What has reason to do with the art of painting?

He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.

God and His Priest and King,...make up a heaven of our misery.

The strongest poison ever known came from Caesar's laurel crown.

I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.

Commerce is so far from being beneficial to arts, or to empire, that it is destructive of both, as all their history shows, for the above reason of individual merit being its great hatred. Empires flourish till they become commercial, and then they are scattered abroad to the four winds.

Want of money and the distress of a thief can never be alleged as the cause of his thieving, for many honest people endure greater hardships with fortitude. We must therefore seek the cause elsewhere than in want of money, for that is the miser's passion, not the thief s.