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 The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded...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
Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives, the cumulative experience of many masters of craftsmanship. Quality also marks the search for an ideal after necessity has been satisfied and mere usefulness achieved.
There are many religions, but there is only one morality.
Labour without joy is base. Labour without sorrow is base. Sorrow without labour is base. Joy without labour is base.
Unless we perform divine service with every willing act of our life, we never perform it at all.
See that your children be taught, not only the labors of the earth, but the loveliness of it.
People cannot live by lending money to one another.
All great art is the expression of man's delight in God's work, not his own.
One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.
We have seen when the earth had to be prepared for the habitation of man, a veil, as it were, of intermediate being was spread between him and its darkness, in which were joined in a subdued measure, the stability and insensibility of the earth, and the passion and perishing of mankind.
Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.
Men are more evanescent than pictures, yet one sorrows for lost friends, and pictures are my friends. I have none others. I am never long enough with men to attach myself to them; and whatever feelings of attachment I have are to material things.
In order that a man may be happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable of his work, but a good judge of his work.
Science lives only in quiet places, and with odd people, mostly poor.
The beginning and almost the end of all good law is that everyone shall work for their bread and receive good bread for their work.