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 The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded...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
Cookery means…English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality; it means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices; it means carefulness, inventiveness, and watchfulness.
No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, or happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than man could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.
Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.
Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.
Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.
Modern travelling is not travelling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.
Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.
It is not how much one makes but to what purpose one spends.
Education is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them.
A great thing can only be done by a great person; and they do it without effort.
The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it.
All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.
Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.
It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and easy execution in the proper place, than to expand both indiscriminately.