The great difficulty is first to win a reputation the next to keep it while you live and the next to preserve it after you die, when affection and interest are over, and nothing but sterling excellence can preserve your name. (Benjamin Haydon)
There surely is in human nature an inherent propensity to extract all the good out of all the evil. (Benjamin Haydon)
Men who have reached and passed 45, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this. (Benjamin Haydon)
The explanation of the propensity of the English people to portrait painting is to be found in their relish for a Fact. (Benjamin Haydon)
Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue. (Benjamin Haydon)
Genius is nothing more than common faculties refined to a greater intensity. There are no astonishing ways of doing astonishing things. All astonishing things are done by ordinary materials. (Benjamin Haydon)
The only legitimate artists in England are the architects. (Benjamin Haydon)
This is an age of intellectual sauces, of essence, of distillation. We have conclusions without deductions, abridgments of history and abridgments of science without leading facts. (Benjamin Haydon)
The longer a man lives in this world the more he must be convinced that all domestic quarrels had better never be obtruded on the public for, let the husband be right, or let him be wrong, there is always a sympathy existing for women which is certain to give the man the worst of it. (Benjamin Haydon)
When a man is no longer anxious to do better than well, he is done for. (Benjamin Haydon)
Fortunately for serious minds, a bias recognized is a bias sterilized. (Benjamin Haydon)
One of the surest evidences of an elevated taste is the power of enjoying works of impassioned terrorism, in poetry, and painting. (Benjamin Haydon)