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Home  »  Dictionary of Quotations  »  Willmott

James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.

Willmott

A good reader is nearly as rare as a good writer.

Art, not less eloquently than literature, teaches her children to venerate the single eye.

Attention makes the genius; all learning, fancy, and science depend on it.

Criticism must never be sharpened into anatomy. The life of the imagination, as of the body, disappears when we pursue it.

Distortion is the agony of weakness. It is the dislocated mind whose movements are spasmodic.

Education is the apprenticeship of life.

Every fresh acquirement is another remedy against affliction and time.

Genius easily hews out its figure from the block, but the sleepless chisel gives it life.

Genius finds its own road and carries its own lamp.

Genius is nourished from within and without.

God is glorified, not by our groans, but by our thanksgivings; and all good thought and good action claim a natural alliance with good cheer.

Joy and grief are never far apart.

Romance is the truth of imagination and boyhood. Homer’s horses clear the world at a bound. The child’s eye needs no horizon to its prospect…. The palace that grew up in a night merely awakens a wish to live in it. The impossibilities of fifty years are the commonplaces of five.

Stone masons collected the dome of St. Paul’s, but Wren hung it in the air.

The age made no sign when Shakespeare, its noblest son, passed away.

The biography of a nation embraces all its works. No trifle is to be neglected. A mouldering medal is a letter of twenty centuries.

Whatever is beautiful is also profitable.

Whatever is pure is also simple. It does not keep the eye on itself. The observer forgets the window in the landscape it displays. A fine style gives the view of fancy—its figures, its trees, or its palaces—without a spot.