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

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

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

Style in painting is the same as in writing; a power over materials, whether words or colors, by which conceptions or sentiments are conveyed.

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.

A mere copier of nature can never produce anything great.

Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising at last with an unexpected catastrophe.