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

Categorized in : Ideas Philosophy Beautiful

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

nature essence ideas

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

Henry Fuseli

command eye expression

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

Henry Fuseli

emulation vampire envy

Indiscriminate pursuit of perfection infallibly leads to mediocrity.

Henry Fuseli

pursuit mediocrity perfection

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

Henry Fuseli

like-love men art

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

action attitude children

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

Henry Fuseli

rome egypt art

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

Henry Fuseli

genius earth heaven

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

Henry Fuseli

fancy sacrifice real

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

Henry Fuseli

immortality excellence labor

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

Henry Fuseli

military religious art

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

simplicity greek mean

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

Henry Fuseli

practice life-is art

Selection is the invention of the landscape painter.

Henry Fuseli

painter landscape invention

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

Henry Fuseli

envelopes criticism character

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

Henry Fuseli

lines color principles

Blake is damned good to steal from.

Henry Fuseli

steal good blake