Robert Aris Willmott Quotes - Page 2

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• Some gifted adventurer is always sailing round the world of art and science, to bring home costly merchandise from every port.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Art, Home, Science

  Robert Aris Willmott (1907). “Pleasures of Literature”

  4 Copy quote

• Attention makes the genius; all learning, fancy, science and skills depend upon it. Newton traced his discoveries to it. It builds bridges, opens new worlds, heals diseases, carries on the business of the world. Without it taste is useless, and the beauties of literature unobserved.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Science, Bridges, Skills

  4 Copy quote

• Genius is nourished from within and without.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Science, Genius

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Art, Children, Eye

  Robert Aris WILLMOTT (1851). “Pleasures,objects and advantages of literature”, p.46

  7 Copy quote

• Winckelmann wished to live with a work of art as a friend. The saying is true of pen and pencil. Fresh lustre shoots from Lycidas in a twentieth perusal. The portraits of Clarendon are mellowed by every year of reflection.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Art, Reflection, Years

  Robert Aris WILLMOTT (1851). “Pleasures,objects and advantages of literature”, p.91

  7 Copy quote

• Association is the delight of the heart, not less than of poetry. Alison observes that an autumn sunset, with its crimson clouds, glimmering trunks of trees, and wavering tints upon the grass, seems scarcely capable of embellishment. But if in this calm and beautiful glow the chime of a distant bell steal over the fields, the bosom heaves with the sensation that Dante so tenderly describes.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Beautiful, Heart, Sunset

  Robert Aris WILLMOTT (1851). “Pleasures,objects and advantages of literature”, p.11

  4 Copy quote

• The fame of a battlefield grows with its years; Napoleon storming the Bridge of Lodi, and Wellington surveying the towers of Salamanca, affect us with fainter emotions than Brutus reading in his tent at Philippi, or Richard bearing down with the English chivalry upon the white armies of Saladin.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Reading, Army, Years

  Robert Aris WILLMOTT (1851). “Pleasures,objects and advantages of literature”, p.12

  7 Copy quote

• Occasionally a single anecdote opens a character; biography has its comparative anatomy, and a saying or a sentiment enables the skilful hand to construct the skeleton.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Character, Skeletons, Hands

  Robert Aris Willmott (1858). “Summer Time in the Country”, p.44

  4 Copy quote

• Joy and grief are never far apart. In the same street the shutters of one house are closed, while the curtains of the next are brushed by shadow of the dance. A wedding-party returns from church, and a funeral winds to its door. The smiles and the sadness of life are the tragi-comedy of Shakespeare. Gladness and sighs brighten and dim the mirror he beholds.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Party, Grief, Sadness

  Robert Aris Willmott (1907). “Pleasures of Literature”

  7 Copy quote

• 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 oriental tale is not too vast. Pearls dropping from trees are only falling leaves in autumn. 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.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Horse, Children, Fall

  Robert Aris WILLMOTT (1851). “Pleasures,objects and advantages of literature”, p.60

  4 Copy quote

• The drama embraces and applies all the beauties and decorations of poetry. The sister arts attend and adorn it. Painting, architecture, and music are her handmaids. The costliest lights of a people's intellect burn at her show. All ages welcome her.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Art, Drama, Light

  Robert Aris Willmott (1866). “Pleasures, Objects, and Advantages of Literature”, p.87

  7 Copy quote

• The discovery of one star is the promise of another.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Stars, Science, Discovery

  Robert Aris Willmott (1907). “Pleasures of Literature”

  4 Copy quote

• Poetical taste is the only magician whose wand is not broken. No hand, except its own, can dissolve the fabric of beauty in which it dwells. Genii, unknown to Arabian fable, wait at the portal. Whatever is most precious from the loom or the mine of fancy is poured at its feet. Love, purified by contemplation, visits and cheers it; unseen musicians are heard in the dark; it is Psyche in the palace of Cupid.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Cheer, Dark, Hands

  Robert Aris Willmott (1866). “Pleasures, Objects, and Advantages of Literature”, p.92

  8 Copy quote

• Poetry deserves the honor it obtains as the eldest offspring of literature, and the fairest. It is the fruitfulness of many plants growing into one flower and sowing itself over the world in shapes of beauty and color, which differ with the soil that receives and the sun that ripens the seed. In Persia, it comes up the rose of Hafiz; in England, the many-blossomed tree of Shakespeare.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Flower, Plants Growing, Color

  4 Copy quote

• Taste is often one of the aspects of fashion.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Fashion, Taste, Aspect

  Robert Aris WILLMOTT (1851). “Pleasures,objects and advantages of literature”, p.73

  9 Copy quote

• How deep is the magic of sound may be learned by breaking some sweet verses into prose. The operation has been compared to gathering dew-drops, which shine like jewels upon the flower, but run into water in the hand. The elements remain, but the sparkle is gone.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Running, Sweet, Flower

  Robert Aris Willmott (1907). “Pleasures of Literature”

  8 Copy quote

• The exhibition of real strength is never grotesque. Distortion is the agony of weakness. It is the dislocated mind whose movements are spasmodic.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Strength, Real, Agony

  Robert Aris WILLMOTT (1851). “Pleasures,objects and advantages of literature”, p.40

  7 Copy quote

• Taste is not stationary. It grows every day, and is improved by cultivation, as a good temper is refined by religion. In its most advanced state it takes the title of judgment. Hume quotes Fontenelle's ingenious distinction between the common watch that tells the hours, and the delicately constructed one that marks the seconds and smallest differences of time.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Differences, Taste, Titles

  Robert Aris Willmott (1907). “Pleasures of Literature”

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Eye, Simple, Views

  Robert Aris WILLMOTT (1851). “Pleasures,objects and advantages of literature”, p.39

  7 Copy quote

• In literature and art memory is a synonym for invention. It is the life-blood of imagination, which faints and dies when the veins are empty.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Art, Memories, Blood

  4 Copy quote

• Newton found that a star, examined through a glass tarnished by smoke, was diminished into a speck of light. But no smoke ever breathed so thick a mist as envy or detraction.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Stars, Science, Glasses

  Robert Aris Willmott (1907). “Pleasures of Literature”

  4 Copy quote

• History is a great painter, with the world for canvas, and life for a figure. It exhibits man in his pride, and nature in her magnificence,--Jerusalem bleeding under the Roman, or Lisbon vanishing in flame and earthquake. History must be splendid. Bacon called it the pomp of business. Its march is in high places, and along the pinnacles and points of great affairs.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Pride, Men, Flames

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• Few footprints of the great remain in the sand before the ever-flowing tide. Long ago it washed out Homer's. Curiosity follows him in vain; Greece and Asia perplex us with a rival Stratford-upon-Avon. The rank of Aristophanes is only conjectured from his gift to two poor players in Athens. The age made no sign when Shakespeare, its noblest son, passed away.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Son, Player, Greatness

  7 Copy quote

• One interesting feature of criticism is seen in the ease with which it discovers what Addison called the specific quality of an author. In Livy, it will be the manner of telling the story; in Sallust, personal identification with the character; in Tacitus, the analysis of the deed into its motive. If the same test be applied to painters, it will find the prominent faculty of Correggio to be manifested in harmony of effect; of Poussin, in the sentiment of his landscapes; and of Raffaelle, in the general comprehension of his subject.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Character, Interesting, Quality

  4 Copy quote

• The light of genius never sets, but sheds itself upon other faces, in different hues of splendor. Homer glows in the softened beauty of Virgil, and Spenser revives in the decorated learning of Gray.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Light, Different, Genius

  Robert Aris Willmott (1866). “Pleasures, Objects, and Advantages of Literature”, p.6

  9 Copy quote

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