"There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking."
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Quote collection
Joshua Reynolds quotes (page 1 of 5)
84 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The real character of a man is found out by his amusements."
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"Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers."
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"A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts."
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"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."
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"Art in its perfection is not ostentatious; it lies hid and works its effect, itself unseen."
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"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."
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"Taste depends upon those finer emotions which make the organization of the soul."
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"A mere copier of nature can never produce anything great."
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"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."
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"The young mind is pliable and imitates, but in more advanced states grows rigid and must be warmed and softened before it will receive a deep impression."
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"Grandeur of effect is produced by two different ways which seem entirely opposed to each other. One is by reducing the colors to little more than chiaroscuro... and the other, by making the colors very distinct and forcible... but still, the presiding principle of both those manners is simplicity."
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"Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius."
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"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."
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"Gardening as far as Gardening is Art, or entitled to that appellation, is a deviation from nature; for if the true taste consists, as many hold, in banishing every appearance of Art, or any traces of the footsteps of man, it would then be no longer a Garden."
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"Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising at last with an unexpected catastrophe."
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"The art of seeing nature, or, in other words, the art of using models, is in reality the great object, the point to which all our studies are directed."
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"I do not see in what manner practice alone can be sufficient for the production of correct, excellent, and finished pictures. Works deserving this character never were produced, nor ever will arise, from memory alone."
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"I can recommend nothing better... than that you endeavor to infuse into your works what you learn from the contemplation of the works of others."
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"Words should be employed as the means, not the end; language is the instrument, conviction is the work."
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