Creativity Quote by Joshua Reynolds

A warning shot at the kind of speech that wins applause while saying almost nothing. Reynolds draws a bright line between eloquence as performance and eloquence as purpose: if rhetoric merely proves the speaker’s verbal agility, it’s not a civic good, it’s self-advertisement. The phrase "but a poor eloquence" is doing moral work. It demotes empty fluency from a neutral trait to a failure of character and craft. Real eloquence, in his view, should make something happen: clarify an idea, move an audience toward judgment, create shared attention around a truth that matters.

The subtext is especially pointed coming from an artist steeped in the 18th-century public sphere, where salons, lectures, Parliament, and the booming print trade rewarded talkers. Reynolds helped found and led the Royal Academy, giving Discourses that tried to elevate painting into an intellectual discipline. He knew how easily "taste" can become a social weapon and how quickly language can substitute for seeing. His dig lands as an artist’s critique of verbal dominance: words can become a velvet curtain drawn over weak substance, while the listener mistakes smoothness for depth.

There’s also a professional self-defense here. If society prizes the orator who can talk, it risks undervaluing the quieter rigor of making: observation, revision, discipline. Reynolds isn’t anti-rhetoric; he’s anti-rhetoric without stakes. The best speech, like the best art, should reveal more than the maker’s technique. It should enlarge the world.