Henry Fuseli Quotes

#1. Indiscriminate pursuit of perfection infallibly leads to mediocrity.

Henry Fuseli

#2. All actions and attitudes of children are graceful because they are the luxuriant and immediate offspring of the moment - divested of affectation and free from all pretense.

Henry Fuseli

#3. Our ideas are the offspring of our senses; we are not more able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence.

Henry Fuseli

#4. Heaven and earth, advantages and obstacles, conspire to educate genius.

Henry Fuseli

#5. The price of excellence is labor, and time that of immortality.

Henry Fuseli

#6. Selection is the invention of the landscape painter.

Henry Fuseli

#7. Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a single object.

Henry Fuseli

#8. Art among a religious race produces reliques [sic]; among a military one, trophies; among a commercial one, articles of trade.

Henry Fuseli

#9. Art, like love, excludes all competition and absorbs the man.

Henry Fuseli

#10. Tintoretto attempted to fill the line of Michelangelo with color, without tracing its principle.

Henry Fuseli

#11. When we idealize the real, we sacrifice to artistic fancy.

Henry Fuseli

#12. Emulation embalms the dead; envy, the vampire, blasts the living.

Henry Fuseli

#13. Expression alone can invest beauty with supreme and lasting command over the eye.

Henry Fuseli

#14. Raffael's drapery is the assistant of character, in Michelangelo it envelopes grandeur; it is in Reubens the ponderous robe of pomp.

Henry Fuseli

#15. Ancient art was the tyrant of Egypt, the mistress of Greece and the servant of Rome.

Henry Fuseli

#16. The superiority of the Greeks seems not so much the result of climate and society, as of the simplicity of their end and the uniformity of their means.

Henry Fuseli

#17. Life is rapid, art is slow, occasion coy, practice fallacious, and judgment partial.

Henry Fuseli

#18. Blake is damned good to steal from.

Henry Fuseli