When we would show any one that he is mistaken, our best course is to observe on what side he considers the subject, for his view of it is generally right on this side,—and admit to him that he is right so far. He will be satisfied with this acknowledgment, that he was not wrong in his judgment, but only inadvertent in not looking at the whole case.— -Pascal. As the scale of the balance must give way to the weight that presses it down, so the mind must of necessity yield to demonstration.— Cicero. Testimony is like an arrow shot from a long bow, the force of it depends on the strength of the hand that draws it. Argument is like an arrow from a cross-bow, which has equal force though drawn by a child.—Boyle. Gratuitous violence in argument betrays a conscious weakness of the cause, and is usually a signal of despair.-Junius. It is an excellent rule to be observed in all disputes, that men should give soft words and hard arguments; that they should not so much strive to vex as to convince each other. The arm The army is a good book to open to study One learns there to put his hand to everything, to the lowest and highest things. The most delicate and rich are forced to see living nearly everywhere poverty, and to live with it, and to measure his morsel of bread and draught of water.—Alfred de Vigny. ARROGANCE. Art must anchor in nature, or it is the sport of every breath of folly.-Hazlitt. The names of great painters are like passing bells; in the name of Velasquez, you hear sounded the fall of Spain; in the name of Titian, that of Venice; in the name of Leonardo, that of Milan; in the name of Raphael, that of Rome. And there is profound justice in this; for in proportion to the nobleness of the power is the guilt of its use for purposes vain or vile; and hitherto the greater the art, the more surely has it been used, and used solely, for the decoration of pride, or the provoking of sensuality.-Ruskin. Art, as far as it has ability, follows nature, as a pupil imitates his master: thus your art must be, as it were, God's grandchild.-Dante. Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature, like himself, is but the effect.-Bulwer Lytton. The only kind of sublimity which a painter or sculptor should aim at is to express by certain proportions and positions of limbs and features that strength and dignity of mind, and vigor and activity of body, which enables men to conceive and execute great actions.-Burke. Art employs method for the symmetrical formation of beauty, as science employs it for the logical exposition of truth; but the mechanical process is, in the last, ever kept visibly distinct, while in the first it escapes from sight amid the shows of color and the curves of grace.Bulwer Lytton. He that sips of many arts drinks of none. — Fuller. No man can thoroughly master more than one art or science. The world has never seen a perfect painter. What would it have availed for Raphael to have aimed at Titian's coloring, or for Titian to have imitated Raphael's drawing, but to have diverted each from the true bent of his natural genius, and to have made each sensible of his own deficiencies, without any probability of supplying them.-Hazlitt. Many persons feel art, some understand it; but few both feel and understand it.—Hillard. Art, not less eloquently than literature, teaches her children to venerate the single eye. Remember Matsys. His representations of miser-life are breathing. A forfeited bond twinkles in the hard smile. But follow him to an altar-piece. His Apostle has caught a stray tint from his usurer. Features of exquisite beauty are seen and loved; but the old nature of avarice frets under the glow of devotion. Pathos staggers on the edge of farce.-Willmott. We speak of profane arts, but there are none properly such; every art is holy in itself, it is the son of eternal light.-Tegner. Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband, and an ill provider, and should be wise in season, and not fetter himself with duties which will imbitter his days, and spoil him for his proper work.-Emerson. The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.— Goethe. All the arts, which have a tendency to raise man in the scale of being, have a certain common bond of union, and are connected, if I may be allowed to say so, by blood-relationship with one another.-Cicero. A work of art is said to be perfect in proportion as it does not remind the spectator of the process by which it was created.-Tuckerman. Moral beauty is the basis of all true beauty. This foundation is somewhat covered and veiled in nature. Art brings it out, and gives it more transparent forms. It is here that art, when it knows well its power and resources, engages in a struggle with nature in which it may have the advantage.-Victor Cousin. The learned understand the reason of the art, the unlearned feel the pleasure.-Quintilian. Art neither belongs to religion nor to ethics; but, like these, it brings us nearer to the Infinite, one of the forms of which it manifests to us. God is the source of all beauty, as of all truth, of all religion, of all morality. The most exalted object, therefore, of art is to reveal in its own manner the sentiment of the Infinite.— Victor Cousin. It is the end of art to inoculate men with the love of nature.-Beecher. The mother of useful arts is necessity; that of the fine arts is luxury. For father the former has intellect; the latter genius, which itself is a kind of luxury.-Schopenhauer. The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.—Michael Angelo. Since I have known God in a saving manner, painting, poetry, and music have had charms unknown to me before. I have received what I suppose is a taste for them, or religion has refined my mind and made it susceptible of impressions from the sublime and beautiful. O, how religion secures the heightened enjoyment of those pleas ures which keep so many from God, by their becoming a source of pride!—Henry Martyn. The first essential to success in the art you practise is respect for the art itself.— Bulwer Lytton. What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting.-Schlegel. The flitting sunbeam has been grasped and made to do man's bidding in place of the painter's pencil. And although Franklin tamed the lightning, yet not until yesterday has its instantaneous flash been made the vehicle of language; thus in the transmission of thought annihilating space and time.—Professor Robinson. Art is based on a strong sentiment of religion,- -on a profound and mighty earnestness; hence it is so prone to co-operate with religion. Goethe. Art, however innocent, looks like deceiving. Remember always, in painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter will be your manner, and the fewer your words; and in painting, as in all the arts and acts of Art does not imitate nature, but it founds life, the secret of high success will be found, not itself on the study of nature, - takes from na-in a fretful and various excellence, but in a quict ture the selections which best accord with its singleness of justly chosen aim.-Ruskin. own intention, and then bestows on them that which nature does not possess, viz. the mind and the soul of man.-Bulwer Lytton. An amateur may not be an artist, though an artist should be an amateur.-Disraeli. All things are artificial; for nature is the art of God.-Sir Thomas Browne. Excellence in art is to be attained only by active effort, and not by passive impressions; by the manly overcoming of difficulties, by patient struggle against adverse circumstance, by the thrifty use of moderate opportunities. The great artists were not rocked and dandled into eminence, but they attained to it by that course of labor and discipline which no man need go to Rome or Paris or London to enter upon.-Hillard. Art needs solitude or misery or passion. Lukewarm zephyrs wilt it. It is a rock-flower flourishing by stormy blasts and in stony soil.Alex. Dumas. If men wish to be held in esteem, they must associate with those only who are estimable.— Bruyère. Might I give counsel to any young hearer, I would say to him, Try to frequent the company of your betters. In books and life is the most wholesome society; learn to admire rightly; the great pleasure of life is that. Note what the great men admired, they admired great things; narrow spirits admire basely, and worship meanly.-Thackeray. You may depend upon it that he is a good man whose intimate friends are all good. Lavater. Associate with men of good judgment; for judgment is found in conversation. And we make another man's judgment ours by frequenting his company.-Fuller. Choose the company of your superiors, whenever you can have it; that is the right and true pride.-Chesterfield. Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.-Bible. When we live habitually with the wicked, we become necessarily either their victim or their disciple; when we associate, on the contrary, with virtuous men, we form ourselves in imitation of their virtues, or, at least, lose every day something of our faults.-Agapet. No man can be provident of his time, who is not prudent in the choice of his company.— Jeremy Taylor. A frequent intercourse and intimate connection between two persons make them so like, that not only their dispositions are moulded like each other, but their very face and tone of voice contract a certain analogy.-Lavater. No man can possibly improve in any company for which he has not respect enough to be under some degree of restraint.—Chesterfield. Company, villanous company, hath been the spoil of me.-Shakespeare. What is companionship where nothing that improves the intellect is communicated, and where the larger heart contracts itself to the model and dimension of the smaller?-Landor. In all societies, it is advisable to associate if be possible with the highest; not that the highest de-are always the best, but because, if disgusted there, we can at any time descend; but if we begin with the lowest, to ascend is impossible.— Colton. He who comes from the kitchen smells of its smoke; he who adheres to a sect has something of its cant; the college air pursues the student, and dry inhumanity him who herds with literary pedants.-Lavater. It is meet that noble minds keep ever with their likes; for who so firm, that cannot be seduced?-Shakespeare. |