"There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking."
"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. The painter's art is more confined, and has nothing that corresponds with, or perhaps is equivalent to, this power and advantage of leading the mind on, till attention is totally engaged. What is done by Painting, must be done at one blow; curiosity has received at once all the satisfaction it can ever have."
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Source: Sir Joshua Reynolds (1842). “The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds”, p.142
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"The real character of a man is found out by his amusements."
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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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