Somewhere the free spirit must take its stand and claim its God-given distinction. If life is to be at all worth while there must be some boundary within which the soul holds its own august and ultimate tribunal.
Cyrus Guernsey Pringle, The Record of a Quaker Conscience
William Blake and his Illustrations to The Divine Comedy in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.
“‘I know that the majority of Englishmen are bound by the indefinite … a line is a line in its minutest particulars, straight or crooked. It is itself not intermeasurable by anything else … but since the French Revolution’—since the reign of reason began, that is—’Englishmen are all intermeasurable with one another, certainly a happy state of agreement in which I do not agree.'” [via]
William Blake and his Illustrations to The Divine Comedy in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.
“colouring does not depend upon where the colours are put, but upon where the light and dark are put, and all depends upon the form or outline” [via]
William Blake and his Illustrations to The Divine Comedy in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.
“Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; and all is chaos again, and the line of the Almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist.” [via]
William Blake and his Illustrations to The Divine Comedy in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.
“How do we distinguish the owl from the beast, the horse from the ox, but by the bounding outline? How do we distinguish one face or countenance from another but by the bounding-line and its infinite inflections and movements? What is it that builds a house and plants a garden but the definite and determinate? What is it that distinguished honesty from knavery but the hard and wiry line of rectitude and certainty in the actions and intentions?” [via]
William Blake and his Illustrations to The Divine Comedy in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.
“To wrap them about in reflected lights was to do this, and to dwell over-fondly upon any softness of hair or flesh was to dwell upon that which was least permanent and least characteristic, for ‘The great and golden rule of art, as of life, is this: that the more distinct, sharp and wiry the boundary-line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and bungling.'” [via]