Henry Fuseli quotes:
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Ancient art was the tyrant of Egypt, the mistress of Greece and the servant of Rome.
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Tintoretto attempted to fill the line of Michelangelo with color, without tracing its principle.
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Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a single object.
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Indiscriminate pursuit of perfection infallibly leads to mediocrity.
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Emulation embalms the dead; envy, the vampire, blasts the living.
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Blake is damned good to steal from.
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Expression alone can invest beauty with supreme and lasting command over the eye.
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Heaven and earth, advantages and obstacles, conspire to educate genius.
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Raffael's drapery is the assistant of character, in Michelangelo it envelopes grandeur; it is in Reubens the ponderous robe of pomp.
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Selection is the invention of the landscape painter.
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The superiority of the Greeks seems not so much the result of climate and society, as of the simplicity of their end and the uniformity of their means.
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Our ideas are the offspring of our senses; we are not more able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence.
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All actions and attitudes of children are graceful because they are the luxuriant and immediate offspring of the moment - divested of affectation and free from all pretense.
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Art among a religious race produces reliques [sic]; among a military one, trophies; among a commercial one, articles of trade.
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Art, like love, excludes all competition and absorbs the man.
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Life is rapid, art is slow, occasion coy, practice fallacious, and judgment partial.
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The price of excellence is labor, and time that of immortality.
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When we idealize the real, we sacrifice to artistic fancy.