The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds

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James Carpenter, 1824 - 279 pages

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Page 161 - And worthy seemed, for in their looks divine The image of their glorious Maker shone, Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure, Severe, but in true filial freedom placed; Whence true authority in men; though both Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed; For contemplation he and valour formed, For softness she and sweet attractive grace, He for God only, she for God in him...
Page 220 - Or ounce, or tiger, hog, or bearded goat, All other parts remaining as they were ; And they, so perfect is their misery, Not once perceive their foul disfigurement, But boast themselves more comely than before ; And all their friends and native home forget, To roll with pleasure in a sensual sty.
Page 232 - He the best player!" cries Partridge, with a contemptuous sneer, "why, I could act as well as he myself. I am sure, if I had seen a ghost, I should have looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did.
Page 42 - There is no excellent Beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. A man cannot tell, whether Apelles or Albert Durer were the more trifler; whereof the one would make a personage by geometrical proportions, the other by taking the best parts out of divers faces to make one Excellent.
Page 96 - Invention is one of the great marks of genius ; but if we consult experience, we shall find that it is by being conversant with the inventions of others, that we learn to invent : as by reading the thoughts of others, we learn to think.
Page 32 - You must have no dependence on your own genius. If you have great talents, industry will improve them : if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency. Nothing is denied to well-directed labour : nothing is to be obtained without it.
Page 233 - Shakespeare that he assumes as an unquestionable principle a position which, while his breath is forming it into words, his understanding pronounces to be false. It is false that any representation is mistaken for reality, that any dramatic fable in its materiality was ever credible, or, for a single moment, was ever credited.
Page 81 - Mankind, who by the mere Strength of natural Parts, and without any Assistance of Art or Learning, have produced Works that were the Delight of their own Times and the Wonder of Posterity.
Page 33 - He thinks in a peculiar train, and he thinks always as a man of genius; he looks round on Nature and on Life with the eye which Nature bestows only on a poet...
Page 40 - I have here offered, than that music, architecture, and painting, as well as poetry and oratory, are to deduce their laws and rules from the general sense and taste of mankind, and not from the principles of those arts themselves ; or, in other words, the taste is not to conform to the art, but the art to the taste.

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