John Ruskin
John Ruskin
John Ruskinwas the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy. His writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. Ruskin penned essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth8 February 1819
Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book.
Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch you add in other places.
A splendour of miscellaneous spirits.
Science studies the relations of things to each other: but art studies only their relations to man.
Science has to do with facts, art with phenomena. To science, phenomena are of use only as they lead to facts; and to art, facts are of use only as they lead to phenomena.
Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves; and art exclusively with things as they affect the human sense and human soul.
No individual rain drop ever considers itself responsible for the flood.
What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.
The art of drawing which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing...should be taught to every child just as writing is.
When God shuts a door, He opens a window.
Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel pit and a little whitening and some coal dust and I will paint you a luminous picture if you give me time to gradate my mud and subdue my dust.
In great countries, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents want to make them into adults. In vile countries, the children are always wanting to be adults and the parents want to keep them children.
Drawing is a means of obtaining and communicating knowledge
It is a good and safe rule to sojourn in every place as if you meant to spend your life there, never omitting an opportunity of doing a kindness, or speaking a true word, or making a friend.