Political Quotes

Edmund Burke: To represent an angel in a picture, you can only draw a beautiful young man winged: but what painting can furnish out…

On the record
To represent an angel in a picture, you can only draw a beautiful young man winged: but what painting can furnish out anything so grand as the addition of one word, "the angel of the LORD?
Said by
Edmund Burke

Editor's note · Context

Burke illustrates the limitations of visual art compared to the expressive power of language in representing divine concepts.

Share

More from Edmund Burke

Jan 1, 1790

If all the absurd theories of lawyers and divines were to vitiate the objects in which they are conversant, we should have no law and no religion left in the world.

gutenberg.org
Jan 1, 1790

By adhering in this manner and on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided, not by the superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy.

gutenberg.org
Jan 1, 1790

Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity.

gutenberg.org
Jan 1, 1790

All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for…

gutenberg.org

Other voices in this conversation