Daily Inspiration Quote by John Mason Brown

Taste, in John Mason Brown's formulation, is a kind of productive dissatisfaction. "The more one has seen of the good, the more one asks for the better" sounds at first like a polite defense of snobbery, but it's really a critic's manifesto: exposure doesn't satiate desire, it refines it. Once "good" stops being a rare encounter and becomes a baseline, you stop applauding effort and start demanding intention, craft, risk.

Brown was a working critic in an American century that increasingly treated culture as both mass commodity and civic education: Broadway as industry, literature as prestige, criticism as consumer guide and moral weather report. In that world, the sentence carries a quiet argument against complacency. "Good" is not a destination; it's a training ground. The subtext is slightly combative: if audiences, artists, and institutions settle for competent, the culture ossifies. Standards are not elitist in this framing; they're the engine of artistic evolution.

The line also slips in a psychological truth critics rarely admit without sounding vain: expertise makes you harder to please. Not because you're jaded, but because you can see the seams. Once you've encountered genuine precision - a performance that lands every beat, a paragraph that does three things at once - "pretty good" becomes more visible as compromise.

There's a democratic sting, too. Brown implies that access to quality raises expectations, and those expectations pressure the whole ecosystem upward. Better art isn't begged for as a luxury; it's demanded as the natural sequel to having learned what good can be.