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Make no man your idol, for the best man must have faults and his faults will insensibly become yours, in addition to your own.

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
Become
Best
Must
Make
Insensibly
Men
Idol
Addition
Idols
Faults

More quotes by Washington Allston

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Humility is also a healing virtue it will cicatrize a thousand wounds, which pride would keep forever open.
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In the same degree that we overrate ourselves, we shall underrate others.
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Distinction is the consequence, never the object of a great mind.
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Never expect justice from a vain man if he has the negative magnanimity not to disparage you, it is the most you can expect.
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Nothing gets you behind faster than trying to keep up with people who are already there.
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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
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Reputation is but a synonym of popularity: dependent on suffrage, to be increased or diminished at the will of the voters.
Washington Allston
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The most common disguise of Envy is in praise of what is subordinate.
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He who has no pleasure in looking up, is not fit so much as to look down.
Washington Allston
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Reverence is an ennobling sentiment it is felt to be degrading only by the vulgar mind, which would escape the sense of its own littleness by elevating itself into an antagonist of what is above it. He that has no pleasure in looking up is not fit so much as to look down. Of such minds are mannerists in Art in the world, tyrants of all sorts.
Washington Allston
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Selfishness in art, as in other things, is sensibility kept at home.
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No man knows himself as an original.
Washington Allston
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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
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Desert being the essential condition of praise, there can be no reality in the one without the other.
Washington Allston
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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
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If I prove extravagant, I shall be more so from ignorance than willfulness. I am not wholly insensible to the pleasures of the world, therefore shall not be governed entirely by necessity but I flatter myself, at least, in being able to restrain their gratification within due bonds.
Washington Allston
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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
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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
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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
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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