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.

When we idealize the real, we sacrifice to artistic fancy.

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

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

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

Indiscriminate pursuit of perfection infallibly leads to mediocrity.

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