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The only competition worthy of a wise man is with himself.
Washington Allston
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Washington Allston
Age: 63 †
Born: 1779
Born: November 5
Died: 1843
Died: July 9
Novelist
Painter
Poet
Writer
Charleston
South Carolina
W. Allston
Washington Alston
Allston
Worthy
Competition
Adventure
Wise
Men
More quotes by Washington Allston
Fame has no necessary conjunction with praise it may exist without the breath of a word: it is a recognition of excellence which must be felt, but need not be spoken. Even the envious must feel it: feel it, and hate in silence.
Washington Allston
The most intangible, and therefore the worst, kind of a lie is a half truth. This is the peculiar device of a conscientious detractor.
Washington Allston
Nothing is rarer than a solitary lie for lies breed like Surinam toads you cannot tell one but out it comes with a hundred young ones on its back.
Washington Allston
Nothing gets you behind faster than trying to keep up with people who are already there.
Washington Allston
An original mind is rarely understood, until it has been reflected from some half-dozen congenial with it, so averse are men to admitting the true in an unusual form whilst any novelty, however fantastic, however false, is greedily swallowed.
Washington Allston
The painter who is content with the praise of the world for what does not satisfy himself, is not an artist, but an artisan for though his reward be only praise, his pay is that of a mechanic.
Washington Allston
The Painter who seeks popularity in Art closes the door upon his own genius.
Washington Allston
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!
Washington Allston
Selfishness in art, as in other things, is sensibility kept at home.
Washington Allston
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.
Washington Allston
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.
Washington Allston
Never judge a work of art by its defects.
Washington Allston
Distinction is the consequence, never the object of a great mind.
Washington Allston
I am inclined to think from my own experience that the difficulty to eminence lies not in the road, but in the timidity of the traveler.
Washington Allston
Reputation is but a synonym of popularity: dependent on suffrage, to be increased or diminished at the will of the voters.
Washington Allston
In the same degree that we overrate ourselves, we shall underrate others.
Washington Allston
No man knows himself as an original.
Washington Allston
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.
Washington Allston
Humility is also a healing virtue it will cicatrize a thousand wounds, which pride would keep forever open.
Washington Allston
Desert being the essential condition of praise, there can be no reality in the one without the other.
Washington Allston
