Life & Wisdom Quote by Isidore Ducasse Lautreamont

“Taste” here isn’t about manners or decor; it’s a deliberately aristocratic word pressed into service as a theory of mind. Lautreamont, the young author of Les Chants de Maldoror, is writing against the romantic cliché of genius as beautiful sickness. He flips the cliché: real genius is “health,” a “balance of all the faculties,” and the diagnostic tool is taste. Not inspiration, not trauma, not delirium. A calibrated sensor.

The subtext is almost taunting. In a literary culture that prized grand poses and feverish originality, Lautreamont elevates the quietest, most socially coded faculty: discernment. Taste becomes “nec plus ultra,” the final proof of intelligence, because it’s the place where everything else gets tested under pressure. Anyone can have ideas; taste decides which ideas are worth keeping. Anyone can feel intensely; taste is the governor that prevents intensity from becoming mere noise.

There’s also a sly power move embedded in the phrasing. Calling taste “fundamental” turns aesthetic judgment into a master key: it “sums up” courage, rigor, imagination, restraint. That’s not neutral. It’s a bid to control the definition of genius by relocating it from the spectacular to the selective, from the volcanic to the edited. Coming from a writer associated with extremes, the line reads like a private rule for surviving one’s own excesses: the only way out of chaos is an intelligence so refined it can say no.