Genius is supposed to be a power of producing excellences which are put of the reach of the rules of art: a power which no precepts can teach, and which no industry can acquire.

The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter.

He who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will be soon reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated.

The excellence of every art, must consist in the complete accomplishment of its purpose

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.

A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts.

Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.