Henry Fuseli Quotes & Sayings

The price of excellence is labor, and time that of immortality. — Henry Fuseli

Blake is damned good to steal from. — Henry Fuseli

Art, like love, excludes all competition and absorbs the man. — Henry Fuseli

Expression alone can invest beauty with supreme and lasting command over the eye. — Henry Fuseli

Indiscriminate pursuit of perfection infallibly leads to mediocrity. — Henry Fuseli

Emulation embalms the dead; envy, the vampire, blasts the living. — Henry Fuseli

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

Tintoretto attempted to fill the line of Michelangelo with color, without tracing its principle. — Henry Fuseli

Ancient art was the tyrant of Egypt, the mistress of Greece and the servant of Rome. — Henry Fuseli

Heaven and earth, advantages and obstacles, conspire to educate genius. — Henry Fuseli

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

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

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

When we idealize the real, we sacrifice to artistic fancy. — Henry Fuseli

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

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

Selection is the invention of the landscape painter. — Henry Fuseli

Life is rapid, art is slow, occasion coy, practice fallacious, and judgment partial. — Henry Fuseli