Washington Allston Inspirational Quotes (32)

All effort at originality must end either in the quaint or the monstrous. For no man knows himself as an original he can only believe it on the report of others.

I cannot believe that any man who deserved fame ever labored for it that is, directly. For, as fame is but the contingent of excellence, it would be like an attempt to project a shadow, before its substance was obtained.

Selfishness in art, as in other things, is sensibility kept at home.

Desert being the essential condition of praise, there can be no reality in the one without the other.

Reputation is but a synonym of popularity: dependent on suffrage, to be increased or diminished at the will of the voters.

Nothing gets you behind faster than trying to keep up with people who are already there.

Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese absolutely enchanted me, for they took away all sense of subject... It was the poetry of color which I felt, procreative in its nature, giving birth to a thousand things which the eye cannot see, and distinct from their cause.

If the whole world should agree to speak nothing but truth, what an abridgment it would make of speech! And what an unravelling there would be of the invisible webs which men, like so many spiders, now weave about each other!