Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a single object.

Indiscriminate pursuit of perfection infallibly leads to mediocrity.

Life is rapid, art is slow, occasion coy, practice fallacious, and judgment partial.

Heaven and earth, advantages and obstacles, conspire to educate genius.

Tintoretto attempted to fill the line of Michelangelo with color, without tracing its principle.

Our ideas are the offspring of our senses; we are not more able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence.

Emulation embalms the dead; envy, the vampire, blasts the living.