“Contented, unambitious people are all very well in their way. They form a neat, useful background for great portraits to be painted against, and they make a respectable, if not particularly intelligent, audience for the active spirits of the age to play before.”
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)
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Jerome K. Jerome 87
English humorist 1859–1927Related quotes

1950
Source: 1946 - 1953, "Song of herself"; interviews by Olga Campos, Sept. 1950, Chapter 'My Painting', p. 75

“A great portrait is always more a portrait of the painter than of the painted.”
Portraits
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VII - On the Making of Music, Pictures, and Books

"Fenestralia" http://books.google.com/books?id=YZMhAAAAMAAJ&q=%22There+is+much+virtue+in+a+window+It+is+to+a+human+being+as+a+frame+is+to+a+painting+as+a+proscenium+to+a+play+as+form+to+literature+It+strongly+defines+its+content%22&pg=PA147#v=onepage, Mainly on the Air (1946), The Atlantic ( April 1944 http://books.google.com/books?id=5KAGAQAAIAAJ&q=%22There+is+much+virtue+in+a+window+It+is+to+a+human+being+as+a+frame+is+to+a+painting+as+a+proscenium+to+a+play+as+form+to+literature+It+strongly+defines+its+content%22&pg=PA85#v=onepage)

“The form of my painting is the content.”
as quoted in "Abstract Art", Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson 1990, p. 173
1969 - 1980

Zdeno Chara, interview in Rich Thompson (January 4, 2008) "Chara keeps star under wraps", Boston Herald.
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Quoted in Seeking a Nation Within a Nation, CBC Canada https://www.cbc.ca/history/EPCONTENTSE1EP5CH12LE.html

Leftist Critiques of Identity Politics (2018)

Letter to Thomas Jefferson (17 January 1820). Often misquoted as "God is an essence that we know nothing of" and attached to a part of his 22 January 1825 letter to Thomas Jefferson.
1820s