Washington Allston Quotes

The greatest of all fools is the proud fool–who is at the mercy of every fool he meets.

Desert being the essential condition of praise, there can be no reality in the one without the other.

Reputation is but a synonym of popularity: dependent on suffrage, to be increased or diminished at the will of the voters.

Humility is also a healing virtue; it will cicatrize a thousand wounds, which pride would keep forever open.

Make no man your idol, for the best man must have faults; and his faults will insensibly become yours, in addition to your own.

I have no ambition to shine beyond my abilities.

If the whole world should agree to speak nothing but truth, what an abridgment it would make of speech! And what an unravelling there would be of the invisible webs which men, like so many spiders, now weave about each other!

He who has no pleasure in looking up, is not fit so much as to look down.

I am inclined to think from my own experience that the difficulty to eminence lies not in the road, but in the timidity of the traveler.

Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese absolutely enchanted me, for they took away all sense of subject… It was the poetry of color which I felt, procreative in its nature, giving birth to a thousand things which the eye cannot see, and distinct from their cause.

Never expect justice from a vain man; if he has the negative magnanimity not to disparage you, it is the most you can expect.

Distinction is the consequence, never the object of a great mind.

I cannot believe that any man who deserved fame ever labored for it; that is, directly. For, as fame is but the contingent of excellence, it would be like an attempt to project a shadow, before its substance was obtained.

Fame has no necessary conjunction with praise; it may exist without the breath of a word: it is a recognition of excellence which must be felt, but need not be spoken. Even the envious must feel it: feel it, and hate in silence.

Never judge a work of art by its defects.

Nothing gets you behind faster than trying to keep up with people who are already there.

If an Artist love his Art for its own sake, he will delight in excellence wherever he meets it, as well in the work of another as in his own.

The only competition worthy of a wise man is with himself.