Citations de The Two Paths

“That is what the colour of the earth would be without its iron; that would be its colour, not here or there only, but in all places, and at all times.”

“Think first of your pretty gravel walks in your gardens, yellow and fine, like plots of sunshine between the flower- beds; fancy them all suddenly turned to the colour of ashes.”

“And what do you suppose dyes your tiles of cottage roof? You don’t paint them. It is nature who puts all that lovely vermilion into the clay for you; and all that lovely vermilion is this oxide of iron.”

“I never went over a more interesting twenty miles than those between Rochdale and Burnley.”

“With all our talk about it, the very meaning of the words “Decorative art” remains confused and undecided.”

“I can analyze the wheat very learnedly for you--tell you there is starch in it, and carbon, and silex. I can give you starch, and charcoal, and flint; but you are as far from your ear of wheat as you were before.”

“ALL GOOD COLOUR IS GRADATED. A blush rose (or, better still, a blush itself), is the type of rightness in arrangement of pure hue.”

“It is the best possible sign of a colour when nobody who sees it knows what to call it, or how to give an idea of it to any one else.”

“The art of painting, properly so called, consists in laying on the least possible colour that will produce the required result, and this measurement, in all the ultimate, that is to say, the principal, operations of colouring, is so delicate that not one human hand in a million has the required lightness.”

“To lay on little needs indeed the rare lightness of hand; but to lay much,--yet not one atom too much, and obtain subtlety, not by withholding strength, but by precision of pause,--that is the master’s final sign-manual--power, knowledge, and tenderness all united.”