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I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may—light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.

— John Constable

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More quotes by John Constable

No man who can do any one thing well will be able to any different thing equally well.

He seems to paint with tinted steam, so evanescent, and so airy.

We see nothing truly till we understand it.

his lectures History of Landscape Painting (1836)

It is so ambiguous as to be scarcely intelligible in some parts (and those the principal), yet as a whole, it is novel and affecting.

A self-taught painter is one taught by a very ignorant person.

The Quarterly Review vol. 119 (1866)

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Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.

Democritus Freeman (1948)

True beauty dwells in deep retreats,
Whose veil is unremoved
Till heart with heart in concord beats,
And the lover is beloved.

William Wordsworth

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.

William Shakespeare The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Constable (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.