Henry Fuseli Quotes

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.

Emulation embalms the dead; envy, the vampire, blasts the living.

Expression alone can invest beauty with supreme and lasting command over the eye.

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.

Indiscriminate pursuit of perfection infallibly leads to mediocrity.

Art, like love, excludes all competition and absorbs the man.

Art among a religious race produces reliques [sic]; among a military one, trophies; among a commercial one, articles of trade.

The price of excellence is labor, and time that of immortality.

Ancient art was the tyrant of Egypt, the mistress of Greece and the servant of Rome.

Life is rapid, art is slow, occasion coy, practice fallacious, and judgment partial.

Heaven and earth, advantages and obstacles, conspire to educate genius.

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.

When we idealize the real, we sacrifice to artistic fancy.

Raffael's drapery is the assistant of character, in Michelangelo it envelopes grandeur; it is in Reubens the ponderous robe of pomp.

Selection is the invention of the landscape painter.

Tintoretto attempted to fill the line of Michelangelo with color, without tracing its principle.