“Disappointment, when it involves neither shame nor loss, is as good as success; for it supplies as many images to the mind, and as many topics to the tongue.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“And images of self-confusednesses
Which hurt imaginations only see—
And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils,
Which but expressions be of inward evils.”
—Fulke Greville (1554–1628)
“The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)