“Space and Time! Two minor omissions that no one is likely to notice.”
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John William Waterhouse
John William Waterhouse was an English painter known for working first in the Academic style and for then embracing the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's style and subject matter. His paintings are known for their depictions of women from ancient Greek mythology, Arthurian legend, and the works of William Shakespeare. A high proportion depict a single young and beautiful woman in a historical costume a…
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culture · English painter (1849–1917) · painter · architectural drafter · also John William Waterhouse, J. W. Waterhouse, John Waterhouse, Nino Waterhouse, Waterhouse
Born 6 April 1849 · Died 11 February 1917 · Q212754
49 published statements · 0 followers
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2026· 38 entries
“I spied ‘em again this morning, Tomba! …I looked to the West and saw ‘em, all lit up by the red sun shining in off the sea. A line of hills, or mountains if you please. Laid out, waiting for us, like baked apples in a pan.”
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“Confusion is a kind of bewitchment — a moment when what we supposed we understood loses its form and runs together and becomes one with other things that, though they might have had different outward forms, shared the same inward nature.”
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“The mechanical world decays. Counterpoised against this tendency to decline must be some creative principle: the active seed--the Subtile Spirit.”
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“But those blows do not hurt me, because I am followed around—some would say, haunted—by a long train of angels and miracles that account for my having survived to such a great age. I think that this explains why I was chosen for this work: either I am living a charmed life, or else I have overstayed my welcome on this Planet; either way, my destiny’s in London.”
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“I’ll not take anyone’s money—yours, your banker’s, or your backer’s, sir. And I’ll not ask who your backer is, for it has gradually become obvious to me that your errand is—like a bat—dark, furtive, and delicate.”
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“Technology is a sort of religious practice to me, a way of getting at the eternal by way of the mundane.”
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“There is nothing quite so civilized as to be recognized in public places as the author of books no one has read.”
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“Condemn an Englishman to hell, and he'd plant a bed of petunias and roll out a nice bowling-green on the brimstone.”
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“Because though I have not done violence I have seen rather a lot of it. Not all of the men who employ it are stupid, or evil. Only most of them. The rest use it reluctantly, as a way, when all else has failed, of seizing the main chance. Thus you tonight. Your mother will understand this and get her equilibrium back. But like a man who imbibes tobacco-smoke, you have died a little death tonight. I do not recommend that you become addicted to it.”
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“I'm keen to know whether the next English King is going to be German or French.”
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“The sorts who found a market a congenial and rewarding place to be, were those who thought quickly on their feet, and adapted to unlooked-for happenings with facility; they were, in a word, mercurial.”
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“We are at a fork in the road just now. One way takes us to a wholly new way of managing human affairs. It is a system I have helped, in my small way, to develop: the Royal Society, the Bank of England, Recoinage, the Whigs, and the Hanoverian Succession are all elements of it. The other way leads us to Versailles, and the rather different scheme that the King of France has got going there.”
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“Though you, and most other Fellows of the Royal Society, are true Christians, and believers in Free Will, the very doctrines and methods that the Royal Society has promulgated have caused many to question the existence of God. ... As so much of civilization is rooted in those beliefs, this strikes me as one way in which our System of the World might be set up wrongly and thus self-doomed.”
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“William and Eliza Discourse of the Englishmen”
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“Your fascination with Negroes is very odd. But I have observed that the best people are frequently odd in one way or another. I have got in the habit of seeking them out, and declining to trust anyone who has no oddities. Your queer ideas concerning slavery are of no interest to me whatever. But the fact that you harbor queer ideas makes me inclined to place some small amount of trust in you.”
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“This may not however elevate your stature during the years you have remaining; for fame's a weed, but repute is a slow-growing oak, and all we can do during our lifetimes is hop around like squirrels and plant acorns.”
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“Revolution is like the wheeling of stars round the pole. It is driven by unseen powers, it is inexorable, it moves all things at once, and men of discrimination may understand it, predict it, benefit from it.”
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“As soon as it is heated a bright cherry red, the lattice-work dissolves, like sugar in coffee, and the metal becomes brittle and worthless — as the Franks discovered during the Crusades, when we captured fragments of such weapons around Damascus and brought them back to Christendom and tried to find out their secrets in our own forges. Nothing whatsoever was learned, except the depth of our own ignorance — but ever since, we have called this stuff Damascus steel.”
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“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.”
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“They tell a story--albeit in a fragmentary and patchwork way--of a sea-change that is spreading across Christendom, in large part because of men like Leibniz, Newton, and Descartes. It is a change in the way men think, and it is the doom of the Inquisition.”
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“Roger Comstock, Marquis of Ravenscar, to Eliza; 20 April 1692”
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“He was selling us insurance against the contingency that our invasion fails to fail.”
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“You do not have a rival, Fatio. But Isaac Newton does.”
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“Godspeed? Godspeed! What kind of a thing is that to say to a fucking galley-slave?”
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“You know something of schoolmasters, do you?”
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“The place was empty 'cause of the Hanging. I didn't want to stay and—”
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“Get more ahead of the others than I was already.”
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“If you are ahead, the correct thing is to get used to it—not to make yourself into an imbecile. Come, you belong in school.”
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“So you see, Ben, journeying via Paris might have been roundabout, but it was infinitely safer. Besides, people in Paris had been pestering me, too, and they had more money than Mr. Clarke. So Mr. Clarke had to get in line, as they say in New York.”
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“Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.”
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“Aboard Minerva, Massachusetts Bay, October 1713”
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“It is a symbol of Mercury--patron of commerce--who has been worshipped in this cellar--and in this city--for a thousand years, by Bishops as well as business-men. It is a cult that adapts itself to any religion, just as easily as quicksilver adapts itself to any container.”
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“I tell you again. True beauty is to be found in natural forms. The more we magnify, and the closer we examine, the works of Artifice, the grosser and stupider they seem. But if we magnify the natural world it only becomes more intricate and excellent.”
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“When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe—for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient.”
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“I believe that binary arithemetickal engines will be of enormous significance”
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“Roger Comstock and Daniel Waterhouse in a coffee house”
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“Daniel to William Penn; “Daniel and Penn”
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1996· 1 entry
“An Abandoned Church in France, March 1996”
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1917· 1 entry
Died 1917-02-11.
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1895· 1 entry
Waterhouse was elected to the status of full Academician
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1894· 1 entry
And 1909 or 1910, and he planned another painting in the series, called Ophelia in the Churchyard
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1883· 1 entry
Waterhouse married Esther Kenworthy, the daughter of an art schoolmaster from Ealing who had exhibited her own flower-paintings at the Royal Academy and elsewhere
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1874· 1 entry
His painting Sleep and his Half-brother Death was exhibited at the Royal Academy summer exhibition
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1871· 1 entry
Entered the Royal Academy of Art school, initially to study sculpture, before moving on to painting
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1854· 1 entry
The Waterhouses returned to England and moved to a newly built house in South Kensington, London, which was near to the newly founded Victoria and Albert Museum
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1849· 3 entries
Born 1849-04-06.
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In the same year that the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, were first causing a stir in the London art scene
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“Where do we find God in the world? That is all I want to know. I have not found Him yet. But when I see anything that does not rot — the workings of the solar system, or a Euclidean proof, or the perfection of gold — I sense I am drawing nearer to the Divine.”
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