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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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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
Within
Dues
Flatter
Able
Entirely
Extravagant
World
Ignorance
Bonds
Therefore
Governed
Prove
Gratification
Shall
Wholly
Willfulness
Least
Pleasures
Insensible
Pleasure
Necessity
Restrain

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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.
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The only competition worthy of a wise man is with himself.
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In the same degree that we overrate ourselves, we shall underrate others.
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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.
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Selfishness in art, as in other things, is sensibility kept at home.
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The greatest of all fools is the proud fool--who is at the mercy of every fool he meets.
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The most common disguise of Envy is in praise of what is subordinate.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Never judge a work of art by its defects.
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Distinction is the consequence, never the object of a great mind.
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The love of gain never made a painter but it has marred many.
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No man knows himself as an original.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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Desert being the essential condition of praise, there can be no reality in the one without the other.
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If an Artist love his Art for its own sake, he will delight in excellence wherever he meets it, as well in the work of another as in his own.
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Nothing gets you behind faster than trying to keep up with people who are already there.
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