Indiscriminate pursuit of perfection infallibly leads to mediocrity.

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.

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

Indiscriminate pursuit of perfection infallibly leads to mediocrity.

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.

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