If you have great talents, industry will improve them: if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency.

Common observation and a plain understanding is the source of all art.

Every art, like our own, has in its composition fluctuating as well as fixed principles. It is an attentive inquiry into their difference that will enable us to determine how far we are influenced by custom and habit, and what is fixed in the nature of things.

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.

Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers.

If you have great talents, industry will improve them: if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency.

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