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 The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art was later superseded...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
If you do not wish for His kingdom do not pray for it. But if you do you must do more than pray for it, you must work for it.
Work first, and then rest.
That admiration of the 'neat but not gaudy,' which is commonly reported to have influenced the devil when he painted his tail pea green.
If the thing is impossible, you need not trouble yourselves about it; if possible, try for it.
There is rough work to be done, and rough men must do it; there is gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must do it.
Why is one man richer than another? Because he is more industrious, more persevering and more sagacious.
Mighty of heart, mighty of mind, magnanimous-to be this is indeed to be great in life.
It is better to be nobly remembered than nobly born.
There is large difference between indolent impatience of labor and intellectual impatience of delay, large difference between leaving things unfinished because we have more to do or because we are satisfied with what we have done.
Better a child should be ignorant of a thousand truths than have consecrated in its heart a single lie.
The man who accepts the laissez-faire doctrine would allow his garden to grow wild so that roses might fight it out with the weeds and the fittest might survive.
That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far reaching ruin
You cannot have good architecture merely by asking people's advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty.
Disorder in a drawing-room is vulgar; in an antiquary's study, not; the black battle-stain on a soldier's face is not vulgar, but the dirty face of a housemaid is.