The great end of all arts is to make an impression on the imagination and the feeling. The imitation of nature frequently does this. Sometimes it fails and something else succeeds.

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.

The real character of a man is found out by his amusements.

Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers.

A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts.

Our Exhibitions [The Royal Academy] have... a mischievous tendency, by seducing the Painter to an ambition of pleasing indiscriminately the mixed multitude of people who resort to them.

Art in its perfection is not ostentatious; it lies hid and works its effect, itself unseen.

A mere copier of nature can never produce anything great.

Taste depends upon those finer emotions which make the organization of the soul.

Genius is supposed to be a power of producing excellences which are put of the reach of the rules of art: a power which no precepts can teach, and which no industry can acquire.

Invention strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come from nothing.

He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.

I succeed him no one could replace him.

The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

No one so poignantly realizes the failures in the social structure as the man at the bottom, who has been most directly in contact with those failures and has suffered most.

This wasn’t the first time I’d been pulled out of bed for a crucial mission. It was, however, the first time I’d been subjected to such a personal line of questioning. “Are you a virgin?

Education is the sum of what students teach each other between lectures and seminars.

Abundance is a dance with reciprocity - what we can give, what we can share, and what we receive in the process.

It may be laid as an universal rule that a government which attempts more than it ought will perform less.

I own a mortgage company and a real estate company funded by the music. Florida is a kinda gold mine.