Quotes from Joshua Reynolds

The greatest man is he who forms the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he who corrupts it.

Excellence is never granted to man, but as the reward of labour.

Less coin, less care.

The art of seeing nature, or, in other words, the art of using models, is in reality the great object, the point to which all our studies are directed.

The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labor employed in it, or the mental pleasure in producing it.

If you have great talents, industry will improve them; if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency.

Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.

Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers.

Genius is supposed to be a power of producing excellences which are put of the reach of the rules of art: a power which no precepts can teach, and which no industry can acquire.

A mere copier of nature can never produce anything great.

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.

There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.

A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts.

The real character of a man is found out by his amusements.

Whatever trips you make, you must still have nature in your eye.

Words should be employed as the means, not the end; language is the instrument, conviction is the work.

And he who does not know himself does not know others, so it may be said with equal truth, that he who does not know others knows himself but very imperfectly.

All the gestures of children are graceful; the reign of distortion and unnatural attitudes commences with the introduction of the dancing master.

It is vain for painters... to endeavour to invent without materials on which the mind may work.

Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come of nothing.

It is but a poor eloquence which only shows that the orator can talk.

The great end of all arts is to make an impression on the imagination and the feeling. The imitation of nature frequently does this. Sometimes it fails and something else succeeds.

What has pleased and continues to please, is likely to please again; hence are derived the rules of art, and on this immovable foundation they must ever stand.

Style in painting is the same as in writing; a power over materials, whether words or colors, by which conceptions or sentiments are conveyed.