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 must have done something very wicked before we were born, or else we must be going to be very happy indeed when we are dead, for God to let this life have all the tortures of expiation and all the sorrows of an ordeal.
WAR, n. A by-product of the arts of peace. The most menacing political condition is a period of international amity.
People on a spiritual path - personal growth, spiritual practice, recovery, yoga and so forth - are the last people who should be sitting out the social and political issues of our day.
So different are the colors of life, as we look forward to the future, or backward to the past; and so different the opinions and sentiments which this contrariety of appearance naturally produces, that the conversation of the old and young ends generally with contempt or pity on either side.
The most complete revenge is not to imitate the aggressor.
Whatever skills I have acquired, whatever gifts I have been given, I place them at Your service.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.