things are not destroyed by time. The ability to last is so exceedingly rare, when a man finds something which has bested time, he has found something for which there is only fitting adjective: divine.”

ArtBeautyTraditionConservatismAestheticsGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Despite such verve and passion for Truth, the Christian brand is now rightly denigrated everywhere as trite and trivial. To put the word “Christian” before any kind of service, institution, or work of art is to consign the thing in question to the garbage pile of cut-rate design and cheap sentimentality.”

ArtBeautyChristianityConservatismAestheticsGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Pleasure takes place in the body, but satisfaction is of the soul, and so things which offer purely physical pleasure cannot help egging people on to consume more and more in search of a spiritual state the carnal thing is incapable of delivering. The economy of spiritual things is different because spirit is immaterial, intellectual, and unquantifiable. There is not “more Christ” in a small bite of the Eucharist than a large one, neither is the object blessed with a bucket of holy water more holy than an object blessed with a thimble full. Inasmuch as a thing appeals more to the spirit than the body, a man needs less of it, which is why many people have accidentally eaten an entire bag of Doritos in one sitting, but no one has ever accidentally read the entire gospel of St. John in one sitting.”

ArtBeautyConservatismAestheticsGood TasteRoger Scruton
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Beauty is what lies beyond usefulness. Beauty inspires loyalty and gives meaning to mere usefulness. We need useful things, but we love beautiful things. A building which is merely functional will not last, for people will not love it. They will get bored with it. The average football stadium now costs a billion dollars to build and lasts just thirty years, after which it appears dated, silly, and unfashionable. The Chartres Cathedral, on the other hand, is more beautiful than any sports complex on earth and it has been functional for more than 800 years. Beautiful things last because when they begin to fall apart, we tend to them, revive and restore them; however, when purely functional things fall apart, we tire of them and replace them.”

ArtBeautyArchitectureConservatismModernityCathedralsGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“The commodification of art has failed to produce more humane music and literature because it has created a system wherein no one can be held responsible for the pap and twaddle presented to the public for consumption. If a certain film is profitable within a system of commodified art, more films like it will be made, even if the film is poorly reviewed and even if audiences do not like it.”

BeautyTasteTraditionArtists
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“To say that Mark Rothko painted “colorful rectangles” really does sum up the man’s oeuvre. The thrill of Rothko’s work is entirely bound up in the massive size of his canvases. The same is true of Pollock and Newman. Had either been forced to use notebook sized canvases, all their power would be lost. On the other hand, the Mona Lisa is still interesting when reduced to the size of a postage stamp.”

BeautyArtificialintelligenceGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Jackson Pollock and Hugh Hefner both rose to prominence in the 1950s, though Pollock’s appeal was that no one understood him, and Hefner’s appeal was that no one misunderstood him. When Modern men think of art, they tend to think of such highs and lows. In the midst of this daring game of extremes, art lost the common touch.”

BeautyPornographyAestheticsGood TasteModern ArtConserevatism
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Very beautiful things become harder to like the more we give ourselves over to the spectacular, sexy, shocking, ultra-sensual, fashionable art and ethics of Modernity. So far as acquiring good taste is concerned, balance is a myth. Every blockbuster film a man watches makes the task of reading Paradise Lost and Jane Eyre seem more dull and more pointless.”

BeautyConservatismAestheticsGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Mediocre art not only hinders our ability to understand other people, it demands that we interpret our own lives through a laughably narrow range of emotions largely defined and curated by the unmarried, agnostic, pro-choice twentysomethings who now rule our culture.”

BeautyTasteConservatismAestheticsGood TasteRoger Scruton
Book:Will Heaven Be Boring?: A Conversation About Beauty and Good Taste
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“In "A Stolen Life," Dugard’s ability to think through questions of suffering, love, hope, and justice is indistinguishable from that of people her age who have lived "normally,” immersed in the world of blockbuster films, disposable fashion, popular music, easy virtue, virtue signaling, screen addiction, trendy political causes, and banal propaganda. The further I got into "A Stolen Life," the more I realized Dugard sounded just like the young women (and men) whose work I read in college writing workshops. My conclusion is both horrifying and offensive: for all the good our freedom is doing us we might as well have been locked up in a dungeon with demoniacs. The effects of living freely in the Modern world are not easily distinguishable from the effects of living in captivity with a psychopath.”

BeautyTraditionModernityModernismGood TasteBanality
Author:Joshua Gibbs
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“We do not deserve a better culture than the one we have; every culture is perfectly suited to the music it produces, the churches it builds, and the poems it writes. We cannot lament our inability to build a fitting sequel to St. Peter’s Basilica without simultaneously lamenting our complete lack of a theology that might compel us to do so.”

BeautyConservatismModernityGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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